Saturday Report 3/9/24 - Dark Brandon shows up & proves he's not too old....

The Best of the Rest of the News

— State of the Union: Dark Brandon shows up & proves he’s still capable of kicking Republican ass. With the exception of rightwing hate media, reviews of President Biden’s SOTU speech Thursday night have been universally positive. He was on fire, filled with energy, and repeatedly went off-script to take on the classless Republicans who heckled and harassed him throughout the speech. Most amazing was how Republicans in the audience refused to applaud lines like, “We will not bow down to Putin” and his call for removing lead pipes to “stop the brain damage they’re causing our children.” The GOP has nearly totally become the party of Putin, and appears to even love lead poisoning America’s kids. They even booed their own legislation to secure the southern border! This is way beyond partisanship: something is really wrong, corrupt, rotten, and bizarre within the party now that it’s been completely taken over by a racist, hateful, orange-faced psychopath. And Senator Katie Britt’s effort to rehearse her tryout for the Scarlett O’Hara role in a high-school performance of Gone With The Wind just made the crisis within the party even clearer: did she really expect people to believe her “American carnage” riff and lies about the border? Now it’s up to us normal people to take our country back and restore sanity to our political processes. Double-check your voter registration, particularly if you live in a Red state, at vote.org.

— Russians are intervening in the election! The New York Times is reporting on a series of new “newspaper” sites that are popping up across America. With names like D.C. Weekly, the New York News Daily, the Chicago Chronicle and the Miami Chronicle, Russian disinformation experts have put up what are pretending to be American newspapers. They steal content from local papers and national news sites like Reuters, then toss in the occasional pro-Putin, anti-Ukraine, anti-Democrat articles. So far, there’s been no response from our government to this blatant attempt to influence the 2024 election by misleading American voters, and doing anything may be difficult as they’re hosted on Russian servers and outside the reach of US law. Putin was deeply involved in the 2016 election on behalf of Trump — to the point that Robert Mueller indicted nearly two dozen Russians for election interference — and they tried again with a major social media presence in 2020. With Ukraine in the balance (and Medvedev saying last week that they would be taking part of Poland next) expect Moscow to be vigorous in their efforts to get their agent, Trump, back into the White House.

— When there’s money to be made, Republicans don’t care how many people die. According to the EPA and the CDC, tiny particles of pollution produced by burning fossil fuels cause an estimated 4,500 premature deaths every year in America, as well as sickening so many people that at least 290,000 workdays are lost. The cost to America from all this pollution-caused disease is estimated at $46 billion a year. To do something about this, the EPA just rolled out a new rule that would require smokestacks and tailpipes to reduce particles as small as 2.5 microns by 2032. So, of course, 24 Republican state attorneys general sued the EPA to block the rule. It doesn’t get more cynical and disgusting that this.

— Republicans are helping Mexicans smuggle fentanyl into the United States. This should probably surprise nobody, but Republican refusal to approve the budget for Customs and Border Patrol is preventing them from installing millions of dollars worth of new scanning equipment to detect fentanyl being smuggled through US ports of entry. The result is that the fentanyl crisis continues to kill Americans every day. When will the GOP begin to put the interests of the American people above their billionaire paymasters who don’t want government programs funded because they fear their taxes going up?

— It was disgusting enough when Tommy Tuberville kneecapped our military because he wanted raped service members to be forced to carry their fetuses to term, but now a Republican senator is blocking an Air Force colonel’s promotion to brigadier general because in 2020 he wrote an op-ed for Stars and Stripes asking his “fellow white colonels” to engage in conversations about racism. That’s right: Missouri Republican Senator Eric Schmitt is outraged that an Air Force colonel might argue that racism is a bad thing. Or maybe it’s that Schmitt is offended that the colonel is in a biracial marriage. In either case, once again Republicans show their true colors and it’s disgusting.

— Hunter in a Farmer’s Alert! ADHD: Study the Lives of Other Unique People When I was around ten years old, my mom gave me a biography of Thomas Edison. He’d been thrown out of school because, his teacher said, he was “slow” and didn’t “pay attention in class”:

ADHD: Study the Lives of Other Unique People

—Crazy Alert! Hannity says President Biden was too “jacked up” at his State of the Union speech. Apparently the hate-mongers over at Fox “News” were shocked when