Political pranksters extrodinaire the Yes Men (previously) have printed a satirical edition of the Washington Post announcing that Donald Trump has abdicated and volunteers have fanned out across DC (where Trump is universally loathed) to distribute copies to all and sundry: you can follow their adventures at the #ByeBye45 hashtag.

In 2016, the Yes Men (previously), everyone's favorite political pranksters, hoaxed the NRA: today, they've released their short documentary, which lays bare the NRA's internal culture of racist-driven fear and gun-humping murderous fantasies.

At "Share the Safety," you can buy one of three Smith & Wesson guns, and the good folks at the NRA will send another one just like it to a lucky person in a low income, inner-city neighborhood, "law-abiding urbanites who will for the first time be able to defend themselves against those who prey on the urban poor." — Read the rest

"Quick question," I asked the newly-minted University of Iowa President Bruce Harreld during his job talk. "Are you a performance artist?" As I watched Harreld's lackluster presentation -- filled with the kind of empty business jargon often used by prankster-activists The Yes Men, who had just visited campus -- I wondered if it could possibly be real, if it was a put-on.

US Trade Ambassador Ron Kirk was in Dallas to kick off a corporate power-event to drum up support for the foundering, secretive Transpacific Partnership, a secret treaty that builds on the work of ACTA to establishing punishing copyright laws that include mandatory surveillance and censorship. — Read the rest

2600 Magazine's Emmanuel Goldstein writes, "One of the keynote addresses at this year's HOPE conference (July 13-15, NYC) will be given by The Yes Men. They're a natural fit at the biennial hacker conference which will be featuring highly technical along with socially relevant talks. — Read the rest

The group of merry populist pranksters The Yes Men have a Kickstarter going to raise funds for Occupy Wall Street Journal, "a four-page broadsheet about the 99% represented at Liberty Plaza." (NYO)

Prankster activists The Yes Men are sick of having the videos depicting their shenanigans taken down through copyright complaints, so they've put the latest video, a full-length doc called The Yes Men Fix the World up as a torrent file through VODO, resistant to censorship and easy to get. — Read the rest

Rebecca from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, "More news about the Yes Men and the Chamber of Commerce. BoingBoing reported on the lawsuit the Chamber filed over the activists' political criticism of the Chamber's stance on climate change and the Chamber's DMCA takedown attempt. — Read the rest

Mother Jones senior editor Michael Mechanic writes in with this update on the "Yes Men pwn the US Chamber of Commerce" story I blogged about last week, which Cory further updated here. Michael says,

Kate Sheppard [of Mother Jones] was at the fake US Chamber of Commerce press conference in DC where a Yes Man, posing as a Chamber rep, claimed the Chamber was reversing its draconian position on climate change, which has caused lots of big Chamber members — Apple, Nike, Exelon, and others — to quit the national business group.

Rebecca from EFF sez, "The Yes Men prank — they put out a press release and held a spoof news conference on Monday, claiming that the Chamber of Commerce had reversed its position and would stop lobbying against a climate bill currently in the Senate — apparently hasn't embarrassed the Chamber of Commerce enough yet. — Read the rest

The Yes Men strike again. Posing as members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, they held a press conference today to announce that the chamber would abandon its opposition to climate-change legislation now in Congress. Well, that would explain the sneaky spam press release I received this morning which pointed to "chamber-of-commerce.us" — Read the rest

In this week's Boing Boing TV update, we discuss what's ahead with the launch of BOING BOING: OFFWORLD, and we speak with the YES MEN about their EPIC STUNT last week in which they printed and distributed lots and lots of copies of a New York Times fantasy-edition, with the headline IRAQ WAR ENDS. — Read the rest

Master pranksters The Yes Men crashed the Gas and Oil Exposition 2007 in Calgary this week, impersonating a rep from the National Petroleum Council at a keynote in which they proposed to convert people who died from climate change disasters into fuel. — Read the rest

Kembrew says,

The Yes Men convinced the organizers of a major conference attended by contractors and government officials in charge of rebuilding N.O. that HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson would attend the conference. Once at the conference, Yes Man Andy Bichlbaum — posing as Rene Oswin, a fake HUD official — delivered a speech that asserted that HUD was wrong and that it would not actually demolish perfectly sound low income housing, as it was planning to do.

The Onion's AV Club has the trailer for a new documentary on legenday political pranksters The Yes Men, who pull stunts like impersonating officials with the WTO and show up at international trade conferences and propose a "market for human rights abuses" and "auctioning votes to the highest bidder." — Read the rest

Here is the Yes Men's commentary on their Textile Prank. Link Discuss (Thanks, Rod!)

A massive fraud scheme targeting Native Americans seeking addiction treatment has left Arizona officials chasing billions in stolen taxpayer dollars, with only 5% recovered so far, according to a new ProPublica investigation.

Between 2019 and 2023, fraudulent behavioral health providers and sober living homes exploited the American Indian Health Program, billing Medicaid for services never provided. — Read the rest

Like most of us, Donald Trump has created a curated media bubble around himself in which he never has to hear how normal people feel about him. And he's surrounded 24/7 by yes men and sycophants. Club members, ass kissers, and shameless suck ups.  — Read the rest

Life in plastic is fantastic, so they say. For the rest of us, however, made of decomposable organic compounds, we're left to live with the landfills piled high with all that fantastic plastic. So just in time for the Barbie movie, actress Daryl Hannah has launched a new Barbie line that will naturally return to the Earth just like the rest of us! — Read the rest