Strap in, it's Monday

A man was found dead inside a papier mache stegosaurus in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, Spain.  Police believe he crawled in to retrieve his phone and was unable to get out.  

I decided to start there because it is the only thing I read today that is not insane.

There was a passive-aggressive coup in Samoa today when Fiame Naomi Mata'afa arrived at Parliament to be sworn in and found it locked.  She eventually took the oath in a nearby tent.  The new PM and her Faith in the One True God party have pledged to cancel a port development deal worth a hundred million dollars to China.

Belarus became even more of a pariah when it scrambled a MiG fighter to intercept a Ryanair flight from Athens to Vilnius and force it to land in Minsk.  And all because the country's dictator Alexander Lukashenko is afraid of a 26-year-old blogger named Roman Protasevich, currently under arrest and charged with terrorism and "causing mass unrest."  There is no equivalent law in the US, but give the red states a couple of weeks.

Another journalist is in trouble with the thugs who run Myanmar.  Danny Fenster, the American editor of Frontier Myanmar, was "detained" while boarding a flight at Yangon airport.  By coincidence, video surfaced today of Trump at an April fundraiser sharing a good joke about reporters being roughed up in North Korea while covering his sleepover with Kim Jong-un.  "These were North Korean guards.  They didn't get pushed down," he noted admiringly.  

It's time to play "What Year Is This?"  Former NBA star Dominique Wilkins was refused service at Le Bilboquet restaurant in Buckhead, a suburb of Atlanta.  They say he violated the dress code, he says it was straight-up Jim Crow.

There were at least twelve mass shootings in the US this weekend.  To celebrate, Texas will soon allow people to carry handguns without a license, background check or training, a bill which is opposed by law enforcement groups and sane people.

Prosecutors say they were just about to seek an arrest warrant for defrocked priest Richard Lavigne in the 1972 murder of altar boy Danny Croteau of Springfield, Massachusetts.  Oops!  Lavigne died last week. 

Liz Cheney sees no connection between Trump's loss and the Republican scramble to make voting all but illegal.  I hate to say I told you so.  No, I don't.

"Can we all agree that Marjorie Taylor Green must be expelled from Congress?" Robert Reich tweeted today.  To which she retorted, "Don't know you but when I saw Berkley in your bio I got it."  Yes, the economist and former Secretary of Labor is clearly a "communist" and also misspelled her name, so she misspelled the California city where he went to college.  Look, does the Capitol have an attic where she could be confined?  With a "nurse" to make sure she doesn't escape and burn the place down?

Ivanka Trump must have been disoriented by Daddy's stolen election when she was deposed last December in the Stephanie Winston Wolkoff suit, because she just couldn't place Allen Weisselberg.  He has been chief financial officer of the Trump Organization since 2000.  Board member of the Trump "Foundation."  You remember, princess, the short man who gave you your allowance.

Anthony Sabatini is only a state representative in Florida but I see a bright future for this Republican.  Last week he tweeted, "If Socrates was out philosophizing in American society today, he would be cancelled real quick."  Because he did philosophy at the University of Florida, and whatever "cancelled" means, he's real against it.   

Joe Biden has earmarked an additional billion dollars for hurricane preparedness.  Who is this guy?