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With billions in property damage from the last hurricane alone, Florida’s property insurers were screwed, but it was just the latest blow to an industry that has survived primarily because they get bailed out by the government after every natural disaster–and from hurricanes to sinkholes to conservatives in The Villages setting things on fire–there’s a lot in Florida that needs covering.

But according to Politico, Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is going to bring the state’s legislature into a special session to fix the industry, which if it follows the way Republicans have fixed things in the past, it’s fucked.  “It costs way more to replace a roof today than it did just three years ago,” DeSantis said in a statement apropos of nothing. “So we need to do everything we can to push back on that and fight for a more competitive market where rates are incentivized to go down.”

The bigger problems for Florida property insurers are pretty obvious to anyone who isn’t a conservative:  Florida is a low-lying, flat state that was once swampland surrounded by water as hurricanes are becoming more powerful and water levels are rising due to climate change.  Add to that crappy building codes put in place by Republican-led state and county governments and you’re looking at year after year of massive claims that only the might of the federal government could cover.  For the industry to survive in Florida, it needs to increase its rates to the point that most people couldn’t afford to live there, but because DeSantis is a self-serving Republican, he’ll promote a tax break for everyone as a way to cover the fact that he’s relying on the socialist payouts from the government to do what the private sector cannot.

After a voter reported feeling intimidated by a crowd of self-appointed election box monitors determined to find evidence of non-existent vote theft, Arizona officials filed reports with state and federal officials, the Washington Post reports.

The voter, who was not identified, described being stalked after dropping a ballot off at a designated drop box.  The voter made a complaint on the Arizona secretary of state’s website, saying “There’s a group of people hanging out near the ballot dropbox filming and photographing my wife and I as we approached the dropbox and accusing us of being a mule.  They took … photographs of our license plate and of us and then followed us out the parking lot in one of their cars continuing to film.”

Voter intimidation is barred by Arizona state law and the federal law, including various aspects of the Voting Rights Act.  Such intimidation is expected to increase as Donald Trump and his political mobsters insist that the 2020 election was stolen from him and handed to President Joe Biden.  Trump and his minions claim a number of crazy conspiracies, including a claim that China printed millions of ballots that people are dropping off at ballot boxes.  This defies logic on its face:  distributed mail-in ballots are tracked and numbered, and they are sent only to addresses of registered voters. 

Consumers feeling the squeeze of inflation, high gas prices, wokeness, and squeezing are going to vote Republican to feel less squeezed and there’s nothing you can do about it, the mainstream media reports. There is no hope for Democrats to hold on to the House, the Senate, over a dozen state governorships, offices, and legislatures. Polls show somewhere between a 100% and a 100% lead for Republicans in every single race. The summer surge of hope that Dems felt was just a mirage. “QAnon defeats libs, lol,” said Axios’s Josh Kraushaar as he fondled himself and drooled.

Lee Zeldin is going to be governor of New York because of crime. Democrats are soft on crime. That’s why they’re going to lose, they never took crime seriously enough. And the fundraising too, they never raised enough money for these swing seats and to protect these safe blue seats and then there’s not enough messaging either. Independent voters aren’t getting the message. Messaging is really important on kitchen tables. Kitchen table politics are a big deal, even though “kitchen table” is just a metaphor for personal finance and household expenses.

Fluoride conspiracy freak and Richmond, Vermont town water superintendent Kendall Chamberlin resigned this week after the asshole recently copped to secretly lowering the addition of the chemical to the municipal water supply for the last several years out of belief it was some kind of Chinese plot against Americans – something he still believes, local blog VTDigger reports.

“I owed it to the customers of the Richmond Water System to make my position clear,” Chamberlain told VTDigger on Wednesday. “I understand there are different opinions, and some of them are strongly held. I do not want to get dragged into a public debate about this.”

Last year Anchorage, Alaska Mayor Dave Bronson, also a complete MAGA dipshit, was caught attempting to force a shutoff of fluoride to the city’s water supply, but quickly backed off. Drinking water fluoridation is to paranoid right wing conspiracy theories what “Stairway to Heaven” is to hard rock. Sometimes it’s important for the old guard to bring back the classics and expose them to a new generation of young pups raised on insipid, manufactured pop hits like “Biden is a cyborg,” “COVID vaccines turn you into a cyborg,” and “the Chinese thermostats hacked the 2020 election”.

The would-be first-ever Confederate-themed superhero movie “Rebel’s Run” has gone to shit as $1 million of the movie’s financing crowdfunded from backers has disappeared in China and the banker who was supposed to help get it made faces a federal indictment, the Daily Beast reports. “I wouldn’t count on us getting the money back,” MAGA blogger and Rebel’s Run creator Theodore Beale told investors and fans in a video last week. Stupid story short, Beale dumped all of the money with Utah-based Ohana Capital Financial, which billed itself as “banking [to] the unbankable.” Ohana’s founder, James Wolfgramm went ahead and pissed all of that money away to pay off a $4 million debt to another client in a Chinese medical equipment racket.

“I strongly suspect that this whole thing was a targeted operation intended to break our community,” Beale told his fans because that’s always the real reason and it could never ever be that he’s the one who fucked up and trusted a scam artist without doing his due diligence.

“A former U.S. Congressional candidate was sentenced today to 30 months in prison for his scheme to use COVID-19 relief funds for personal expenditures and filing a false report with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) by concealing thousands of dollars of in-kind contributions by employees. Nicholas Jones, 36, of Boise, Idaho, pleaded guilty to wire fraud and falsification of records on June 1. In addition to the prison sentence, Jones was also ordered to pay a $100,000 fine and $90,564.84 in restitution. According to court documents, Jones was a small business owner who applied for and received $753,600 in COVID-19 relief funds, primarily from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program.”

“Despite certifying that the funds would only be used for business-related expenditures, Jones used a significant portion of these funds for personal expenses, including car payments, life insurance policies, and political advertisements. According to court documents, in 2020, Jones ran as a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives and told employees of his small business that they could continue to be paid their normal wages if they worked on his congressional campaign. Employees reported to work on behalf of Jones’s congressional campaign and were paid thousands of dollars in wages through Jones’s small business including, in part, with funds Jones had received as part of a PPP loan. After losing the primary election, Jones caused his campaign committee to file a campaign finance report with the FEC that omitted any in-kind contributions from any entity or individual other than Jones, including the thousands of dollars of in-kind contributions to his campaign in the form of employee time and work,” says a Justice Department press release. Jones co-founded a fast food chain called “Good Burger” which we guess is named after the 1990s Nickelodeon skit and movie starring Kenan Thompson and Kel Mitchell. Kind of lame.

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump
Who’s this Clinton appointed “Judge,” David Carter, who keeps saying, and sending to all, very nasty, wrong, and ill informed statements about me on rulings, or a case (whatever!), currently going on in California, that I know nothing about – nor am I represented. With that being said, please explain to this partisan hack that the Presidential Election of 2020 was Rigged and Stolen. Also, he shouldn’t be making statements about me until he understands the facts, which he doesn’t!

1,904 6,275 Oct 20, 2022, 10:05

Donald is correct when he says he’s not being represented in this case in which fascist coup attempt lawyer John Eastman sued the House January 6th Select Committee to hide the emails they sought in a subpoena. But that’s on him as it’s been going on since January 2022 and he could at any point have at least tried to join as a plaintiff alongside Eastman. Sucks for him.

The Department of Justice has told Congress they need more funding to track down and prosecute the hundreds of MAGA insurrectionists who have been identified by online volunteers but have yet to be arrested, NBC News reports. More than 870 of the rioters have been arrested and charged since the failed coup attempt, but that represents only a fraction of the thousands estimated to have entered restricted Capitol grounds during the attack, and the DOJ estimates it needs at least $34 million to pay for more attorneys to process the workload. The window for securing more funding would probably be closed with a House GOP majority taking over in January, so it’s on Democrats to get it done before the end of the year by attaching it to the annual spending bill.

Election data eggheads TargetSmart have modeled the numbers for early and absentee vote turnout by party and determined that, as of Wednesday afternoon, 55.7% of early ballots nationally have been cast by Dems, 33.5% by Republicans, and 10.8% by unaffiliated voters. On their dashboard they compare this to the same point two years ago, showing that 20 days before the election 54.5% of early votes by Dems, 34% by Republicans, and 11.5% by unaffiliateds.

TargetSmart CEO Tom Bonier offered some tips on how to use the data, writing “The early vote is going to give us a decent indication of Dem enthusiasm (though not entirely, more on that soon) but not so much on GOP enthusiasm, since they are much more likely to vote on [election day]. The comparison to previous cycles is important and very imperfect. Almost every state has significantly expanded early voting access since ’18 and many have since limited access somewhat since ’20. So neither is a perfect point of reference… We have breakdowns by party registration and modeled partisanship. Party reg isn’t available in every state. We model party everywhere, but it is a model of self party ID, NOT a prediction of candidate preference. And comparing party models across years is difficult,” among other important caveats to think about when injecting hopium.

“Perhaps my most important note – these are not projections of outcomes or candidate vote totals. This is turnout data in the context of prior elections. We hope this will enhance your understanding of the electorate, but please take it in context,” Bonier concluded.

UK Prime Minister Liz Truss has resigned after just 45 days in office. The most remarkable part of her tenure besides the economic clusterfuck she exacerbated is that the other leader of the United Kingdom named Liz died after a much, much, much longer time at the helm.

The UK’s political clusterfuck continued Thursday as members of the “1922 Committee,” a group of Conservative MPs, told embattled Prime Minister Liz Truss she has hours left to figure out how to save her job before they move forward with a vote of no confidence in her leadership, CNN reports.

Journalist James Smartwood from upstart cable news network TOTN, or “Tooning Out the News,” actually got Herschel Walker of Texas, the GOP’s Senate candidate for Georgia’s seat, on the phone to assist him in investigating his stolen laptop, taken from his car the night before.  Walker says, “We’ll report your thing and all that stuff.” Smartwood, a real journalist in the same way Tucker Carlson is a real human being, gets the wannabe Senator to fire up a new episode of Walker, Texas Faker in the search for the missing item.  And yes, the Daily Beast confirmed that Walker himself did take the call.

Among 59 pages of text messages from former Senator Kelly “Left Eye” Loeffler’s obtained God knows how by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution are pleas from asshole Senator Ted Cruz and unfaithful wife Marjorie Taylor Greene trying to get Loeffler to object to Georgia’s electoral votes for Biden on January 6th, 2021. Another lowlight features Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s wife Tricia telling Left Eye “I hold you personally responsible for anything that happens to any of my family, from my husband, children and grandchildren,” after Loeffler and former Senator David “Chickenshit” Perdue publicly called on Brad to resign in the days after the 2020 election.

The House January 6th Select Committee have yet to formally deliver their subpoena to disgraced former President Trump as they haven’t been able to find one of his lawyers willing and authorized to accept service of the subpoena, ABC News reports. The fat bastard and his idiot son Eric had managed for weeks to avoid being served in New York Attorney General Leticia James’s $250 million lawsuit against them until servers finally caught up with them this week.

The Sean Hannity Telethon for Needy Multimillionaires finds us today in York, Pennsylvania, a town I spent a week in one afternoon, known for the York Peppermint Patty, York Barbells and little else.  But dog killing New Jerseyan Mehmet Oz, the GOP nominee for the Pennsylvania Senate seat, is trailing in the polls and Trump advisor Hannity needs to donate his hour of Fox airtime to Oz’s campaign.

Democratic Pennsylvania Senate nominee John Fetterman, the only Pennsylvanian in the race, released a letter from his personal doctor declaring, “He has no work restrictions and can work full duty in public office,” CBS News reports.

Dr. Clifford Chen of UPMC said Fetterman still has some effects of a stroke he suffered five months ago, but is overall healthy.  Fetterman uses a speech-to-text device at times due to an auditory processing difficulty, common among stroke patients, which short-circuits the brain’s processing of words.

“He spoke intelligently without cognitive deficits,” Chen wrote. “His speech was normal and he continues to exhibit symptoms of an auditory processing disorder which can come across as hearing difficulty. Occasional words he will ‘miss’ which seems like he doesn’t hear the word but it is actually not processed properly. His hearing of sound such as music is not affected.”

After the Fox graphics department apparently lost Georgia, it feels almost too cheap to note they misspelled the ethnicity of the people they claim to support, the Rwandans.  But the bigger issue is, how far down the fucking rabbit hole is Fox going to let Tucker Carlson go in his obvious race-baiting?  Seriously, if you want to start a race war, try to figure out spell-check first, ‘kay?

The Home Secretary in UK Prime Minister Liz Truss’s Cabinet resigned Wednesday after it was disclosed she sent a classified document to a member of Parliament using her personal email account–apparently safeguarding national secrets is still a thing in Britain–marking the second major departure from Truss’s new administration, the New York Times reports.

Truss addressed the issue at Wednesday’s prime minister’s questions in Parliament, during which Members taunted Truss with demands for her resignation.  “I’m a fighter and not a quitter,” Truss responded.

Suella Braverman, the former Home Secretary (equivalent to the Attorney General and DHS Secretary rolled into one), wrote in her resignation letter, “I have made a mistake; I accept responsibility; I resign,” an apparent reference to the earlier firing of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who implemented a harsh economic plan that sent the pound falling and rattled financial markets.

“Just hopin’ to clarify for midterm voters’ top domestic issue,” poster child for nepotism Peter Doocy drones.  “Inflation or abortion?”

“All important,” President Joe Biden asserts.  “Unlike you, there’s no ‘one thing.’ It crosses the board.  Domestic–  Ask me about foreign policy, too.  There’s multiple, multiple, multiple issues, and they’re all important.  And we ought to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.”

CNN reports that Donald Trump is considering allowing federal investigators to conduct a search of Mar-a-Lago to close the book on if more government documents–particularly classified documents–are stored illegally there.

The Department of Justice and the National Archives and Records Administration have stated in letters and in court filings that they believe Trump holds additional government documents although his lawyers have submitted sworn statements that they know of no documents at the overvalued Florida supper club where Trump sometimes sleeps.

Trump has claimed at various times that he’s given all the documents back (he didn’t); that he had an absolute right to possess the documents (he doesn’t); that all the documents were declassified (they weren’t); and that the FBI planted all the documents it recovered (it didn’t).