One of the news media’s longest-running crime dramas came to an underwhelming finish yesterday when the U.S. government reached a plea deal with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange that will allow him to go free after 13 years living in embassies and prisons. This started back when it was big news that the U.S. committed war crimes in Iraq. I don’t think that surprises anyone anymore.

The judge in Trump’s New York hush money trial partially lifted Trump’s gag order, allowing him to attack the jurors who convicted him without fear of incurring more slaps on his wrists. Everyone expects this will unleash his zombie minions to exact revenge, mostly by tweeting out misspelled death threats.

The Beetlejuice Groper, Lauren Boebert, won her crowded primary in the Colorado district she carpet-bagged into, allowing her to star in another season of “Catfighting Congresswomen of Washington” opposite Sextuple B – Bleach Blonde Bad Built Butch Body Marjorie Taylor Greene.

If there’s a difference between reporting on sports and politics, it’s too slight to be discernible. News feeds are overflowing with stories about THE BIG DEBATE! just as they are before THE BIG GAME! Give Trump credit for realizing these exercises have more in common with professional wrestling or the Miss America pageant, two media extravaganzas he wormed his way into back in the day, than the Lincoln-Douglas debates. His disdain for the hollow pomp of politics is the cornerstone of his support.

The floor’s yours.

Somebody must have spiked Sen. Chris Coons’ breakfast on Sunday, because he went on Fox News and freaked out the host by pointing out that Trump is a convicted felon. The host’s flustered reaction might put Coons’ status as Fox’s favorite Democrat in question.

Before getting too excited about Coons acting like a Democrat for a change, let’s see how he behaves when Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Congress today. Many Democrats intend to boycott the event. I doubt Coons will join them, but who knows where this new tough-guy persona might lead?

Climate protesters took a break from throwing soup at paintings to break out smoke bombs at Sunday’s PGA golf tournament, raiding the 18th green as the leaders were finishing their round. I applaud this change in tactics on the grounds that golf contributes to global warming a lot more than art does.

Remember when Lauren Boebert’s notoriety forced her to flee her Colorado representative district and run for election in the district next door? At that point it looked like her days in Congress were numbered, but her desperation move now has a good chance of working. The seat next door is open, and eight other candidates are on the primary ballot, so even though Boebert is polling at 40%, she’s far ahead of the rest of the field (this is why I still consider Bethany Hall-Long the favorite in Delaware’s gubernatorial race). The silver lining: Marjorie Taylor Greene, recognizing a rival for Crazy Queen of Congress, hates her guts.

The floor’s yours.

Democrats would have an easier time drubbing Republicans for corruption if there weren’t so many corrupt Democrats. New Jersey is proving a happy hunting ground for indicting crooked ones. While Bob Menendez is still in court explaining his gold bar collection, South Jersey Democratic power broker George Norcross has been indicted for racketeering. Norcross pulled the dick move of crashing the media announcement, sitting in the front row and refusing to move. Some sobering context: On lists of the most corrupt states, New Jersey only sometimes makes the top 10.

Speaking of self-enriching pricks, somebody has taken advantage of Delaware’s secretive incorporation laws to set up a ghost company that has received $3.1 million from the Trump campaign. If it helps, remember that every crooked dollar spent contributes to the booming economy.

Continuing with our theme of self-enriching pricks, the IRS wants to close a tax loophole called partnership basis shifting that costs the government $50 billion a year.

Miles Johnson, a senior attorney adviser and partnership tax specialist at the Tax Law Center at NYU Law, said “these transactions effectively make income disappear from the tax system by creating depreciation deductions or other tax reductions that don’t reflect any true economic cost.” He said the proposed rule and guidance shows that the IRS wants to stop these sorts of transactions “by eliminating their tax benefits and better identifying them to the IRS as without substance.”

I’m sure Republicans oppose it, but will anyone get them on the record defending the practice?

I wonder how many Democrats secretly oppose it as well. “More than a few” would be my guess, because rich people and corporations are the ones who provide them with campaign money. That’s how you get a group of House Democrats fighting Biden’s climate policy – they’re sucking up millions from petroleum companies.

We have the Republican Supreme Court to thank for green-lighting unlimited money in politics, and we now know a big reason is that at least two of them Alito and Thomas, are on the take. What can Democrats do about it? Not much except win elections. Good luck with that.

Dr. Anthony Fauci has authored an article in The Atlantic recounting the first three months of the COVID pandemic. His understated account has some choice nuggets, including this one:

Then, in one Oval Office meeting, I mentioned to Trump that we were in the early stages of developing a COVID vaccine. This got his attention, and he quickly arranged a trip to the NIH. During his visit, Barney Graham told the president that within a couple of weeks, a Phase 1 trial would likely begin. The president asked, “Why can’t we just use the flu vaccine for this virus?” It was not the first or the last time that he seemed to conflate COVID with influenza.

Nor was it the first time that he demonstrated the intelligence of a not-very-bright fourth-grader, but Fauci was too restrained to point that out.

The floor’s yours.

There is no news today outside of the usual huffing and puffing from Trump and his acolytes in politics and the media, so feel free to discuss what you want.

In America’s supposedly liberal media, Jeff Bezos hired some British Fleet Street sleaze to run the Washington Post and the New York Times is having a field day running stories about his history of running stories based on illegally obtained phone hacks. The Times isn’t the only media outlet gloating; Politico wasted no time piling on.

You’d think Republicans, having seen the backlash against overturning Roe v. Wade, would soft-pedal their Christianist forced-birth bullshit, but no – they’re actually split about whether in-vitro fertilization should be banned. Keep fucking that chicken, fellas.

Republicans, with Trump at the forefront, keep criticizing voting machines that don’t keep a paper record of votes. Raw Story looked into it and found that except for New Jersey, the states without paper ballots all are red states that voted for Trump. The GOP screwed itself on this one: They’re the ones who rigged the vote whenever possible, and they’ve now made that harder for themselves.

The floor’s yours.

Hunter Biden was convicted of being a gun-toting drug addict – or was it a drug-addicted gun toter? – and MAGAts, in true Old Man Yells at Clouds form, are angry about it, and in the stupidest possible way. They claim Joe Biden orchestrated the conviction of his son to justify his prosecution of Donald Trump. These aren’t just the usual internet randos and Russian bots, either. Someone’s going to have to explain to me how you can share a country with people who think that’s a rational conclusion to draw.

In further evidence that lots of people beyond RFK Jr. must have brain worms, a Florida school board banned a book about book-banning. Look, there have always been people this stupid and deluded, but back in my day we didn’t let them run things. Then again, we had Jerry Lewis movies to show us what would happen if you let a moron run, say, a laboratory.

Every so often I see an article about declining sperm counts around the world. Lots of causes are suspected, but here’s a possible clue: scientists found microplastics in every semen sample they’ve tested. It’s not just the climate suffering from our petroleum addiction.

I never much cared for Joe Biden as a politician, but I’m perplexed by the level of unpopularity for a guy who has taken meaningful steps to help consumers through antitrust actions and by eliminating the “junk fees” that businesses increasingly use to burrow deeper into our pockets. If he had done more of that – or, really, any of that – during his long Senate career I would have liked him sooner.

There’s a reason you haven’t heard from Noam Chomsky lately. He’s in Brazil, recovering from a stroke he suffered last year, according to the Brazilian wife his Wikipedia page doesn’t mention him having.

The floor’s yours.

Ever wonder why the American public opposes Israel’s war on Gaza but its elected representatives are for it? Here’s why: AIPAC funneled money from Republican donors to Democratic candidates more than any other organization. Shalom my ass.

In a tape made surreptitiously, SCOTUS justice Sam Alito admitted his Christian nationalism, telling his interviewer that compromise with the left isn’t possible, which explains his record of voting with the conservative litigant 100% of the time – no hyperbole, it’s actually every single time. I can’t put it any better than the Atlantic’s Norman Ornstein did: “Utterly unethical, corrupt, a serial liar, and a radical lacking every element of judicial temperament. This monster does not belong in civil society, much less on any court, much much less on the Supreme Court.”

One of the many ironic things about our so-called Christians is their exclusionary nature, the exact opposite of what the Bible character they supposedly revere preached. The latest target of their ire: Dolly freaking Parton, of all people, apparently because she doesn’t condemn LGBT+ folks. For the record, the character Jesus said exactly zero about homosexuality.

People debate whether Trumpism will survive Trump. I tend to think not, because I don’t think they can find someone with the same appeal to know-nothings who watch reality TV, but this article makes a convincing case that Trump is a terrorist and his brand of terror will live on, whether or not it’s called fascism. Today’s must-read.

People are starting to tumble to the fact that plastic is not the unalloyed boon they used to think it was. The attitude shift is showing up in a growing number of governmentssuing over plastic pollution, and not just in California. I expect Delaware’s DINO congressional brigade to come down squarely in the polluters’ corner. Go ahead, Coonsy and LBR, prove me wrong.

The floor’s yours.

Americans love scary stories, so it’s no surprise that American media dispenses countless articles about Trump. You rarely see his name in European newspapers, but their political leaders are frightened all the same. And, as in the United States, the constant drumbeat has a deleterious effect: As is true here, most are convinced Trump will win again. The lesson is clear: Propaganda works, and it’s apparently so easy to employ that Republicans can manage it.

Speaking of which, if you need a new horror to fuel your nightmares, the Chinese military has released video of a functional machine gun robot dog. You don’t need much imagination to write the horror movie about that.

Liberals tend to dismiss the contention of many so-called independent voters who like to say both parties are the same. They’d say that less if Democrats didn’t keep demonstrating that in some regards they are. Democrats and Republicans might back different policies, but too many exhibit a common root of greed. Bob Menendez is a good example. The corrupt senator from New Jersey is as unpopular as Chris Christie, so Democrats have nominated Rep. Andy Kim to replace him in November’s election. But Menendez not only won’t resign, he filed for the race as an independent, despite being in the midst of his corruption trial. Let’s hope prosecutors put Gold Bar Bob behind some iron bars.

Why do people like Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene routinely make asses of themselves in their MAGA devotion? For the money, of course. This article on plunging small-dollar political donations points out that Jordan and Greene have bucked the trend thanks to their constant presence on cable news. This helps explain why Congress is full of street performers.

Researchers have come up with a theory for what’s causing the strange weather much of the globe has experienced in the past two years: The undersea volcanic eruption in Tonga in January 2022. Most volcanoes spew ash high into the atmosphere, but being under the water, this one created vast amounts of steam and shot it to heights water vapor otherwise wouldn’t reach. The effects have been far-reaching, and they could continue for the rest of the decade.

Soda shakeup on Aisle 6: Dr Pepper has surpassed Pepsi at the No. 2 selling soda in the United States. Somewhere, Allan Loudell is smiling – he drank more of the stuff than anyone I’ve ever known.

The floor’s yours.

For years now I’ve been told that attacking Donald Trump only makes his support stronger. Yeah, sure it does, buddy. Unfortunately for that argument, post-conviction polling says the opposite is true. On the other hand, lots of evidence points to facts not mattering anymore.

In a rare sign of fight, Democratic senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Ron Wyden are investigating Trump’s “give me a billion dollars” pitch to oil executives. As Whitehouse pointed out, it’s the very definition of corruption. Then again, so is the purchase of Clarence Thomas’ “friendship” by a Nazi-obsessed billionaire, yet here we are. As noted above, facts don’t matter anymore.

For Trump, everything is a transaction expressed in financial terms, even the tawdry sex he has with porn stars and Playboy models, so it’s no surprise that Pro Publica found he bestowed financial favors on potential witnesses to his many, many crimes. I think he calls it “the Biden crime family” out of resentment at having to do all his crimes himself.

I don’t think we’ve posted a link to it yet, so here, belatedly, is “The Apprentice” producer Bill Pruitt’s behind-the-scenes account of working with the failed businessman, and how the magic of editing cobbled together an illusion of competence. The big reveal, of course, was Trump dropping the N-bomb in front of witnesses, including Pruitt. I’m sure some people will say that release of the tape would only make Trump stronger.

Republicans’ panicky response to Trump’s convictions is mind-boggling in its magical thinking – get the Supreme Court to make it stop! – but weaselly pervo Jim Jordan has an actual plan to defund any office that tries to hold Turd King accountable. I understand people falling into cults of personality, but it’s truly sad that Trump was the best personality they could find.

The floor’s yours.