Warm-bordering-on-hot this late-afternoon Thursday here in California’s Central Valley, with deep, yellow sunshine adding to the sense of heat — summer’s coming way-soon and it’s going to be long and hard.

In the news, Republicans top the cycle again for being assholes and nasty-ass fuckers, emitting foul shit from leaning into The Big Lie to warrant ballot-box discrimination, to the wonders of assault rifles.
Hiding behind the Lie:

According to a new report by the Brennan Center for Justice, 361 bills to make it harder to vote have been introduced in 47 states in the first three months of this year, overwhelmingly by Republicans.
That’s up from 253 restrictive bills tallied as of February 19, an increase of 43 percent in just over a month.

“In a backlash to 2020’s historic voter turnout, and under the pretense of responding to baseless and racist allegations of voter fraud and election irregularities, state lawmakers have introduced a startling number of bills to curb the vote,” the report says.

While Matt Gaetz has turned into a self-perpetuating scandal system:

“Gaetz allegedly showed off to other lawmakers photos and videos of nude women he said he had slept with, the sources told CNN, including while on the House floor.” https://t.co/GniyGyg5hi

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 1, 2021

The scoop from CNN:

Gaetz allegedly showed off to other lawmakers photos and videos of nude women he said he had slept with, the sources told CNN, including while on the House floor. The sources, including two people directly shown the material, said Gaetz displayed the images of women on his phone and talked about having sex with them. One of the videos showed a naked woman with a hula hoop, according to one source.

“It was a point of pride,” one of the sources said of Gaetz.

There’s no indication these pictures are connected to the DOJ investigation.

Shit-stories on Gaetz are all over the InterWebs this afternoon:

• Billy Barr, whose DOJ started the investigation into Gaerz in the last months of T-Rump’s term, avoided the shitheel like the plague, found here.
• QAnon and Gaetz, found here. (Also here).
• DOJ looking into Gaetz’s antics outside Flordia, found here.
• DOJ also looking at Gaetz’s possibly misusing campaign funds, found here.
• Gaetz is a longtime nasty-ass douchebag, found here. (No wonder he loves the T-Rump).
• ‘Gaetzgate’ is now a thing, found here.

And for leverage, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe explained for depth:

Speaking to CNN last night, McCabe said: “It’s substantial and very serious. You know [after] 21 years of opening and overseeing, conducting investigations, I can tell you that nobody opens a sex trafficking investigation in which the subject is a sitting member of Congress without having a significant degree of information.”

“In any case, I can assure you the FBI doesn’t open these cases lightly, and don’t get briefed to the attorney general without some significant momentum behind them,” he later added.

When assholes go down, they seem to go down hard.
And to further showcase hardcase Republican pieces of shit — Lindsey Graham continued his Rambo dream:

In 1994, there was an Assault Weapons Ban – the evidence indicates that there was really no change at all in crime, because the crooks are going to get a gun!

Today at @PalmettoArmory I fired one of the weapons they are trying to ban. #2A pic.twitter.com/XI985BZ96F

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) April 1, 2021

The shithead is way-wrong, however, on that assault weapons ban, especially with mass shootings — Bill Clinton signed the law in 1994, and GW Bush let is expire 10 years later. Although a 2004 study for the Justice Department found the ban’s impact on gun violence was mixed, as most shooters used semiautomatic handguns, the real result of the ban wasn’t apparent until years later.
Mass shootings with automatic rifles increased after the ban was lifted — via The Washington Post last week:

Christopher S. Koper, an associate professor of criminology at George Mason University, was the author of the 2004 Justice Department study that found the law had minimal effect.
But in a 2020 study, Koper said evidence suggested that mass killings had increased after the federal ban on assault weapons expired.

Ironically, the ban may have been increasingly more effective toward the end of the 10-year period.
“The law’s significant exemptions ensured that its full effects would occur only gradually over time, and those effects were still unfolding at the time it expired,” Koper wrote, saying the law helped cap and then reduce the supply of assault weapons and large-capacity magazines.
…
Louis Klarevas, a research professor at Teachers College at Columbia University, studied high-fatality mass shootings (six or more people) for his 2016 book “Rampage Nation.”
He said that compared with the 10-year period before the ban, the number of gun massacres during the ban period fell by 37-percent and that the number of people dying because of mass shootings fell by 43-percent.
But after the ban lapsed in 2004, the numbers in the next 10-year period rose sharply — a 183-percent increase in mass shootings and a 239-percent increase in deaths.

Shit dog!
Who the fuck needs those fucking guns? Republican assholes…