Rep. James Comer, dumbest man in Kentucky, isn’t going to let a little thing like a lying Russian stooge derail his impeachment of Hunter Biden. No sirree, he’s gonna keep fucking that chicken until its feathers fall off. Some Republicans are on the Russian payroll; others, like Comer, are just following along.
Israel and Hamas both denied they’re anywhere close to any deal for a truce, cease-fire or cessation of hostilities, directly contradicting what Joe Biden said Monday. I’m getting the sense that somebody’s lyin’.
You could fill a daily newsletter on the Republican vs. Republican beat. In Michigan, the new head of the state party, an old-school Republican, got a court order telling the MAGAt he ousted she can’t keep calling herself the party chairperson. This could interfere with her plan to hold an alternate state convention. Keep that popcorn buttered.
One of the many reasons that I can predict greenhouse gas emissions won’t be cut anywhere near enough to stave off global warming: the thousands of abandoned wells emitting methane and other gases. Basically, wells produce at ever-decreasing rates, and get sold to smaller companies that try to squeeze out the rest. When the bottom-feeders go bankrupt, they simply abandon the wells to the elements, another gift of our system of barely-fettered capitalism.
Outside the U.S. media echo chamber, there’s much less coverage of Trump, but people seem to form a clearer image of what he represents. Here’s what Malcolm Turnbull, the center-right prime minister of Australia from 2015 to 2018, had to say about Trump and the MAGA Republicans at a televised confab about Ukraine. The quotes begin at 5:20:
Regrettably, the Republican Party under Donald Trump, and particularly the right wing of the Republican Party, are very sympathetic to Vladimir Putin. I mean, I have been with Trump and Putin. Trump is in awe of Putin. When you see Trump with Putin, as I have on a few occasions, he’s like the 12-year-old boy that goes to high school and meets the captain of the football team. ‘My hero.’ It is really creepy. It’s really creepy. …
It struck everybody. It was, it was, like you could touch it. It was creep—the creepiness was palpable. … I’m just telling you what I saw. You saw that in that press conference they did in, I think, in Helsinki. You saw a similar thing. Now the sad thing is that you’ve got the right wing of the Republican Party—you saw this with Tucker Carlson, doing that sycophantic kind of non-interview with Vladimir Putin. I mean, it’s terrifying. It is terrifying. And the scary thing is that countries like Australia or many European countries, uh, we may find ourselves, are we going to find ourselves not dealing just with two autocracies in Russia and China, but what is Trump’s America going to look like? This is a guy leading a party that is no longer committed to democracy as we understand it.
The floor’s yours.