In a wig-flipping reversal, CNN is reporting that the House Ethics Committee secretly voted earlier this month to release the report on former congressman and apparent Botox aficionado Matt Gaetz after all, and it’s expected to public after the House’s final day of votes this year, which appears to be … tomorrow?!

Does that mean Marjorie Taylor Greene is going to drop the dime on all those sexual harassment and assault claims/boner orgy potlucks paid for by taxpayers that she claims to have been covering up so far? Can’t wait!

Or will Matt Gaetz personally do it himself, as he is also now threatening? Oh do it, do it, do it!

Well, whoa if true!

We already have some idea about what might be in that Gaetz report, based on how much has already oozed out so far. Boy are we about to type “allegedly” a lot!

You already know about the alleged sex parties, and alleged sex with at least one underage girl, or as the law would call that, statutory rape, allegedly. There’s an alleged video of one of his young girlfriends naked hula-hooping, that he allegedly showed around to other haw-hawing gross pigs in Congress. And reportedly there’s even more party-poon bucks spent than we’d already heard about before, including $10,000 to two women he flew to New York to motorboat his receding hairline and caress his greasy pompadour. He also allegedly paid for them to travel and have sex with them 10 to 15 times, or as the law calls it, sex trafficking, allegedly. Hey, remember that time he was the one person in the House who voted against a human trafficking bill?

Also, allegedly, Gaetz used his “adopted son” Nestor Galban's PayPal for transactions of this type. What a naughty “daddy”! Will we finally learn what the deal is with Nestor, who by the way actually has a whole-ass living father? Party planner? Human catfish? Just what is the story there?

And of course there’s drugs, drugs, drugs! According to a sworn affidavit in a civil lawsuit against Gaetz that was later dropped, Gaetz and the kiddies were drinking alcohol, smoking pot, and wacked out on cocaine and ecstasy too. Just the guy Trump wanted for attorney general, to go after all the meanies who hurt Trump’s feelings at the DOJ.

There were emojis, oh so many cringey emojis, love hotel, kiss, ice cream! And an empty Costco-size box of "Bareskin" Trojan condoms in his office trash can. This is the worst advent calendar of all time!

Gaetz lost his seat in Florida when he accepted the AG job that he then withdrew from. Now he’s got a talk show on OANN lined up, because people just love looking at his face. And if you’ve got “$325+” you can have him record a Cameo of decorating tips for your MAGA uncle.

Gaetz swears he never did the underage statutory rape thing, though partying too hard? He is guilty of that! Too much weekend? Too many times! He posted on Xitter:

I was charged with nothing: FULLY EXONERATED. Not even a campaign finance violation. And the people investigating me hated me.

Then, the very “witnesses” DOJ deemed not-credible were assembled by House Ethics to repeat their claims absent any cross-examination or challenge from me or my attorneys. I’ve had no chance to ever confront any accusers. I’ve never been charged. I’ve never been sued. [...]

In my single days, I often sent funds to women I dated - even some I never dated but who asked. I dated several of these women for years. I NEVER had sexual contact with someone under 18. Any claim that I have would be destroyed in court - which is why no such claim was ever made in court.

My 30’s were an era of working very hard - and playing hard too.

It’s embarrassing, though not criminal, that I probably partied, womanized, drank and smoked more than I should have earlier in life. I live a different life now.

TL;DR: Sorry for party rockin’! He didn’t pay women for sex, he just had sex with them and gave them money, not for sex, see? Correlation does not equal causation, of sex!

The GOP’s been howling that Matt Gaetz is a private citizen now, so none of this is anybody’s business, unlike Hunter Biden’s dong, which ought to be as unregulated as a public utility. But come on, Democrats get so few treats these days!

Still, we’ve gotten our hopes up and dashed too many times before, so we are cynically holding off on buttering our popcorn for now. But maybe, just maybe, for Christmas we will hear the ding-dong of Matt Gaetz’s little jingleballs.

And with that image in your head, we will OPEN THREAD you.

[CNN / Washington Post archive link]

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For the last century or so, many Christians have chosen to spend the run-up to their lord and savior’s birthday condemning those who don’t practice their religion for not celebrating it hard enough; for daring to say “Happy Holidays” to strangers instead of presuming that they are Christian; for not wanting to mix tax money, state property and public schools up with religion; and, of course, for having insufficiently festive cups.

This, they claimed, was a War on Christmas.

According to one history, it started (as it so often does) with Henry Ford claiming that Jewish people were trying to destroy Christmas. “People sometimes ask why 3,000,000 Jews can control the affairs of 100,000,000 Americans. In the same way that ten Jewish students can abolish the mention of Christmas and Easter out of schools containing 3,000 Christian pupils,” he wrote in his famously batshit newsletter, The International Jew.

Personally, I wouldn’t consider it a bad thing that we live in a country where a majority is not supposed to be allowed to impose their religion on a minority, but I tend to be a pretty big fan of freedom.

It was later picked up in the 1960s by the famously paranoid John Birch Society, which claimed there was an ongoing “assault” on Christmas. "UN fanatics...What they now want to put over on the American people is simply this: Department stores throughout the country are to utilize UN symbols and emblems as Christmas decorations.”

That really doesn’t seem like it actually happened.

This year, however, a YouGov survey found that there has been a sharp drop over the last two years in the number of Americans who actually believe there is a war on Christmas. In 2022, 39 percent of Americans believed in the War on Christmas. This year, only 23 percent do. The numbers have even fallen among Republicans, who have gone from 59 percent to 36 percent.

So what happened? Did we all roll over and accept Christian nationalism? Did we start saying “Merry Christmas” to people regardless of their personal beliefs? I didn’t, doesn’t seem like anyone else did, either. Did the Satanic Temple stop putting statues of Baphomet near nativity scenes on public property? Nope, they definitely did not. Did Starbucks’s holiday cups feature anything specifically Christmassy, apart from being red and green? Not really. Also, they are red, green and light pink, which is not generally considered a Christmas color.

It seems like the only real difference between this year and every other year I have been alive is that Fox News and the Right in general are not freaking out over every single thing they consider remotely “too secular” this year. The One Million Moms have been far too busy fighting the War on Wicked (which they are mad about because witches and sorcery and LGBTQ+ subtext and actors being in the movie, which they also erroneously believe is a “children’s movie”) to bother.

Some have even decided that since they haven’t heard much about it, that it is time to declare victory, even though literally nothing has changed.

Now, keep in mind, Target has always had Christmas shit. They just also had other items and signage that said things like “Happy Holidays!” or “Season’s Greetings!” or “Happy Hanukkah!” or “Happy Kwanzaa!”, which they also still have. Disingenuous people, however, would take pictures of those signs and not the “Merry Christmas” ones to convince relatively daft people that they were under attack. And it worked. Now, they’re showing things as they always have been and declaring “victory.”

Really, it’s all about the constant mindfuck.

Lately, the Right has had far more luck having quick moral panics in endless succession and ending them the moment it becomes clear that they are bullshit, usually in favor of another hysterical narrative that is also bullshit. I mean, who can even remember a few months ago when their big cause was “Haitians eating cats?”

And how could they even be bothered to care about Coca-Cola putting polar bears on their cans instead of Santa when they had to spend this whole week claiming, erroneously, that the Wisconsin school shooter was transgender and, also erroneously, that all recent shooters have been transgender?

When you’re provoking outrage about things that are not especially reality-based or that make no sense, it’s usually best to move on quickly before people start to catch on too much. I’m not saying they’re all that swift, but just look at this person coming very close to realizing that saying “Happy Holidays” was actually always just about having good manners and not assuming what religion people are?

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I do, however, wonder how long the “Victory at last!” tactic can work for them, when so much of the Right’s success has been linked to the “You are the Real Americans and you have to take your country back!” narrative. If they already believe they have their country back, they might just calm down to the point where the next hysteria might not even register — and then where would they be?

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Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Virginia) is a good guy. He’s was elected to the House in 2008 and, as a member of the House Oversight Committee, is a familiar face in hearings, where he has gone after Republicans’ nonsensical investigations into Hunter Biden’s weenus, mocked the effort to impeach Joe Biden for … things, fought back against Donald Trump’s child separation policy, and advocated for an assault weapons ban.

His Facebook page also features a sweet photo of himself petting a doggo at a train station, of which we completely approve.

And yesterday, House Democrats overwhelmingly elected Connolly to become the ranking member of the powerful House Oversight Committee, choosing him in a 131-84 vote over Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York). Ocasio-Cortez, 35, argued that with Donald Trump and a Republican trifecta coming to power next month, it’s high time for House Democratic leadership to break with business as usual and to do that generational change thing, to oppose the fascist leanings of the incoming administration.

It was a good argument, especially considering that Connolly is 74 years old, not terribly well-known outside Virginia (or outside the nerds who closely follow the House), and is being treated for esophageal cancer, although he says he’s fine to handle the stresses of the job. Connolly has seniority on the committee, and we get Traditions and Norms, but democracy is in danger here, and with her far larger public profile, Ocasio-Cortez would have been a far more effective voice of opposition to the Trump-driven vendettas, racist scapegoating of immigrants, and attacks on basic freedoms that are on the way.

As Politico explains, Connolly’s win wasn’t solely the result of his seniority or his collegial ties with lots of influential House Dems, though those were certainly factors. There was also entirely too much worry about making the public face of the committee a Young Progressive Firebrand like Ocasio-Cortez, never mind her mastery of issues, her TV-savvy rhetorical skills, or, related to that, her knack for focusing public attention on issues that matter. Or rather, it was that knack for getting on TV and social media that may have worried them, the big chickens.

There were enough “centrist” Dems who were willing to go with seniority — and to some degree, to listen to the urgings of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi — that seniority won out. (It probably also didn’t help AOC’s bid that she has supported progressive primary challengers to old-line Democrats, although she reportedly promised to refrain from doing that if she became ranking member on Oversight.)

But after a campaign in which Democrats were perceived as bending over backwards to overlook Joe Biden’s age — sure, unfairly, compared to Trump! — the vote looked like one more win for the congressional gerontocracy, as Chris Hayes noted on MSNBC last night.

Far worse, though, is that Democrats just aren’t acting like a real opposition party, as Jamelle Bouie argues today in The New York Times (gift link):

An opposition would use every opportunity it had to demonstrate its resolute stance against the incoming administration. It would do everything in its power to try to seize the public’s attention and make hay of the president-elect’s efforts to put lawlessness at the center of American government. […]

It would prioritize nimble, aggressive leadership over an unbending commitment to seniority and the elevation of whoever is next in line. Above all, an opposition would see that politics is about conflict — or, as Henry Adams famously put it, “the systematic organization of hatreds” — and reject the risk-averse strategies of the past in favor of new blood and new ideas.

Gerry Connolly is a perfectly OK Democrat on most issues that matter, but the times call for much more than “perfectly OK” and “focus on getting things done” that seems to be infecting too many Democrats, who instead of preparing to stand up and fight Trump, are freaked out over the election loss and wondering how they can make Americans like them again.

Trying to appeal to Trump voters is not the answer. Nor is rolling over and hoping for belly rubs, although Crom help us, this story from ABC News certainly suggests that's exactly what some Democrats are hoping to do, again.

Democrats have a plan to take back power in Washington back from Republicans in two years: work with them now.

Democrats, who are already planning their comeback after being swept out of power in Washington last month, have said they'll oppose President-elect Donald Trump and his allies when their values collide but are open to cooperation on a range of issues, including immigration, federal spending and entitlements.

Oh, fuck no. Please tell us this is only a terrible parody of Democrats’ thinking, please:

"People want to see government work, and we're going to hold Republicans accountable for whether they're willing to help move things forward for the American people. So, if they aren't, then absolutely, that will impact them at the ballot box," said Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., who led House Democrats' campaign arm this year and will do so again for the 2026 midterms.

"I think we are telling them that we're here to govern," DelBene added. "And I guess the question is, are they serious about governing?"

EXCUSE ME, WHAT PARTY AND WHAT ELECTORATE ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? Republicans haven’t been serious about governing since sometime before Newt Gingrich made “refuse to ever cooperate with Democrats” the most important principle of GOP politics in the 1990s, and it’s only gotten worse since then! Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t give a single ripe shit about consumer prices now, and only pretended to during the campaign. Instead, it’s all going to be revenge and giveaways to the people what funded his campaign. Or the person, as the case may be.

And voters have made clear they don’t care about good governing, either, or they might have gone with the vice president lady who had actual policies that were aimed at helping Americans, and who served with a president who managed the best national recovery from the pandemic, and even from the inflation that followed it.

We are not, however, going to let that ABC story freak us out too much just yet, because what some Democratic leaders are saying and thinking in the immediate aftermath of the election loss is almost certain to change rapidly once we have to deal with the realities of another Trump term with a GOP trifecta. We just wish more Democrats would plan to fight back sooner, instead of trying to impress voters with what a fine report card they’ve brought home.

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[AP / Politico / NYT (gift link) / ABC News]

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Ding dong, fascism calling, wrapped in a flag and accessorized with a cross! Time for some Christian dominionism, everybody! And not the huggy potluck kind of Christianity of the Unitarians or Quakers, either. The role of dominating Christian God shall be played by Samuel Alito’s God, and he’s more like Louis XIV’s god, or an abusive boyfriend.

Rule number one: there are no rules for God’s voices on earth, AKA a certain 34-count felon and the holy Supreme Court justices who don’t need no stinkin’ enforceable ethics rules. And especially not for knight of the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of Saint George Samuel Alito and his petty neighbor-harassing wife Martha-Ann.

Now in an irony of ironies, US District Judge Michael Ponsor has been found by the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit’s chief judge, Albert Diaz, to have violated judicial ethics rules, for accusing Samuel Alito of violating ethics rules. Ponsor published an opinion piece in the New York Times in which he criticized Martha-Ann Alito’s flapping of her MAGA-associated flags as “tantamount to sticking a ‘Stop the steal’ bumper sticker on your car.” Ponsor stated the obvious: “any judge with reasonable ethical instincts would have realized immediately that flying the flag then and in that way was improper. And dumb.” Which it was.

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But, HOW DARE PONSOR SAY SO? Free speech is for SCOTUS and their vergogna treason flags flapping for the purpose of shaming their neighbors and the gay guys across the lagoon from their beach house. It’s being free to accept gifts from billionaires and not feel bad about it. Or for Samuel Alito yapping to some lady he did not even know at a dinner party (who was actually Lauren Windsor) about how he was “fighting to return our country to a place of godliness” and “win” the culture wars. That couldn’t possibly diminish the public’s confidence in the independence of the judiciary or be viewed as a commentary on partisan issues, because Sam Alito was the one saying it, you see?

But free speech is not for little district court judges, who actually do have enforceable ethics rules instead of the bullshit “maybe we’ll try to do better about reporting gifts” ones that the Supreme Court not-imposed upon itself after ProPublica busted Alito and Clarence Thomas’s spendy vacations with billionaires. Within five days, a complaint was filed against Posnor, and now Ponsor’s been found culpable of misconduct, for engaging “in conduct prejudicial to the effective and expeditious administration of the business of the courts.” And Ponsor was forced to write a public letter of apology. Because, his op-ed could have been taken as “commentary on partisan issues” or “as a call for Justice Alito’s recusal from the then-pending January 6 cases.” The fucking irony!

Welp, get used to it.

[Wall Street Journal gift link/ New York Times archive link/ ProPublica]

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Last week, handsome Joe Biden pardoned 39 people, and commuted the sentences of 1,499 others, for a total of 1,634 commutations during his term. What a swell guy, saving us taxpayers the price of three hots and a cot or monitoring for nonviolent offenders! Except, a few of these people are seriously fucked up. Why did he choose to give them a pass? It’s a mystery!

Possibly the worst on the sentence-commutation list, former Judge Michael T. Conahan, who was serving 17 1/2 years and had been granted home confinement during COVID for his part in the horrific “Cash For Kids” scandal in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. This asshole used his position as judge to defund the county-owned juvenile detention center and give that money to his friend Robert J. Powell to build two private kiddie lockups instead. Then he and co-defendant Judge Mark Ciavarella took $2.6 million in kickbacks to fill their friend’s prisons, locking up kids as young as eight years old for offenses like petty theft, jaywalking, underage drinking, truancy, smoking on school grounds, or failing to appear in court as witnesses, without notifying the kids or their parents that the kids were witnesses! They locked up literally thousands of kids.

Reported the New York Times (and you really should read the whole story if you haven’t, because it is NUTS): “Proceedings on average took less than two minutes. Detention center workers were told in advance how many juveniles to expect at the end of each day — even before hearings to determine their innocence or guilt.” Then Powell, Conahan and Ciavarella swanned around on a million-dollar boat in Florida called the “Reel Justice,” and partied together in a Florida condo they bought to try to launder their cash, because you can’t make this shit up.

It was the “trying to hide the money” part that got them in the end: in 2022, both Conahan and Ciavarella pleaded guilty to tax evasion and wire fraud, and were ordered to pay more than $200 million to nearly 300 people they victimized. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court threw out about 4,000 juvenile convictions involving more than 2,300 kids. But “sorry” isn’t enough for everything; one of the kids, Edward Kenzakoski, committed suicide after having to spend eight months in juvenile detention his senior year of high school for underage drinking at a party. He lost his chance at scholarships, and fell into deep depression.

Why would Biden commute the sentence of Conahan? And why not the other two guys in the scheme, for that matter? Sending kids to jail for money in an elaborate scheme is not some one-off mistake, it is life-ruining evil.

Why not pardon Native American activist Leonard Peltier, or Jamil Al-Amin, AKA H. Rap Brown, or Reality Winner? Or any of the other 157,504 people in federal prison? (Damn, does this country put a lot of people in prison!) It’s just weird.

Also on the sentence-commutation list, and also evil, Meera Sachdeva, a Mississippi oncologist, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2012 for defrauding Medicare. For at least four years, Sachdeva gave cancer patients expired and diluted chemotherapy drugs, and billed Medicaid and Medicare for the full price of the drugs. She also used old needles, and one patient apparently got HIV from a dirty needle used by her clinic.

This is turning into a list of sinners you’d meet on a tour of hell!

There’s Rita Crundwell, former comptroller of the town of Dixon, Illinois, who ripped off an entire town. She embezzled nearly $54 million over 22 years from Dixon’s coffers — the biggest municipal theft in history — to fund her quarterhorse breeding operation, and buy herself two fancy houses, a million-dollar motorhome, and a '67 Corvette and a Ford Thunderbird, while the streets of Dixon crumbled. She got 19 years and seven months for wire fraud, and has been living in a halfway house since 2021.

Also on the list, two Chinese spies, Yanjun Xu and Ji Chaoqun, who tried to steal US tech secrets, and also Shanlin Jin, a relative of a high-ranking member of the Chinese Communist Party who was convicted of possession of more than 47,000 images of child pornography. Biden at least got something for those: three days later the Chinese government released three Americans, two who had been charged with espionage, and one who’d been charged for drug offenses. And presumably the spies and well-connected creepo all will be soon deported back to China, so whatever, bye.

There’s a pharmacist, Babubhai Patel, who also defrauded Medicare by billing for drugs through a chain of pharmacies, and then shorted patients on their painkillers or wrote dummy prescriptions and sold the drugs he billed Medicare for on the street. Fayez Abu-Aish, who sold manufactured “Spice” he called “Scooby Snax.” There’s some random cocaine dealers. Why these cocaine dealers in particular? Who knows? It’s like pardoning a Thanksgiving turkey, just that butterball’s lucky day.

Some of these people do seem expunge-worthy. Kelsie Lynn Becklin pleaded guilty to a nonviolent felony charge for failing to provide information to police about a 2007 bank robbery. There’s Stevoni Doyle, a social worker who pleaded guilty to drug possession and check forging charges 23 years ago.

Call us Wavy Gravy, but maybe everybody should be able to apply to expunge petty convictions after multiple decades? Maybe it’s not good for society to make thousands of people fail a background check for the rest of their lives over a possession charge in their 20s. But rehabilitation after prison in America, it’s not really our thing, unless you are Martha Stewart.

And punishment and serving as a warning to others have a place too. There’s not enough years for that kiddie-prison judge, or the dirty doctor who let patients suffer. Sometimes prison and a big fat record for life can be richly deserved.

At least old Joe didn’t pardon Donald Trump?

[White House Clemency Recipient List / New York Times archive link / US v. Babubhai Patel et al. / NY Post / AP / Time Magazine / The Mississippi Link]

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I’m sorry to report that this morning’s tabs are a load of what the FUCK! But I promise some good ones in there (a few) to happy up the what the FUCK.

They found a judge who broke ethics rules. The ethics rules that say you can’t criticize Justice Alito and his treason flags. What the FUCK. (Gift link Wall Street Journal)

They found a CEO who frauded and sentenced him to almost 10 years. Is it a coincidence that he’s a Black guy? Judgment suspended on fuck-and-whatness. (Inc)

What are we even DOING? We just hired a septuagenarian man currently undergoing chemo on his throat to make the case against the Trump administration in the House Oversight Committee, because the other option was a whip-smart, active, energetic, SHARP 35-year-old woman of color. What the FUCK. (NBC News)

Is Nancy Pelosi (NOT HAPPY WITH YOU MA’AM) running the Texas Republican primary rules now? (Texas Tribune)

Looks like North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson has run out of fucks, which is hard because that man was BIG ON FUCKS! (WRAL)

From the comments, this delegate was too much even for West Virginia Republicans so they tried not to seat him and he tried to kill them! You’ll really want to check the second link here, it’s the background check on yes yes, these are perfectly cromulent people to elect, for FUCK. (WV Metro News / Dragline)

A Coast Guard commander almost died when she couldn’t get a D&C for her miscarriage because “life.” (Pro Publica)

How the pandemic broke our brains! But really, it did. (Ahmed Baba) So uh … the conspiracy theories they believe are going to happen with FAKE PANDEMIC HOAXES after Trump is reinaugurated UGH. (Mother Jones)

Joe Biden administration, and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm in particular, got real on natural gas. Bill McKibben says this matters. (The Crucial Years) The study! (Heatmap)

Weird! Supreme Court lets California’s emissions standards ride Sally ride, even though the red states whined that boo hoo! You never know when they’ll decline to be the absolute fucking worst! (CNN)

Biden fucked up the pardons though, and I’m not talking about Hunter, that pardon was absolutely reasonable and fine. The rest of these, after we yelled at him to pardon more people? What the FUCK. (Citizens Voice)

Well the brides look fucking beautiful. (Erin in the Morning)

And here’s some beauty, a song I love so much by my friends when we were young and made beauty and music.

I’m not trying to make you feel bad, but Wonkette is entirely reader-supported, and I sure do like paying the staff and feeding the babies! If you are able!

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Since Evan’s doing it at his place, I thought I’d try it here too. Wonkette Venmo button aqui!

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Early this year, we found out something hilarious, namely that House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, the Kentucky fried pigfuck himself, had been played hilariously by an informant claiming to have dirty secrets about Hunter Biden and the rest of the Biden family, Ukrainian secrets, secrets the informant had 100 percent gotten from Russian spies.

Alexander Smirnov was Comer’s star witness, who was gonna blow this case wide open as soon as he sat down to testify before Congress. But like yeah LOL nah, that’s not exactly how it went.

Smirnov’s lies to the FBI about Ukrainian Biden bribes made up the FD-1023 form Comer and Jim Jordan and Chuck Grassley spent months yelling about, which was supposed to be their smoking gun. It was also the form full of Russian spy lies for which Smirnov was indicted and arrested. This is the long debunked malarkey tale that figured heavily in Donald Trump’s first impeachment, when it was brought back to America by Rudy Giuliani. It alleged that the Ukrainian energy company Burisma had hired Hunter Biden to get close to his sweet, sweet Joe Biden goodies, had bribed them each $5 million, and that Joe Biden had gotten the Ukrainian prosecutor general fired to protect Burisma. All bullshit.

And Smirnov admitted he got his fake lie stories about the Bidens from Russian intelligence.

Now he has struck a deal and pleaded guilty. Womp womp. What a sad coda to the only thing that’s given Old Pigfuck Comer’s life any meaning these past few years.

Smirnov admitted in court documents that he gave “false and derogatory information” about the Bidens to the FBI. He will be sentenced to anywhere from 48 to 72 months, with credit for time served. And this all came out of the office of Special Counsel David Weiss, the same one who went after Hunter Biden.

Oh, and now Hunter Biden is pardoned, which means who’s going to jail? Yep, just the informant with the Russian spy lies about the Bidens that made James Comer’s belly giggle like a bowl full of jelly. Merry Christmas, Pigfuck!

For a full recounting/reminder of exactly what Smirnov did, check this link, as Wonkette has written it previously eight times and doesn’t feel like doing it again. In that post, we noted that Sean Hannity spread this informant’s bullshit 85 times last year, and put it in 28 monologues. Chris Hayes also noted that Hannity had Jimmy Pigfuck Comer on his show 43 times last year.

We are sure Fox News is wall-to-wall with Smirnov’s guilty plea now, you bet.

As for James Comer, that sad failure, we are sure he is feeling fully chastened and won’t make a mistake like this again, ha ha just kidding.

First of all, Comer is still out there bitching and moaning that Joe Biden lied about “his family’s shady business dealings.” He wrote an op-ed in Fox News, just whining about a Biden family “influence-peddling racket” that he still desperately needs to believe exists, otherwise why did God interrupt him trying to make chickens and roosters kiss on his farm in Kentucky and ask him to come to Washington? Seems a waste of his plucky talents.

In that op-ed he tries so hard to make it seem like his Oversight Committee’s impeachment investigation into the Bidens didn’t turn into a complete limp dick. He does not succeed, but it’s OK, Fox News viewers don’t read op-eds. He claims he exposed the “lie” that the Hunter laptop is Russian disinformation. (Interestingly, Lev Parnas still says it sure did get corrupted by Russian intelligence.) He tries to put lipstick on his own series of pigfucks, all the bombshells he pretends he found that weren’t bombshells.

It’s sad. It’s like he’s doing an exit interview with his bathroom mirror and the mirror is making armpit farts sounds and calling him a loser.

Elsewhere, Comer has expressed complete openness to Donald Trump’s masturbation fantasies of having members of the House January 6 Select Committee jailed, including Jamie Raskin, who served alongside Comer as the ranking member of the Oversight Committee.

Also he says he’s a “big fan” of having Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez become the ranking member of Oversight, now that Raskin is leaving to occupy that position at Judiciary. He says she’s a “good person,” and more:

“I certainly look forward to working with the next ranking member. And if it’s AOC, I think we’ll have a good working relationship,” he concluded. “We‘ll obviously have a lot of differences on policy, but I think she’s a good, well-spoken person for the Democrats to serve in that position.”

We’re sure he thinks he’s playing some kind of multi-dimensional chess mindgame trying to encourage Democrats to select AOC as ranking member. (Unfortunately, Dems went with Gerry Connolly instead.)

Bless his heart.

Can y’all imagine what a dipshit he’s going to be chairing that committee with Trump as the president?

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Last Thursday, Texas state Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against a New York doctor for prescribing abortion pills to a resident of Texas, where — of course — abortion pills are illegal.

Paxton has said he wants to stop Dr. Margaret Daley Carpenter of New Paltz, New York, a co-founder of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, from mailing abortion pills to Texas and to be allowed to apply Texas’s law to her — which he says allows him to sue her for up to $250,000.

Right now, he only has one case. Over the summer, Dr. Carpenter prescribed and mailed mifepristone and misoprostol to a woman in Texas who made the mistake of asking the man who got her pregnant to take her to the emergency room for “severe bleeding” after taking the cocktail.

Said man “suspected that the biological mother had in fact done something to contribute to the miscarriage or abortion of the unborn child” and then, when he got home, he found the medications Dr. Carpenter sent her.

It turns out she was pretty smart not to want to give birth to that creep’s kid, because he ended up ratting her out to someone high up enough to get Paxton’s attention. Hopefully, she’ll come forward and out him so that no other woman makes the mistake of sleeping with him ever again.

Thankfully, there are laws protecting Dr. Carpenter. New York, like California, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington, has shield laws that protect doctors trying to ensure access to these medications in states where abortion is banned. This means that the state will not do what Paxton is hoping for — they will not cooperate with attempts by other states to go after doctors in their own states who provide abortion care and send pills to patients across state lines.

Of course, Paxton already knows this law exists, so he’s likely going to try to get it into federal court and get a federal court to rule the shield laws unconstitutional in some capacity.

One thing that’s concerning, however, and this might not have pricked your radar immediately, is the fact that Donald Trump confirmed yesterday that he is considering privatizing the post office.

“Well there is talk about the Postal Service being taken private, you do know that. Not the worst idea I’ve ever heard, it really isn’t,” he said during a press conference in Palm Beach on Monday. “You know it’s a lot different today … between Amazon and UPS and FedEx and all the things that you didn’t have. But there is talk about that, it’s an idea that a lot of people have liked for a long time. We’re looking at it.”

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Now, this is a terrible idea for a number of reasons we could name, but one of them is the fact that part of the reason people in abortion ban states have been able to get abortion pills mailed to them is that the USPS has agreed not to interfere, so long as the Comstock laws don’t get resurrected. A private company, in this instance, could do whatever it wants and could be more easily pressured to do whatever Ken Paxton wants.

There’s also been speculation that Trump will also try to revive the Comstock laws for this purpose, as Project 2025 recommended, despite having said he would not do that. There is absolute no reason to trust him on that, or on anything else.

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It’s weird how Democrats can’t quit slamming themselves in the clam, fumbling the balls, seemingly trying to drown whatever bit of hope for a sparklemagic resistance there may be. Latest example, the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee voted 34-27 in a secret ballot on Monday to recommend 74-year-old Virginian Gerry Connolly as the ranking member on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Are the Democrats out of touch? Maybe it’s the kids who are out of touch! The entire caucus is set to vote later today, so we shall find out.

First of all, who is Gerry Connolly? We consider ourselves pretty plugged in and read the news for about 16 hours a day, and still have barely noticed this guy. Wonkette has written about him zero times. He represents Virginia’s 11th District, has a paltry 83,000 Xitter followers, and a handsome pushbroom mustache. He’s not on Bluesky, TikTok, or Facebook at all. Which is not the full measure of a person’s worth, sure, but social media sure seems to be a vital way to reach the kids these days. Also, the poor guy has cancer of the esophagus and is undergoing chemotherapy and immunotherapy, does he really need an extra job too?

But Connolly does have the backing of Nancy Pelosi, who is 84, has been retired from the House speakership for nearly two years now, and broke her hip last week. Still, she’s been making calls and whipping votes from her recovery bed! We love these old Democrats and their tenacity, we truly do. But, c’mon, man. Isn’t it time for a transfusion of fresh blood in here?

Do Democrats just want somebody who’s going to disappear into the background and not be a lightning rod for attacks? Is it a seniority thing? Does Pelosi just not like AOC for whatever reason? Reportedly she is no fan of “the Squad,” scolding them in a closed-door meeting in 2019 that “some of you are here to make a beautiful pâté, but we’re making sausage most of the time.” Wait, you mean they are chopped liver? And she groused to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, “All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world. But they didn’t have any following. They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got.”

The Fucking News implies the Steering Committee — and perhaps Pelosi too — is down on AOC because she regularly backs primary challengers to incumbent Democrats. That seems likely! And it’s a reasonably better reason than “Nancy’s being a bitchface we guess.”

Connolly has certainly put in his time in the House. He’s been there for 15 years, and is the ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. He’s served on the Committee on Foreign Affairs and Committee on Oversight and Reform since 2009, and been chairman of the Delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly since 2013. He’s sponsored bills, and no doubt everybody likes him, because he’s apparently as uncontroversial to fellow Democrats as a bowl of tapioca pudding. And he is not a total wuss, he calls out Republicans on the regular. He got booed on the House floor for telling Jim Jordan he was not about to be lectured by his election-overturning ass.

“I did not vote to overturn an election, and I will not be lectured by people who did!” Damn straight! He goes on CNN and MSBNC to call Kash Patel delusional, Trump a walking conflict of interest, Pete Hegseth a disaster, because somebody’s gotta!

And in the other corner, AOC, age 35, first person to reach a million followers on Bluesky, 12.8 million followers on Xitter, 8.5 million on Insta, 3.4 million likes on TikTok. She’s been out there blasting Elon Musk and his dipshit DOGE committee with all the ridicule it rightly deserves, reposting Bernie and the UAW, talking about wealth inequality, climate change, food insecurity, y’know stuff people actually seem to care about more than the Vienna Volunteer Fire Department pancake breakfast with Santa. She’s got the kind of populism that leads people to vote for her and Trump, which seems puzzling, until you realize most people get their news from Facebook these days.

But, the sausage, the House is about making sausage! Packaging bills into a casing, and frying up those votes! Democrats perhaps don’t want someone who can appeal to Trump voters, they want someone who can appeal to the old, dry chorizos voting in the House, without alienating any of them. And sometimes you gotta cut off your own snout to make the sausage, we guess.

We shall see how it goes!

[Politico/ New York Times archive link]

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There is no cutting to the chase on this one, it is ALL chase: Florida is using its recent law banning public funds’ use to provide or promote trans health care as an excuse to go much, much further. In its latest expression, the state is torturing trans prisoners in its state “corrections” system.

The Marshall Project, named after Thurgood Marshall and a consistently great source of news on prisons, prisoners, and criminal justice, published a piece that is absolutely chilling to anyone trans or who has had to stand up for their right to express the deep and important parts of themselves that people in power would prefer stay hidden. Their first paragraph is too powerful not to repeat in full:

Earlier this fall, Florida officials ordered transgender women in the state’s prisons to submit to breast exams. As part of a new policy for people with gender dysphoria, prison medical staff ranked the women’s breast size using a scale designed for adolescents. Those whose breasts were deemed big enough were allowed to keep their bras. Everyone else had to surrender theirs, along with anything else considered “female,” such as women’s underwear and toiletry items.

Somehow, prison officials have decided, soap scented with hibiscus and lavender is a grave security threat in men’s prisons but not women’s.

While the state of Florida and prisons around the US have long and horrifying histories of mistreatment of trans prisoners, this latest crackdown on harmless personal belongings is part of a new approach to punishing trans prisoners that somehow goes even further than the new health policy directive that supposedly requires it.

The directive is, and it’s hard to overstate here, bad. It requires anyone in the prisons to undergo a year of psychotherapy whose intent is to “resolve” gender dysphoria before “variances” like prescribing hormones can be considered. This is mandatory even if they’ve received more than a year of psychotherapy previously, even if they have medical records going back decades and, shockingly, even if those medical records are the prison’s own. That’s right, as implemented, the diagnosis of a prisoner by the prison health system combined with a history of psychotherapy and positive response to hormones is insufficient to even consider continued prescribing.

But wait! It gets worse!

All identified medical and psychiatric comorbidities must first be addressed. As appropriate, psychiatric comorbidities should be addressed through psychotherapy, psychotropic medication, or other appropriate medically accepted interventions. Once these medical and psychiatric comorbidities are resolved and ruled out as the potential cause of the Gender Dysphoria, further treatment for Gender Dysphoria may proceed. [Emphasis Wonkette’s.]

Comorbidities, for those not in the know, have multiple definitions, but the concern here is that the most common definition is simply any conditions that co-occur with any other conditions. If you have gender dysphoria and the common cold, your virologist would tell you that gender dysphoria is a comorbidity, while your psychologist would tell you that the cold is one. Considering that and noting that the policy above says comorbidities must be resolved and ruled out as a cause of dysphoria (rather than “or” ruled out), the policy here is pretty clear that if you have a bruise on your foot you can’t be treated for gender dysphoria — other than mandatory psychotherapy — until the bruise is resolved.

This may seem an insane interpretation of the document, but the document itself is that extreme. Although it contemplates “variances” from the standard treatment regimen of psychotherapy, it also specifically bans granting variances except as necessary “to comply with the Constitution or a court order.” In other words, the state won’t even do the work to consider whether hormones *might* be prescribed until forced to do so. So to get hormones requires a year of therapy, then a lawsuit and appeals, then an evaluation — likely negative — and then a new suit over any negative evaluation. It’s not exaggerating to say this might take a decade.

As for the therapy required, while the UN has identified conversion therapy as torture, Florida has identified it as required treatment. The directive itself isn’t as plainly written as to say that the required psychotherapy is conversion therapy, but every indication in the document and in the actions documented by The Marshall Project is clear: The state intends to stop people being trans.

Transgender women who attended the meetings said they were told by officials that everyone identifying as transgender would be “re-evaluated” to assess whether they can have continued access to the care and accommodations they had been receiving, such as permission to grow their hair long. […]

Since then, more than a dozen transgender people said corrections officers ordered them to cut their hair. Mariko Sundwall told The Marshall Project that she was given a disciplinary infraction and spent 10 days in solitary confinement for refusing to cut her hair before officers put her in handcuffs and led her to the prison barber where her hair was cropped short.

Of course bad treatment of prisoners isn’t limited to trans people. Others have faced similar abuses. Rastafarians have had their heads shaved despite a case history documenting a religious right to keep their hair in dreadlocks. Muslims have been forcibly shaved. Nor have prisons respected the right to wear harmless articles of clothing in a manner that should be constitutionally protected. In 2014 Wyoming prisons denied at least one orthodox Jewish prisoner the right to wear a head covering called a kippah even as other prisoners were allowed to wear baseball caps. While religious rights are better documented than the right to choose one’s own underwear, the callousness in Wyoming towards Judaism is perfectly parallel with that in Florida towards trans people.

Fights for trans rights frequently end up protecting everyone with a gender. The abuses in Florida are particularly nasty, and will require a particularly fierce fight to end. The ACLU filed Keohane v Dixon on October 25. Let’s hope for all our sakes that they win.

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Yesterday, when a second-grader called the police to report an active school shooter at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, they dialed 911. Despite the many, many school shootings we have had throughout the years, no one has ever thought to have a special separate number for them.

On the one hand, this makes sense, given that 911 is an easy number for second-graders to remember, even while under fire. On the other, New York Governor Kathy Hochul is reportedly considering creating a special hotline for CEOs to report perceived threats from those who may want to eat the rich.

Hochul is convening a virtual meeting today with state law enforcement officials, Homeland Security and counterterrorism officials, and about 175 corporate representatives to discuss how best to protect people who — unlike, say, schoolchildren — can afford their own personal security.

The intention, it seems, is to take this seriously as a “domestic terrorism” issue, despite the fact that there have been no other credible threats against CEOs since the shooting.

Kathy Wylde, the CEO and president of the Partnership for New York City — a non-profit membership group of around 300 of New York’s most powerful CEOs — will also be there to represent business interests. Wylde has been making the rounds to share her concern for CEOs who are now feeling under attack and her appreciation that Hochul is taking this seriously.

“She understood how serious the impact of both the killing and the hateful reaction to it is, and she wants to make sure that the state resources, specifically the domestic counterterrorism resources, are focused on being supportive, sharing information,” she told Politico last week.

“Demonization of corporate executives is not new,” she added. “It was part of the rhetoric in the financial crisis of 2008-09. The real estate industry has obviously been subject to it. It’s not new. Translating people’s anger from rhetoric into shooting someone is new.”

People understanding why someone might want to shoot a healthcare executive isn’t remotely the same thing as excusing it or suggesting it ought to happen more often. These are very different things.

Still, giving the most privileged people in our nation special access to a kind of emergency service that no one else has access to and convening a massive meeting to discuss how the wealthy can be protected from those they harm might just actually be the kind of things that engender even more resentment towards the upper class.

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It’s not yet clear what this special hotline will entail, but I think we can fairly assume that it will be something like a concierge 911, where those reporting that they feel threatened will get not just a direct line to a domestic terrorism official, but a hot towel and a glass of brandy to calm their nerves.

I mean, given the lack of actual credible threats, those operating the line will need something to do.

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He said he was going to do it, and emboldened by ABC News sucking his cock, he did it. Donald Trump has sued Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register for releasing a poll that was wrong in a way that hurt King Weenus The First’s feelings. Not that it affected the election outcome in any way, of course! He still won the election.

But still, though, UNFAIR, off with their heads!

Fox News reports:

President-elect Donald Trump is suing the Des Moines Register and its top pollster J. Ann Selzer for “brazen election interference” and fraud over its final 2024 presidential poll showing Vice President Kamala Harris leading him in Iowa, despite his ultimate victory in the state by more than 13 percentage points, Fox News Digital has learned.

The lawsuit was filed Monday night in Polk County, Iowa under the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act and related provisions. It says it seeks “accountability for brazen election interference committed by” the Des Moines Register (DMR) and Selzer “in favor of now-defeated former Democrat candidate Kamala Harris through use of a leaked and manipulated Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll conducted by Selzer and S&C and published by DMR and Gannett in the Des Moines Register on Nov. 2, 2024.”

Uh huh, well we are sure that’s gonna bring down the price of groceries for the people who elected him to bring down the price of groceries, and not for any of this other shit, which is going to become tiresome with normal people real fuckin’ fast. Despite what MAGA may have heard on TV, “suing the newspaper for aggravated Hurt My Feelings” actually isn’t a very strong look and solves nothing about “the rent is too damn high.”

As Trump himself explained after the election:

“I have more complaints on grocery, the word ‘grocery,’ you know, it’s a sort of simple word, but it sorta means like everything you eat, the stomach is speaking, it always does.”

Very good, Mister President! The “grocery” is the stomach that is speaking and always does!

Point being, no strong men have tears in their eyes saying “Sir! Sir! The Des Moines Register and Ann Selzer did a bad poll and it scared me!”

Back to Fox News:

The lawsuit is also against the parent company of the Des Moines Register, Gannett, which also owns other publications, including USA Today.

Gotcha. So this is partially just him checking to see if another one of the biggies will open wide and suck.

“Contrary to reality and defying credulity, defendants’ Harris Poll was published three days before Election Day and purported to show Harris leading President Trump in Iowa by three points; President Trump ultimately won Iowa by over thirteen points,” the lawsuit states.

Do lawsuits have to have a point or can they just babble? The poll was wrong. Selzer’s assumptions turned out to be wrong. She even quit because she had so much egg on her face.

Trump attorneys said Selzer’s prediction of Harris’ three point lead in “deep-red Iowa was not reality, it was election-interfering fiction.”

Trump attorneys said Selzer had “prided herself on a mainstream reputation for accuracy despite several far less publicized egregious polling misses in favor of Democrats” and said she “would have the public believe it was merely a coincidence that one of the worst polling misses of her career came just days before the most consequential election in memory, was leaked and happened to go against the Republican candidate.”

We guess lawsuits don’t have to have a point, because again this summary is from Fox News, and if anybody would try to make this gibberish make sense for Dear Leader’s benefit, they would.

“The Harris Poll was no ‘miss’ but rather an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2024 Presidential Election,” the lawsuit states, adding that “defendants and their cohorts in the Democrat Party hoped that the Harris Poll would create a false narrative of inevitability for Harris in the final week of the 2024 Presidential Election.”

Whatever.

“Instead, the November 5 election was a monumental victory for President Trump in both the Electoral College and the Popular Vote, an overwhelming mandate for his America First principles, and the consignment of the radical socialist agenda to the dustbin of history.”

Usually when a lawsuit is written for an audience of one, they mean the judge, as opposed to an audience of the plaintiff using it as fap material.

Trump lawyers argued that “left-wing pollsters have attempted to influence electoral outcomes through manipulated polls that have unacceptable error rates and are not grounded in widely accepted polling methodologies.”

Uh huh.

“While Selzer is not the only pollster to engage in this corrupt practice, she had a huge platform and following and, thus, a significant and impactful opportunity to deceive voters,” the lawsuit states. “As Selzer knows, this type of manipulation creates a narrative of inevitability for Democrat candidates, increases enthusiasm among Democrats, compels Republicans to divert campaign time and money to areas in which they are ahead, and deceives the public into believing that Democrat candidates are performing better than they really are.”

OK.

The lawsuit states that Democrats’ “need for fake polling was even more acute than usual in the 2024 Election, given Harris’s many fatal weaknesses as a candidate and lack of appeal to critical swaths of the traditional Democrat base.”

He finished yet? He need a towel?

Trump attorneys are suing under the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act, alleging that defendants “engaged in an ‘unfair act or practice’ because the publication and release of the Harris Poll ‘caused substantial, unavoidable injury to consumers that was not outweighed by any consumer or competitive benefits which the practice produced.’”

They also said consumers were “badly deceived and misled as to the actual position of the respective candidates in the Iowa Presidential race.”

“Moreover, President Trump, the Trump 2024 Campaign, and other Republicans were forced to divert enormous campaign and financial resources to Iowa based on the deceptive Harris Poll,” the lawsuit states, adding that consumers of the Des Moines Register and Iowans who contributed to Trump’s 2024 campaign were “similarly deceived.”

Oh my fucking god.

Y’all hear Trump is still a felon in New York? Yeah, that judge told him to eat shit. Somehow Supreme Court rulings granting permanent immunity to presidents don’t apply to crimes committed when people weren’t the president.

Who knew?

[Fox News]

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Oh hey, tabs readers, read these tabs:

Donald Trump is still a convicted felon, as the judge has refused to throw out his 34 felonies. Again, that’s Trump, still a convicted felon. [New York Times]

There was a mass shooting at a Christian school in Madison, Wisconsin, yesterday. That is a thing that happens all the time in this country, and Republicans don’t give a fuck about it. What else can we say? [CNN live updates]

Surprise, y’all, the Trump transition team wants to get rid of a rule where car companies have to report to the feds when their self-driving autos kill people. Guess which company’s self-driving autos kill the most people NO GUESS! [Reuters]

It’s weird how Pete Hegseth always takes the side of soldiers (white men) who have been accused of violent crimes. Wait no it isn’t. It’s exactly what we expect from a scumbag like him. Just another one of his sick patterns, we guess. Anyway, learn about the security guard who escorted Hegseth to Capitol Hill, and the violent thing a military jury found him guilty of doing before he left the Army. [New York Times]

Remember old Mister Pigbabble James Comer and his Oversight Committee investigation into Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian penis? Comer’s SMOKING GUN witness pleaded guilty yesterday to making up all his SMOKING GUN lies to the FBI. [NBC News]

This past Friday at my other place, I had to deal with the latest sick garbage from Pete Hegseth — his opinions on gays in the military, yay! — but I’m tired of his loser ass so I also wrote about the Texas Dildo Police (they’re back!) and some hilarious right-wingers having hilarious right-wing reactions to the Wicked movie. Hit that subscribe button if you haven’t! [The Moral High Ground / audio version]

It is impossible to overstate how breathlessly stupid Marjorie Taylor Greene is. Anyway, she definitely believes vaccines cause autism. Why wouldn’t she? [RawStory]

All these Democrat-appointed judges keep rescinding their retirements rather than letting Trump appoint their successors, and oh boy, Republicans are mad! [CNN]

Yes, make the loubia I mentioned last week, it’s delicious. (It’s like a yummy Moroccan comfort food stew. Vegetarian, if you’re curious. Vegan even!) I ordered Camellia’s beans on the internet (it’s a New Orleans brand), so if you want to go the dry beans route and can’t find cannellinis/white kidney beans in your town, you can do that, and I recommend. [New York Times]

OK that’ll do, tabs readers, that’ll do.

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Convicted felon Donald Trump, soon to be known as “convicted felon President Donald Trump,” held one of his classic press conferences on Monday. And we have to tell you, we felt this weird nostalgia bubble up from the fetid depths of our blackened, cynical hearts.

It was so, so very Trumpian, circa 2017. There he was at his dollar store Monticello in Florida, face more orange than an old Denver Broncos jersey, standing in front of two giant American flags one might easily imagine were physically recoiling from fear that he might at any moment grope them. There were the cheesy gold-plated wall sconces and the spooky leftover prop candelabra that looked like something Gary Sinise carried through dark hallway sets in Dracula. There was a wizened foreign CEO — in this case, SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son — sucking up to Hairball Hitler by announcing a $100 billion investment in “artificial intelligence and related infrastructure,” whatever the fuck that looks like.

The SoftBank deal will also allegedly create 100,000 jobs in the United States. Sure thing. Anyone know how SoftBank’s $50 billion investment that was supposed to create 50,000 jobs that the same CEO announced after Trump’s victory in 2016 ever did? Oh, they lost $16 billion of it investing in WeWork? Neat.

That was the first five minutes of the press conference, and was followed by a solid hour of Trump taking questions from the press and responding with lie after lie after lie, while the reporters dutifully wrote it all down with little to no pushback. The answers were his characteristic mixture of vague to the point of meaninglessness and flat-out falsehoods on every topic — vaccines, immigration, all the money he thinks Mexico and Canada are stealing.

He accused the Biden administration of covering up the truth behind all the recent drone sightings on the East Coast. He claimed he won the youth vote in this election by 34 points. (In reality, Kamala Harris won the youth vote by 12 points.) He defended secretary of Defense nominee and reported drunk Pete Hegseth, who he claimed was in line to make a ton of money at Fox but gave it all up to work in Trump’s Cabinet. (Why Hegseth can’t go back to Fox and make a pile of money if his nomination gets rejected remained unexplained, of course.)

It was all such a throwback to the first Trump term that CNN even had Daniel Dale on to fact-check him while blinking the words GOD HELP ME in Morse code:

Perhaps most egregiously, considering the assembled crowd, he threatened defamation suits against media outlets that have displeased him. He threatened to sue The Des Moines Register and pollster Ann Selzer for publishing a poll that showed him losing Iowa right before the election, and talked about two other ridiculous lawsuits he’s pursuing, one against “60 Minutes” over what he thinks was a misleading edit in its Kamala Harris interview, and the other against Bob Woodward for releasing tapes of interviews he conducted with Trump.

Oh, and he talked about suing “Pulitzer” for awarding its journalism prizes to The New York Times and The Washington Post over their reporting on Russia instead of to the likes of Sean Hannity and Judge Jeanine, who he said actually got the story right, that it was a giant hoax. (It wasn’t, according to the then-Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Marco Rubio.)

He wrapped up that section of the press conference by saying this:

“We have to straighten out the press. The press is very corrupt. Almost as corrupt as our elections.”

He called them corrupt and threatened to straighten them out to their dang faces, and the reporters immediately fell all over themselves to change the subject.

A few people online have been yelling Thanks a pantsload, ABC, over the network’s grotesque capitulation to Trump’s lawsuit against the network, which is only partially correct. The man sues just to sue, whether he has a case or not, and we strongly, strongly doubt that a protracted fight with ABC, or even an immediate dismissal of the lawsuit, would have discouraged him.

But it is possible that ABC’s ridiculous $15 million settlement will embolden him even further and make him think he’s doing the right thing, and he’ll start going after smaller outlets that don’t have the means to fight. Outlets like The Des Moines Register, to take just one example off the top of our head for no reason.

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Which brings us back to our original thought as we watched the media let Trump steamroll over it as he has for a decade. And that is how absurd it is that reporters still, still, after all this time, troop into these rooms with Trump like a bunch of lemmings, knowing they will be lied to, knowing they will be berated and threatened and insulted, and dutifully write it all down without standing up for themselves and their profession.

Trump even at one point commented on Monday that the press conference felt like the old days. But the old days sucked!

We watched four years of such scenes during Trump’s first term, and we find it unreal that we will be watching the same sorts of spectacles for another four. We can’t believe we get another four years of White House reporters scribbling down Trump’s rambling horseshit without noting that Trump has always rambled through every press conference and interview, and that 95 percent of the stuff he promises never happens.

We just found it all very depressing for a minute. Because it is.

The whole sorry spectacle is right here, in case anyone wants to also crack a jar of Hooper’s eggnog at 4:20 in the afternoon.

OPEN THREAD.

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Last week, I watched Girls Gone Wild: The Untold Story on Peacock, which, unsurprisingly, was fairly disturbing on a number of levels, starting with the fact that most people at the time thought “getting young women extremely drunk and then convincing them to take their tops off on camera” was a fairly normal, “boys will be boys!” thing to do.

The thing that really struck me, though, was the fact that it remained “normal” until about 2011, when creator Joe Francis was arrested for false imprisonment and assault, after he brought three women home after a night out and refused to let them leave, ultimately attacking one of them and bashing her head into the floor. Francis had long been Public Enemy #1 for feminists (along with, on the other end of the spectrum, the Christian patriarchs who fake-married their daughters at Purity Balls), but at that point, no one was really paying any attention to us.

The reason I bring this up, the reason it struck me, is because I don’t think I really realized until just then what an incredibly short time period it was between the end of that era — this era where bro culture was celebrated, where rape culture was celebrated, where women’s sexuality was a thing within their control whichever way they chose to control it, in which beautiful female celebrities were excoriated for being a size four in public — and the era we are now in.

Because we hear a lot about it from their end, right? The story, as they tell it, is that there were all these ostensibly “liberal” men who “voted for Obama,” but then the Left “just went too far” and drove them into the loving, misogynistic arms of Andrew Tate and Donald Trump. And now they’re lonely and they don’t know how to be men and it is a full-on crisis! A crisis I tell you! And an epidemic!

The way they talk, you would think that they had been forced to live in this horrible matriarchal world for years, during where they weren’t allowed any free speech, were constantly accused of rapes they didn’t commit, were told constantly by everyone that they were garbage and that they had to apologize for being born male.

But let’s piece together this timeline, shall we?

2011: Joe Francis arrested, “Entourage” ends.

2012: During a stand-up set, comedian Daniel Tosh starts talking about how rape jokes are “always” funny — causing a woman in the audience to yell, “Actually, rape jokes are never funny!”, to which he responds, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, five guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her?”

— Also, Tucker Max, who was celebrated for having written a book called I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell, in which he tells multiple stories of having sex with extremely intoxicated women, “retires” from being Tucker Max.

2013: We have the rape joke discourse, led by then-Jezebel writer Lindy West. On the one hand, you have feminists saying “This shit isn’t actually funny,” and on the other, approximately 87 million op-eds about how we must protect the sanctity of rape jokes.

— The campus rape discourse begins. Women who have been raped on campus discuss both the problem of rape on campus and the tendency of school officials to do nothing about it, asking people to take it more seriously and criticizing men who have sex with women when they are too intoxicated to consent. This is followed by years of people complaining that we can’t take these women seriously, because what if they are just having day-after regrets because the man didn’t send them flowers or call them back or something?

2014: In May, incel Elliot Rodger kills six people because he is angry that women won’t have sex with him.

— In August, Gamergate begins — starting out as a rage against progressive videogame developer Zoë Quinn from gamers who believe that she only got good reviews for a game she made that they didn’t like because she had a sexual relationship with a video game reviewer (who never actually reviewed her game). It turns into unfettered rage and harassment against women who dare to criticize games for being misogynistic, and then against all “Social Justice Warriors” in general.

— We have the street harassment discourse, started by Black women on social media, in which women publicly discussed the general unpleasantness of not being able to walk to the grocery store without some guy yelling “Nice tits!” at us. This is quickly followed by approximately 87 million “How are men even supposed to talk to women if they can’t yell at them while they walk down the street?” and “But it’s a compliment!” and “I’m a woman and it makes me feel pretty when men I don’t know compliment my ass!” op-eds.

— The height of the affirmative consent discourse, in which people discuss why it’s important to have affirmative and enthusiastic consent at each stage of sexual activity. Some states implement “Yes Means Yes” laws — so that, instead of asking campus rape victims whether they were clear enough that they did not want to have sex with someone, accused rapists will be asked how they obtained consent, This was, naturally, followed by lots of complaining that it will ruin sex.

2015: Donald Trump begins his presidential campaign, ultimately winning in part due to a backlash to “social justice” activism — feminist activism and rape culture discourse in particular.

So let’s just stop there for now. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, because I know we had a few more discourses and we certainly had a lot more incel mass murders. But it doesn’t need to be, because the main thing I want to point out is that, at the very most, we had a few years of public discussions of things women had grown real fucking sick of, each of which was swiftly followed by an inevitable “Has feminism gone too far?!?” backlash from those who thought everything was fine the way it was and had been — mostly from those with bigger platforms and more power than we ever had.

This, frankly, has been the case for all social justice movements that have occurred over the last few years — not just feminism and rape culture, but also racism, police brutality and trans rights. You see a groundswell of actual people talking about their experiences and how best to change things so that other people don’t have to go through them, and a swift and terrible backlash from those who say they would like those other people to shut up, please.

Donald Trump was elected again this year, and again we were all told “This is all because you all just went too far! They just couldn’t take it anymore!”

But like, in the end, what did they have to take? People talking publicly on social media? People making art, movies, television shows, music, video games, etc. that they don’t like? Or publicly criticizing things they do like or behavior they enjoy engaging in?

That’s nothing. Especially when compared to everything that everyone else was expected to go through and shut up about. I’d like to point out that, quite notably, taking rape more seriously did not lead to any epidemic of men being sent to prison for not sending flowers or calling the day after.

One of the most jarring points of the “Girls Gone Wild” documentary is one in which a girl recounts how she ended up in a video when she was 17 years old (making it, legally, child pornography), and one of the male teachers at her high school responded by asking her to autograph a copy for him. That’s just one moment, one small snapshot of what was meant to be acceptable back then.

And, you know, at no point did anyone back then publicly wonder or wring their hands about “Is the patriarchy going too far?” Rather, then, as now, most public discussion was about what was wrong with the girls who were doing this, not the men who produced it.

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It’s not at all surprising to me that men living in that social environment felt “safe” voting for Barack Obama, or felt like they were totally liberal because they wanted to legalize weed and didn’t care if people were gay or not. Because they could vote for Obama and feel like a good liberal while chanting “Iron my shirt!” at Hillary Clinton. Everything was going really well for them and no one was really challenging the status quo, at least not anyone they were paying any attention to. This is part of what they mean when they say “the Left left me!”

(And, again, that’s just the feminist side of it. They were also “totally fine” with Black people until Black people started bringing up police brutality and racism, and fine with LGBTQ+ people when they thought that civil rights push would end with marriage.)

We’re being punished right now for a feminist utopia we never even had. We went straight from the Girls Gone Wild Era to the Gamergate/Incel mass murder era to the the Trump era. And while a whole lot has changed in terms of what we are willing to put up with or be quiet about, the only thing that has actually changed about the patriarchy has been the flavor it takes on.

Somebody needs to yell at prissy Confederate monument Senator Lindsey Graham, so here we go!

The guy who tweeted in 2016, “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed.......and we will deserve it,” has spent the last eight years walking that back vigorously as a june bug in July. So he went on “Meet the Press” on Sunday to let Kristen Welker and everybody know that he hearts Pete Hegseth, double hearts Kash Patel, and is XOXOXO for “cleaning house” at the FBI and getting rid of anyone who dared question sweet, innocent lamb Donald J. Trump.

Watch it all, if you want!

Will Graham vote yes to confirm Pete Hesgeth as Secretary of Defense? You betcha, they are good friends!

“I’m in a good place with Pete, unless something else I don’t know about comes out. These allegations are disturbing, but they’re anonymous. I asked him point-blank “were you drunk in a bar and got up and said ‘let’s kill all the Muslims,’ and he said ‘no.’ There’s one allegation, a police report about sexual assault, that person has the right to come forward to the committee, but about mismanagement of money, about um, y’know, having a drinking problem or saying inappropriate things, all of these are anonymous allegations, he’s given me his side of the story, it makes sense to me, I believe him. Unless somebody is willing to come forward, I think he’s going to get through. Remember Kavanaugh? ... [W]e’re not going to let that happen to Pete.”

Hey, that’s the same line Joni Ernst just used to excuse ignoring those credible allegations that are backed up by more than a dozen witnesses, corroborated by the fact that Hegseth paid his accuser to shut up! And seems like the financial mismanagement part would be easy to show?

Wonder what else could come out that could be a dealbreaker? Maybe a book where he openly advocates to bring back the Crusades?

And yes, we sure do remember Boofy ol’ Brett and his beautiful calendars. But, as Welker pointed out, Hegseth and his accuser signed a nondisclosure agreement, so no, the accuser can’t come in front of the committee, not unless she wants to be sued for that shut-up money Hegseth paid.

But, said Graham, Pete Hegseth told him he would release the lady from the agreement, so her kids can watch her on TV getting called a slutty nut and a nutty slut, and they all can get driven from their home by threats like Christine Blasey Ford did. And then experience watching her alleged assailant get confirmed anyway! Then have the pervy, angry, perhaps drunk secretary of Defense maybe coming after them too? Who wouldn’t want that? Also, whispering a thing in Lindsey Graham’s ear is not the same thing as an actual legal release. Neither of these guys is exactly a reliable narrator.

And what does Graham think about the FBI being headed by incompetent bumblefuck Kash Patel, does Graham like him too? Oh, you betcha he does! The last time there was an FBI director nominated, Graham was on TV fussing about Christopher Wray, saying the president has a “duty and obligation to pick somebody beyond reproach, outside the political lane… I’d encourage the president to pick somebody we all can rally around.” Is lawsuit-happy lunatic Kash Patel really that guy?

“Look what happened since the last time. The FBI in the eyes of conservatives has become a very biased organization. The Hunter laptop was real […] The FBI suppressed that story. Crossfire Hurricane was a joke. […] The Steele dossier was a lie […] the FBI […] has changed. What duh ah want in a FBI director now? Somebody that can clean it up and get back to the job of fightin’ crime, don’t have yuh thumb on the political scale. Make sure it’s not used as a political weapon against people that you have a beef with. We don’t want to go back to the days of J. Edgar Hoover. What we want to do is have an FBI that’s going to call balls and strikes. It’s gonna take somebody to clean out the place,” he drawled.

Clean out the place? Well, that’s ominous. (And isn’t the FBI supposed to be investigatin’, like it says in their name, with the judiciary doin’ the strike-callin’?)

Speaking of old Hoover, Kash Patel literally, gleefully has an enemies list of 60 people (so far), whose names he published in his book Government Gangsters, and he’s slobbered on Steve Bannon’s War Room show that he wants to “come after people in the media”. Just like J. Edgar Hoover! Hoover’s list of “enemies” were people like Martin Luther King Jr., whose bedroom he even had bugged, the Black Panthers, John Lennon, Charlie Chaplin, gay people, and any suspected communists and anarchists. In 1920, as head of what was then the Department of Justice’s General Intelligence Division, he ordered “Red Raids” and arrested 6,000 people he suspected of being “subversive,” though only one in 10 of them were found to have committed any kind of crimes. And Hoover even had members of the media submit their work to the FBI for approval.

Sounds like exactly the kind of funtimes Patel and old Treasonballs have a real boner for.

Then Graham bitched some more about James Comey and Russia hoax and blah blah.

Welker had another question: should members of the January 6 Committee get locked up? Graham said “no.” Well, that’s mighty gentlemanly of him, how about that? Housecleanin’, it’s just for those little guys at the Bureau! And what about Dreamers, are they going to have a path to legal status? Only if we clean up the border, Joe Biden, 13 million people, gotta deport people, or there’s going to be a run on the border, lock down the border, gotta pass a border security bill on day one, terrorists, fentanyl, need a border bill that Stephen Miller can support, build that wall!

Hey, the old man had four years before to build that “fuck you Mexico” bazillion-dollar wall and make Mexico pay for it. He even shut down the government! Then his interest flagged in the whole thing and he went to go look for his lost golf ball and throw some kids in cages instead. But maybe he’ll get a wall this time? Probably not, but at least he knows he’s got Lindsey Graham’s undying devotion!

[Wilson Quarterly / New Republic / NBC News]

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The All-Star lineup that is Donald Trump’s second presidential administration continues to take shape. And by All-Star lineup, we mean this chucklefuck collection of baked potatoes so odious, so repellent, so loathsome, that we will need all the bleach in the known universe to disinfect Washington DC after they eventually abscond with every dollar from the nation’s treasury that hasn’t been screwed into the floor.

Over the weekend, Sweet Potato Suharto added to this harem of monstrosities his ambassador to Germany from his first administration, who was such an asshole that the Germans openly cheered when he left. Then Trump followed up by adding a doofus former congressman who once sued a pretend cow for being mean to him. Like we said, all-stars.

We will say this, though. The jobs that Ric Grenell and Devin Nunes signed on for at least sound as if the two men are being shunted off to the edges of the administration, as opposed to being brought in toward any center of power. We suppose it is a second-best-case scenario with these two, the best-case scenario obviously being stranding them on Attu Island with nothing but a thermos full of horse diarrhea and one long-sleeve T-shirt to ward off the cold that they have to share.

Let’s start with Nunes. His list of sins is too long to summarize concisely. We do remember his laughingly ironic chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee during the early days of the investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia, when he spent weeks and months trying to undermine the inquiry by leaking to the press that he had information from whistleblowers that the Obama administration had illegally conspired to frame Trump. Needless to say, this was bullshit.

Nunes’ efforts included a secret meeting at the White House to meet with the alleged whistleblowers, who were actually Trump toadies, in a weird nighttime dash around Washington that was so inept, none other than Lindsey Graham compared him to Inspector Clouseau.

Christ, we wish anyone in the Trump administration had the competence of Inspector Clouseau.

Nunes sued Ryan Lizza and Esquire for publishing an accurate story about his family moving its dairy farm from California to Iowa, a suit that was eventually dismissed in its entirety. He also sued CNN for defamation for $435,000,000. Unsurprisingly, that one was also dismissed in its entirety. Nunes does love filing frivolous lawsuits that judges kick into the ionosphere.

Nunes eventually resigned from Congress to become CEO of the Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent company of Trump’s vanity social media product and Nazi safe space Truth Social. He will soon be taking on an additional gig, as chairman of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board:

So he’s taking this position while continuing to run one of Trump’s private businesses? Boy, that doesn’t sound at all like a massive conflict of interest waiting to happen.

According to the White House website, the PIAB exists to provide the President “with an independent source of advice on the effectiveness with which the Intelligence Community is meeting the nation’s intelligence needs.” This means that Nunes, according to Barbara McQuade of MSNBC, will have access to all of America’s massive trove of intelligence. Which, given Nunes’s past efforts to manipulate classified information to look favorable to Trump, feels like a recipe for disaster.

On the plus side, this is an advisory board and a position deemed not important enough for Senate confirmation. It’s not as if Trump is trying to make Nunes the Director of National Intelligence. Frankly, we’d be shocked if Nunes has the smarts to impress even the Senate enough to confirm him, and the Senate’s Republican caucus includes the likes of Tommy Tuberville and Ron Johnson.

Speaking of the DNI, we might have Tulsi Gabbard overseeing America’s entire intelligence community and Devin Nunes, a man his hometown paper once called “Trump’s yes-man,” running an advisory board telling Trump whether she’s doing a good job or not. This is either the setup for a horrific disaster movie or history’s dumbest romcom.

Then we come to Richard Grenell, possibly the nastiest piece of work in an administration full of people that would reject the shark from Jaws as too milquetoast, a description he will likely enjoy putting on his business cards.

Grenell served as the ambassador to Germany during part of Trump’s first administration. He took over the job in May of 2018. By the following January, as Our Liz once noted, German politicians were calling for his expulsion.

Grenell’s sins, in addition to general galactic assholery, were fairly numerous. We suppose you could sum them up as his trying to export Trumpism to one of America’s biggest European allies. Given that Trumpism is just warmed-over bullying by dotards, this went over about as well as one could expect.

For example, within one day of taking office, Grenell was threatening German companies that did any business with Iran. He publicly suggested on Tucker Carlson’s show, which was still on Fox, that Germany needed a change in leadership. As Liz noted:

Advocating for leadership change in a diplomat's host country is very NOT ON, not to mention being a violation of Article 41 of the Vienna Convention, which requires overseas diplomats "not to interfere in the internal affairs of that State." So Grenell was off to a cracking good start!

Grenell also spent time cozying up to Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right nationalist political party. Hey, when has coddling a far-right nationalist political party in Germany ever backfired on the planet? And yet these were the people Grenell found most comfortable being around, and violated an international treaty to stan for. Diplomacy!

Is it any wonder that Der Spiegel reported that of the more than 30 sources it interviewed for a profile on Grenell, the majority described him as a “vain, narcissistic person who dishes out aggressively, but can barely handle criticism”? Just like his boss!

And this was just Grenell’s ambassadorship. We won’t even get into his involvement with the Stop the Steal movement in 2020, except to say that he admitted to GOP operatives in Nevada that the whole thing was bullshit.

It’s always neat when people openly put their own desperate need for power above American democracy. Truly the evil orcs who raised Grenell in a cave in the woods must be proud.

Even before the 2024 election, Grenell was openly campaigning to be Secretary of State in the next Trump Reich. After the election, he was even more craven and pathetic about it, according to Politico, which reported recently on efforts by conservatives to convince Trump to name Grenell to the job:

Around the same time, an associate of Grenell had approached conservative social media influencers, according to two people with knowledge of the situation, offering paid contracts of as much as five figures to post favorably about Grenell.

Listen, if you have to pay people to say nice things about you, maybe the job of America’s chief diplomat is not a good fit. Nonetheless, Grenell supposedly told people in Trump’s orbit that he would accept nothing less than secretary of State.

Then the State gig went to Marco Rubio, and suddenly Grenell would accept whatever scraps the Trump people tossed his way:

“Presidential Envoy for Special Missions” sounds like the sort of make-work consolation prize you give to someone who didn’t get the job he wanted, and also who you would like to keep out of the White House and the country as much as possible.

So congrats to Grenell on his participation trophy. And Devin Nunes on his participation trophy. You’re both doing great.

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It’s the conspiracy theory sensation sweeping the nation! Drones!

They’re a little bit chemtrail, a little bit UFO. The specter of drones in the skies is freaking out everybody from Marjorie Taylor Greene to Larry Hogan to every rando nutjob on Xitter. Since the first sightings on November 18, calls to the FAA have exploded, and expanded to other states. Italian space lasers? Aliens? The Chinese? Santa Claus’s elves checking on who is being naughty or nice? Probably it’s Project Blue Beam!

Have you heard of that one? Hoo boy, buckle up and strap on your tinfoil! This theory, made up by a Quebecois conspiracist named Serge Monast in the ‘90s, posits that there’s “a plot to facilitate a totalitarian world government by destroying Abrahamic religions and replacing them with a New Age belief system using futuristic NASA technology and involving a faked alien invasion or fake extraterrestrial encounter meant to deceive nations into uniting under a world government.”

Oh, well, that must be it, then. That’s what Roseanne Barr and Alex Jones think, anyway. Jones even thinks some kind of holograms will be involved. Maybe Tupac will hop off a spaceship and tell us all to obey the New World Order! Matt Walsh is sure it is aliens, because aliens apparently have nothing better to do than watch the Wildwoods rollercoasters in December.

Even Dotard is getting in on the action.

“Mystery Drone sightings all over the Country. Can this really be happening without our government’s knowledge. I don’t think so! Let the public know, and now. Otherwise, shoot them down!!!”

Yes, shooting at things in the sky when you don’t know what they are, what could go wrong? Rep. Jeff Van Drew, New Jersey Republican, is convinced the drones are coming from “a mothership” from Iran that is “off the East Coast of the United States of America.” Whatever it is, “we aren’t being told the truth,” he fussed on Fox News. “They are dealing with the American public like we’re stupid.” Uh, no comment there. Maybe it’s George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic here to force the boys to make some noise and put glides in their strides and dips in their hips, wouldn’t that be nice?

For a mothership, this one sure has been mighty shy. And why would these mothership drones/fake aliens/destroyer of Abrahamic religions be interested in New Jersey, of all places? And not, like, somewhere where a lot of people could better see and appreciate their New World Order-bringing glory? Why are they only seen at night, in very blurry photos? Does no one in the state of New Jersey have a decent camera? Really not getting the light-year-groovin’ job done, there, mothership. Swing the chariot lower and loosen up that booty!

Also, if you’re the New World Order and want to freak everybody out, why take the extra steps with the religion and the alien encounter stuff? Why not just be like “we’ve got a mothership connection and ubiquitous drones, so bend the knee before we pew pew pew vaporize y’all, mkay?” Why does this World Order give a shit what anybody’s religion is, so long as they get the adrenochrome to keep their alien skin smooth and supple, or whatever it is that they want?

So what are these drones really?

Probably planes. White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby says that’s what most of them are. And sweet new Democratic New Jersey Senator Andy Kim, the guy who went around with a trash bag cleaning up the Capitol at 1:00 a.m. after the January 6 attack for Trump, did a little bit of investigating of his own. He looked at the lights, he shot video, and used public flight tracking tools to reference flight data, and spoiler, they were planes.

The Twitterverse was grateful! Just kidding, he got comments like “Yup.. just as we thought: You’re a gigantic pussy.” And “one red light one spraying, and another one surveiling (sic) - they are moving in groups - what are they spraying?” (Sigh, planes trail vapor.)

And some of them are stars! Former Republican Maryland governor and loser for Senate Larry Hogan confused the constellation Orion with mystery vessels, yowza yowch cringe! A whole lot of this seems to be folks like Hogan who apparently do not get out and look at the night sky too often.

Oof, that community note. “The stars at the 39 second mark are recognizably the constellation Orion. From this you can determine that the bright lights behind the trees are the stars Sirius and Procyon. No anomalous objects are apparent in this video.” Just one big dumb melon head.

And some of the objects may be actual drones! Radiation-detecting drones have been a thing for at least six years. Maybe they’re checking out Three Mile Island over there for leaks? That would be a good thing. Also, there’s nothing illegal about hobbyists flying drones at night, and if I were a jerkass kid with a drone I’d sure be right out there launching that thing to watch idiots crap their pants about it. Where there have been dicks with drones, police have acted fast: two men were arrested in Boston over the weekend and charged with trespassing for flying a drone “dangerously close” to Logan International Airport.

But seems like every couple of years (or more lately, every couple of weeks) there’s some freakout about things in the sky. Remember 2008 when Texans were convinced that some alien craft “as big as a Walmart” was being escorted by military planes over Stephensville? Bill O’Reilly even featured it on his stupid “O’Reilly Factor” show. In May we had sentient hairbrush Rep. Anna Paulina Luna flapping her yap in a House Oversight Committee meeting, claiming the government is covering up UFOs. And Charlie Kirk has been on the fake-alien-invasion thing for a while.

Well, if it does turn out to be an alien invasion of adrenochrome-sucking New World Order somethings, we sure will feel silly for making fun of these idiots. But until we see some little green asses out here demanding fealty, we’re going to be sticking with the planes and stars theory, for now.

[Daily Beast archive link / NBC - John Kirby / NBC - Drone Arrests]

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On December 16, 1977, eight women bank workers at Citizens National Bank in Willmar, Minnesota, went on strike, charging sex discrimination they faced on the job. The Willmar 8 would not transform the banking industry or the small town where they lived. But they would serve as inspiration for women around the nation seeking to end the sexual harassment and gender discrimination in hiring and promotion they faced everyday.

The Equal Pay Act of 1963 legislated away unequal pay for the same work, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increased federal commitment to gender equality on the job. But enforcement was highly sporadic in a misogynist society. Women made less than men because men thought women were not equal. Eight female workers at the Citizens National Bank in Willmar became outraged that they made $300 less a month than the men doing the same work. That was a huge pay gap, especially given 1977 wages. The starting salary for men was the same salary a woman working at the bank for 10 years received.

In April 1977, the bank ordered a group of women to train a young male to become their boss. He already made more than they did. They had enough. They went to see the bank president. He told them that “We’re not all equal, you know” and that men needed more money than women because men paid for dates. The women were furious. Their names were Doris Boshart, Irene Wallin, Sylvia Erickson Koll, Jane Harguth Groothuis, Sandi Treml, Teren Novotny, Shirley Solyntjes, and Glennis Ter Wisscha.

They filed a gender discrimination case with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and an unfair labor practice with the National Labor Relations Act. They formed their own small union that May, affiliating with American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 5 Local 404, based out of St. Peter, Minnesota. In June, the EEOC ruled that the company had engaged in gender discrimination. But the company didn’t care. Ordered to negotiate, the bank stalled and did not take any of it seriously. Said Ter Wisscha, the negotiations were “an absolute effort in futility.”

So, on a cold December day, the women decided they had enough and would strike and walk a picket line. How cold was it that day? Oh, the wind chill was -70. The 1970s was a period of labor militancy. Even though they did not have a union, they decided to go on strike. And they were highly committed. They picketed for nearly a year in front of the bank. Pretty amazing given they were such a small number. That also meant picketing in the middle of a Minnesota winter, which is nothing to sneeze at, largely because the sneeze will freeze in the air. They chose to file a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board over their grievances.

Willmar was hardly a center of union activity. The AFSCME local in St. Peter was 100 miles away from Willmar. It’s just a small farm town and county seat in the prairies between Minneapolis and the South Dakota line. Even in 1977, it had less than 15,000 people. The strike caused a lot of tension in the community. Almost no one locally supported it. This was a strongly Republican town and this was the kind of thing that outsiders did. In fact, when the local head of the Republican Party, who was also a lawyer, took the case, he lost his position with the party. The women really suffered. Many of them were ostracized from the community. Businesses would refuse to serve them. Their children’s friends couldn’t play with them anymore. It was bad.

But this does not mean that the Willmar 8 did not get support. They did. A lot. It just came from unions and women’s groups in the Twin Cities and around the nation. The National Organization for Women sent supporters to join them on the picket line. The Willmar 8 did not generally consider themselves feminists. Those were crazy bra-burning radicals. But NOW educated the workers themselves, telling them that feminism was about giving women power, including at the job. They were ready to hear this message. Their newfound embrace of feminism no doubt did not help them in the Willmar community. Unions also came out to help. One day in February 1978, a big group of United Auto Workers members showed up in solidarity. The UAW then showed up many times. They were on the “Phil Donahue Show” and the “Today Show,” as well as many other television appearances. This was a story with legs.

However, this was not a strike built to last. The AFSCME local did not have a big strike fund and the workers eventually did need to work. Of course the bank had already replaced them. In the summer they dropped the lawsuit for gender discrimination in exchange for a small amount of money. By September, they asked to come back to work. Only one was immediately brought back, demoted from head bookkeeper to bank teller. Five eventually did end up back at the bank. It was not a victory for the workers at all. But the impact of the strike nationally was real.

The National Labor Relations Board did not really rule in the workers’ favor when it finally issued its ruling in 1979. It did say that the women had faced real gender discrimination. But it also said that the strike was economic in nature and that the women would not receive their jobs back or any back pay.

In the aftermath, the banking industry and other professional workplaces with a large number of women did begin to make some changes in workplace culture to reduce sexual harassment and provide women with something closer to fairer pay and chances for promotion. But we also know how limited those gains are.

The story also continued to receive national attention, largely through the attention of Lee Grant. You may remember Grant, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her work in 1951’s Detective Story. But then she was blacklisted for her leftist ties. She disappeared for awhile, showed back up in “Peyton’s Place,” had a big comeback in the late ‘60s, and then started directing documentaries. In 1981, she directed a documentary on the Willmar 8 by that title. That started her on a long run of well-received documentaries on issues around gender and sexual discrimination, including an early transgender film titled What Sex Am I? Grant also directed a feature film in 1984 based on the Willmar 8 titled A Matter of Sex.

FURTHER READING:

Almost nothing actually! This action is mentioned here and there, but there’s not a lot of literature about it. A couple of books that at least mention it include:

Tom Zaniello, Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraff: An Expanded Guide to Films about Labor, which discusses Grant’s documentary.

Dave Kenney and Thomas Saylor, Minnesota in the 70s

Otherwise, it’s just a few magazine articles from the time and the like. Always more to write about!

Reporters are expensive meatbags, and they complain a lot. What if you could just replace them with robots? That’s the brilliant idea media company BuzzFeed’s CEO Jonah Peretti has, anyway. He is selling the farm to buy the robots!

And there’s not much of a farm. Three years ago, BuzzFeed paid $300 million for Complex Networks and First We Feast, owners of that “Hot Ones” YouTube show where celebrities like Shaquille O’Neal, John Stamos and Lorde get interviewed by an affable guy named Sean Evans, while they eat progressively spicier chicken wings, and the celebrity proclaims that the wings are indeed spicy. People like it! The show has somehow been around for an entire decade, and has 12.6 million subscribers.

Then earlier this year BuzzFeed sold some of the Complex business to ecommerce company Ntwrk for around $109 million, and laid off about 16 percent of its remaining workforce. And then last week it sold First We Feast for $82.5 million to an affiliate of Soros Fund Management. Quite the big fat loss! But it’s part of a strategy, you see, to get rid of “lower-margin content products” in favor of “high-margin, tech-enabled revenue lines.”

Or as the BuzzFeed CEO put it, in business-speak: “In the coming years, we will continue to invest in our most scalable and tech enabled services, launching new AI-powered interactive experiences, and delivering for our loyal audience and business partners.” Translation, robots won’t demand severance pay or file for unemployment, and the audience won’t mind.

In the worst kind of timing, the next day the BBC’s Apple AI sent out a news alert falsely notifying “Apple Intelligence”-enabled iOS 18.1 iPhones that shooting suspect Luigi Mangione had shot himself. (He had not.) You would think AI would at least be able to summarize existing news stories without completely making things up, but the technology, it seems, is not there yet. It can’t even reliably draw people and figure out how many fingers they have. And have you ever tried to write porn on ChatGPT? It really does not understand how human bodies work. We hear. So entire stories? Good luck with that.

Red Ventures’s technology website CNET already tried robot reporters, and what they got was plagiarism and stories full of errors. AI can’t tell if the information it’s scraping is fact or fiction. It has no ability to verify information, or ring up a source for a quote (yet). It can’t run down to the courthouse to watch a trial, or decide what’s newsworthy and what is not, or slip in cute little dick jokes! All it can do is generate some text based on the patterns it was trained on. And then there’s the plagiarism problem: AI steals and regurgitates what humans have written, that’s what it does. So if AI requires an editor to insert quotes, check facts, vet a story for any plagiarism and put in the dick jokes, at what point is any of this saving time and money over just hiring a reporter to write things in the first place?

But, BuzzFeed is a public company, and it’s gotta do something to try to keep itself alive for its last remaining shareholders. The stock has been steadily sinking, down more than 35 percent since it went public in 2021. And shareholders demand public companies constantly churn out increasing profits. The only way to do that is to make more stuff, faster, at a lower cost. In BuzzFeed’s case, the “stuff” is newsy listicles and quizzes: 40 gifts parents will love! Take a food quiz to see if you’re a You’re a Glinda or an Elphaba! Or there’s “43 Things That’ll Make Laundry Day Run A Little More Smoothly.” (Really, 43? And people are spending a whole day on laundry?) You don’t need the second coming of Ida B. Wells to churn out this slop, and calling it “reporting” is generous. Is it better than computer-generated content? We shall see.

And what a sad state of affairs! The web site once known for publishing the Steele dossier, Trump Tower documents and even won a Pulitzer Prize in 2021 for a series on the mass detention of Uyghur Muslims by China degraded to this. It shut down its actual news division in 2023, after rounds of buyouts and layoffs, and there they are.

So now instead of Pulitzers or Hot Wing Shows it shall make AI slop, as if the world didn’t already have enough. The slop has taken over Facebook feeds with generated pictures of Jesuses, salads, and Pope Francis in a puffer coat. And Xitter, obviously, where porn bots and crypto bots and scam bots demand attention. The slop is even oozing into publishing, where acquisition editors are being swarmed by submissions from people who typed “ChatGPT, write a 500-page romance novel” or “ChatGPT, write a book about fibromyalgia.” The slop can now even call people on the phone, pretending to be a loved one in distress, asking for money.

It’s scary shit, and sad, but what can you do? Definitely get a code word to use with family, in case some scammer calls with a fake kidnapping. Maybe stay off of the social media, or at least if you see the pope in a puffer jacket, or Trump in hip waders, consider that that’s not him.

And of course donate to Wonkette, which is still tappedty-tapped by real humans, flawed and expensive as they may be, no robots allowed!

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[New York Magazine / Gizmodo / The Desk / New York Times archive link / NPR / Marketing Brew / Washington Post archive link]

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