Sat: How Does Flori-Dumb Defend the Indefensible? With Lies

It Must Have Been a Big Explosion to Close the Bridge 100 Miles Away

A drone attack on an ammunition depot in Crimea has led to civilian evacuations and disrupted transport, Russian authorities have said.

Sergei Aksyonov, the Russian-installed governor of occupied Crimea, said Ukraine was behind the attack, without providing evidence.

Mr Aksyonov said local residents living within five kilometres of the blast were being evacuated.

Rail services across the Kerch bridge have also reportedly been halted.

Earlier on Saturday, Russian authorities stopped traffic on the bridge, but then swiftly reopened it to cars.

A later update from the Moscow-installed government said road traffic was again halted until further notice.

Mr Aksyonov said infrastructure facilities in the Krasnogvardeysky district in Crimea were the target.

"According to preliminary data, there were no damages or casualties," Mr Aksyonov wrote on a Telegram post.

The BBC has not been able to independently verify the attack.

The district where the strike was reported is more than 160km (100 miles) from the Kerch bridge.

Texas Seems to Believe the Only Good Immigrant is a Dead Immigrant



The Department of Justice has weighed in on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's deadly border trap targeting migrants crossing the Rio Grande. In a Thursday letter to Abbott, the DOJ warned the state that it would be filing legal action to force Texas to remove the mid-river buoys wrapped in razor wire. While the department did not come right out and accuse Abbott and his fellow Republicans of being murderous, criminal monsters, it sure hinted at it.

“The State of Texas’s actions violate federal law, raise humanitarian concerns, present serious risks to public safety and the environment, and may interfere with the federal government’s ability to carry out its official duties,” the letter stated, citing a clause in the law that “prohibits the creation of any obstruction to the navigable capacity of waters of the United States, and further prohibits building any structure in such waters without authorization from the United States Army Corps of Engineers (“Corps”)," says the letter, which was obtained by CNN.

At issue is the design of the Republican-pushed border obstruction, which seems plainly intended to cause death.

A line of razor wire-wrapped buoys has been floated in the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass, Texas, a current hotspot for asylum-seekers seeking to cross the border to U.S. soil. Migrants who attempt to swim under the buoys may find themselves snagged on underwater netting anchored to the riverbed. Miles of razor wire have also been installed on the riverbank, "deterring" migrants from crossing but also blocking rescuers from reaching migrants injured by the river and its new traps.

The Justice Department issued its threat after two stories in the Houston Chronicle revealed claims that troopers were being ordered to "push small children" attempting to cross the river "back into the Rio Grande" and that Texas officials had installed razor wire blocking federal Border Patrol agents from parts of a site housing a makeshift riverside migrant processing center.

The Texas government's border trap would appear to be illegal in an entire array of ways. It violates a U.S.-Mexico treaty forbidding such constructions. It violates federal law by blocking a navigable river and by not receiving authorization from the Army Corps of Engineers for the plan. Submerged razor wire and razor wire that is now concealed by plants growing along the riverbank pose a deadly danger to federal agents patrolling the border and to agents and emergency responders attempting lifesaving rescues. The wire has blocked the Border Patrol from accessing many parts of the river at all. The wire poses an even greater risk to the public and the environment if, as is inevitable, flooding dislodges large segments of wire and sends it tumbling downriver to rest in tangles at the bottom of the river or in large snags on the shoreline.

And all of that is aside from the main issue, which is that the Texas government has installed miles of traps clearly intended to maim or kill migrants who risk crossing them. An unclimbable wall is one thing; tangles of razor wire installed to snag flesh and clothes on the surface or banks of a flowing river are certain to cause drownings, and there's no plausible argument to the contrary.

Texas Republicans may currently be swept up in one of their perennial orgies of xenophobic hysteria, but there are no situations in which it is considered acceptable to murder asylum-seekers simply because you don't want to deal with the paperwork to process them. It's a criminal act familiar to authoritarian or fascist states and considered a horrific crime everywhere else.

Who Will Be the Next Flavor of the Month?

Republican voters with a college degree and a built-in skepticism of Donald Trump were supposed to form the backbone of Ron DeSantis’ strategy to win the 2024 GOP presidential primary. Instead, they’re leaving his campaign in droves. A trio of Republican primary polls, including previously unpublished data obtained by McClatchyDC, show that Florida’s governor has suffered steep declines in support among GOP voters with at least a bachelor’s degree, an erosion that threatens to undermine his candidacy.

The Only Way to Use "Ethics" and "Marjorie Taylor Greene" in the Same Sentence

Hunter Biden’s attorney Abbe David Lowell filed an ethics complaint against Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on Friday, just days after the right-wing congresswoman showed poster-sized nude images of the president’s son at a House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing.

Lowell, in the letter to the Office of Congressional Ethics, wrote that it previously contacted the office over Greene’s defamatory statements and “bizarre dissemination of conspiracy theories” toward Hunter Biden, adding that she “lowered herself and by extension the entire House ... to a new level of abhorrent behavior” with her actions at Wednesday’s hearing.

Greene displayed the sexually explicit images at a hearing where Internal Revenue Service whistleblowers made claims that the Justice Department interfered in an investigation into Hunter Biden’s taxes.

MVHA: Make Voting Hard Again

Florida Democrats say they’re spending and organizing to chase down people who vote by mail after election officials across the state canceled all standing mail ballot requests this year.

The mass cancellations were to comply with a 2021 election law that added new restrictions to mail-in voting. The legislation — which was celebrated by Gov. Ron DeSantis and slammed by voting rights advocates as discriminatory — cut the duration of mail-in ballot requests in half from four years to two. It also required that existing requests for mail ballots be canceled at the end of 2022, forcing election workers to cancel millions of requests and start their lists of vote-by-mail voters from scratch.

In practice, that means that voters who requested mail-in ballots in 2021 or 2022 will have to make such requests again to vote in local races and the 2024 primary and general elections. In previous years, voters would not have had to request a ballot again for four years.

Democrats in the state say the change disproportionately affects their voters, who have embraced mail-in voting more than Republicans since 2020, when then-President Donald Trump falsely claimed mail-in voting was rife with fraud. The new law is forcing campaigns to adapt; Democrats say they're organizing aggressively to educate voters about renewing their mail ballot requests, sapping resources from voter registration and other outreach efforts.

“It’s doing exactly what they intended it to do, which is suppress voters and take resources,” said Nikki Fried, chair of the state Democratic Party. “Instead of focusing our money, resources and time on other endeavors and talking to voters, we’re having to spend resources to get people back on the rolls.”