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Fulfilling the first step of putting all of Eastern Europe under the Kremlin’s control like it’s 1939, Russian President Vladimir Putin officially proclaimed Russian has illegally annexed four Ukrainian districts that conducted a sham referendum earlier this week, the Washington Post reports.

Putin declared the regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in eastern Ukraine to now be a part of Russia, although the regions are not under Russian military control as Ukraine stages a punishing counteroffensive and retakes territory.  Only a handful of the world’s nation–like Turkmenistan, Belarus and likely Saudi Arabia–with recognize Russian claims to the territory.

In a list of grievances that would make a Republican proud, Putin took the opportunity to blame “Anglo-Saxons” for the explosions that damaged the Nord Stream II pipeline this week, a move that injected tons of methane into the air and water causing an environmental catastrophe.

Yeah we’re going to preface this article with another insufferable “self-affirmation” of our dedication to not covering what we subjectively deem to be extraneous bullshit: We liked and respected Queen Elizabeth, she was an exemplary leader and we will again express our deepest condolences to the British Commonwealth people on their loss. That said, we’re Americans, she wasn’t our queen, we were proud to not join the MSM’s fucking wall-to-wall coverage of her funeral and her son’s accession and then the goddamned death certificate revealing that she died of old age. Like wow, holy shit, a 96 year old woman died of old age. Next you’re going to tell us a woman whose number one hit song was about not going to rehab died of alcohol poisoning.

That said, earlier this month we pledged we would cover anything related to Elizabeth’s death we deemed to have actual political significance (or at least was entertaining) and damned if this new report in the Daily Beast doesn’t hold up to that standard: A friend of the Queen says they believe she purposely stayed in Scotland when she knew the end was near in order to save the union amid Kilt Country’s ongoing agitation for independence from the United Kingdom.

“She was frail and there was an argument that she should be back in Windsor where it is significantly easier to get hospital treatment,” said the unnamed friend. “Of course she had access to medics at Balmoral, but nothing like at Windsor. Balmoral is very isolated, but that is where she wanted to be, precisely because she thought the end might be near. She planned to die in Scotland to save the union.” Others are not so sure, especially given the Scottish National Party’s semi-firm commitment to remaining a realm of the Commonwealth in the event of independence, but it sure was a hell of shrewd move if Elizabeth did it on purpose. There’s definitely some kind of chess metaphor in there that we’re not bold enough to attempt because we’ve never played the game.

The leader of the Kremlin-puppet Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine complained Friday that Kyiv’s offensive against the Russian stronghold of Lyman in his pseudo-state is ruining the special occasion of his submission to Putin, Reuters reports. “[The villages of Yampil and Drobysheve] are no longer fully controlled by us,” and “the Ukrainian army is trying with all its might to blacken this historic event for us,” Donetsk People’s Republic leader Denis Pushlin wrote on Telegram.

Pushlin’s disappointment kind of calls into question what was the whole fucking point of even having a fake “People’s Republic” in the first place. If the aim was self-determination and independence against the evil machinations of the “Nazis” in Kyiv then why was he so excited to submit himself and his people to a new master even further away? We all know it was a complete sham, of course, but authoritarians didn’t always used to be this blatantly transparent, did they?

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman writes in her upcoming book that the Orange God Emperor had threatened to go after her phone records in order to find out who was leaking to her.

Besides himself, of course. “Trump, angry about my published stories, would bellow that he wanted administration officials to obtain my phone records and identify my sources,” Haberman wrote, according to yet another preview of “Confidence Man” in Axios.

A now-former Texas prison warden and his brother have been arrested for shooting into a group of migrants at a roadside water station, killing one and wounding another, ABC News reports.

Mike Sheppard, a former warden at the West Texas Detention Center in Sierra Blanca, and his brother Mark were arrested after the shooting in a rural county outside El Paso.  Reportedly, the pair were in a pickup that approached a group of migrants and opened fire randomly into the crowd.  A man was killed and a woman wounded.

ABC News called the West Texas Detention Center to confirm Mike Sheppard’s employment, and a person at the prison said Sheppard had been terminated “due to an off-duty incident unrelated to his employment.”

Hurricane Ian’s winds regained strength after departing Florida and heading north along the East Coast, heading toward a third landfall somewhere around Charleston, South Carolina Friday afternoon, CBS News reports.

Officials in the Charleston area are preparing for rainfall of up to twelve inches and significant storm surge in the Low Country.  The impact of the storm could reach as far south as Florida and as far north as the Delmarva Peninsula.

In Florida, more than 2.6 million people are still without power, and officials warn people that if they cannot get to safe ground or a shelter, to stay in their homes until they can be rescued because alligators and snakes are traveling the floodwaters into neighborhoods.  USA Today reports that at least fourteen people have been confirmed killed in Florida during the storm.

Host Trevor Noah announced during The Daily Show’s Thursday taping that he was leaving the show after a seven-year run, Variety reports.  The date of his departure was not disclosed.

A South African native who related his parents’ mixed-race marriage was illegal when he was born, Noah was a relative unknown when he took over the show after a dominating 17-year tenure by Jon Stewart.

The number of Americans who say they trust the Supreme Court fell 20 percentage points in the last two years, with only 47% saying they have a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust in the Supreme Court, USA Today reports.

The percentage of Americans who trusted the Court dropped by 13 percentage points in 2021, after Donald Trump and Senate then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pushed through the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett while voters were casting their ballots in the 2020 election.  In 2016, McConnell refused to recognize a SCOTUS nomination made by Barack Obama, saving the seat for the winner of the 2016 election because, McConnell claimed without merit, voters should decide the seat, which sat vacant for more than a year.

The poll also shows the public’s disapproval of the Court’s work, with only 40% stating they approved, down 18 percentage points from 2020.  Unsurprisingly, Republicans disproportionately supported the conservative-stacked Court.

Seven women and nine men were selected for the jury in the trial of Stewart Rhodes and four other members of the far-right nationalist paramilitary group the Oath Keepers facing charges of seditious conspiracy for their role in planning and executing an attack on the Capitol on January 6th, Reuters reports.

The jury, pulled from the voting registration rolls of Washington, DC, including people who work for the Departments of State and Homeland Security, as well as people who work in healthcare, a youth center worker and a government contractor.  Twelve members will make up the jury while the other will serve in reserve.  Opening arguments are expected on Monday.

Rhodes, Kelly Meggs, Thomas Caldwell, Jessica Watkins and Kenneth Harrelson also face charges of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and obstructing an official proceeding, charges which themselves carry a maximum 20 year prison sentence.

Two former senior executives at online retailer eBay were sentenced to jail for a sustained harassment and cyberstalking campaign against a Massachusetts couple who published a newsletter about e-commerce because eBay executives felt the newsletter disparaged the company, CNN reports.

The former senior director of safety and security Jim Baugh and former director of global resiliency David Harville were sentenced to 57 and 24 months in prison, respectively for the campaign, which directed eBay employees send David and Ina Steiner harassing emails and angry tweets, and to ship them a series of bizarre packages containing things like a bloody Halloween pig mask, a book on surviving the death of a spouse, and boxes of cockroaches.

Baugh, a former CIA employee, and Harville took to heart a message from then-eBay CEO Devin Wenig, who messaged another executive at the company that it was time to “take her [Ina Steiner] down” after the couple’s newsletter published something considering insulting and damaging to the company.  Wenig is not charged as part of the scheme and denies any knowledge of it.

A federal judge in Southern Indiana has tossed out a lawsuit brought by an Indiana man working for a libertarian think tank claiming that President Joe Biden’s plan to cancel up to $20,000 in federal student debt per loan holder violates the law.

Pacific Institute attorney Frank Garrison claimed that the forgiveness of his debt–he’s on Year 6 of a 10-year student loan payment plan, and the Biden loan forgiveness would erase his debt–would burden him because his home state, Indiana, taxes loan forgiveness as income, which would, Garrison claims, cause him irreparable harm because he would have to pay tax.  So because he would be inconvenienced to pay additional taxes, Garrison wanted the entire program scrapped.  (Curiously, on the Pacific Institute website, the rationale for the lawsuit is very different:  various claims that Biden and the Department of Ed don’t have authority to cancel the debt because something something Joe Biden declared the pandemic over and that the order referred to the wrong Act and it limits my personal liberties to not make me pay government-backed debt.

Judge Richard Young, a Clinton appointee, ruled that Garrison could not show an irreparable harm by the forgiveness of his debt because the Department has given loan holders the option to carry on paying their debt and opt out of the loan forgiveness program.

Political strategist predicts Trump-Clinton rematch in 2024 | Just The News https://t.co/ggW3rGdIv7

— John Solomon (@jsolomonReports) September 29, 2022

Federal Judge Alieen Cannon has again ruled in favor of her client, disgraced former President Trump, helping him escape from having to submit an affidavit on whether he agrees or disagrees with the FBI’s list of items seized from Mar-a-Lago just before Special Master Raymond Dearie’s deadline of Friday for the fat bastard’s legal team to “put up or shut up” once and for all in court on his assertion that the FBI planted evidence. She really came through for the Donald on this one.

“There shall be no separate requirement on Plaintiff at this stage, prior to the review of any of the Seized Materials, to lodge ex ante final objections to the accuracy of Defendant’s Inventory, its descriptions, or its contents. The Court’s Appointment Order did not contemplate that obligation; Defendant since has complied with the requirement to attest to its now-revised inventory; and the parties and the Special Master now are situated to proceed forward with the review process pending exchange of the actual materials. Should any additional matters surface during the Special Master’s review process that require reconsideration of the Inventory or the need to object to its contents, the parties shall make those matters known to the Special Master for appropriate resolution and recommendation to this Court,” Cannon wrote.

For all the Republican hype about a “good guy with a gun” and how more guns make people safer, somehow the guy in MacGregor, Texas shot and killed five people before being shot and taken into custody by police, KWTX CBS-10 in Waco reports.

Police responded to a call reporting a man had shot his wife and two children.  Upon arriving on the scene, they found the body of another woman lying in the street and a second body was found in a nearby home.

The site of murders is located two blocks away from a campus for the McGregory elementary and high schools, so the schools went on lock-down for around 15 minutes as police secured the area.

The company that produces paid rallies and events featuring appearances by Donald Trump reportedly hasn’t paid speakers, vendors and employees, according to the Washington Post, adding another victim to the “Everything Trump Touches Dies” roster.

The American Freedom Tour has canceled most upcoming paid events featuring Donald Trump because it’s been unable to secure venues and speakers are backing out of commitments because they haven’t been paid.  Some of the other speakers at the shows have been Candace Owens and screech owl Kimberly Giulfoyle.

Two top executives have left AFT, a Florida-based company that entered into an agreement with Trump to produce events after he left the White House.  According to sources, Trump made sure he got paid first so he is not at risk, but other speakers have not gotten checks for appearances. 

The Senate has passed a continuing resolution funding the federal government until December 16th when some other shitshow last minute thing will happen too, the Washington Post reports.

The US Department of Justice has indicted Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire and ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin who is subject to sanctions for Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014, for violating the sanctions to utilize US financial services, Reuters reports.

The DOJ alleges Deripaska sold a California music studio in 2019 for $3.1 million, using a naturalized Russian who lives in New Jersey named Olga Shriki, who is also charged in the case, to front the operation.  Shriki and another defendant, Natalia Bardakova, arranged for Deripaska’s lover, Ekaterina Voronina, to travel to the US in 2020 and earlier this year to give birth to two children fathered by Deripaska so the children could have US citizenship.

Following a briefing with FEMA officials on Hurricane Ian’s impact on Florida, President Biden gave brief remarks Thursday, warning the storm could be “deadliest in Florida’s history,” CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reports. This would be really fucking bad if true, given that the 1928 Lake Okeechobee Hurricane killed as many as 2,500 people in Florida. For that many people to die in a natural disaster in the 21st century, one they clearly saw coming at them for days is horrific. We should all pray that Ron DeSantis was right about something for once when he downplayed the potential death toll.

Two pro-Russian traitors were hit with a federal indictment to provide Russia with intel on American Army officers’ personal medical information and on training provided to Ukrainian military medical personnel by the US military, the Baltimore Banner reports. Johns Hopkins anesthesiologist Anna Gabrielian and her husband, Army Major Doctor Jamie Lee Henry met with an undercover law enforcement agent posing as a Kremlin goon in a Baltimore hotel room last month thinking the agent was working for the Kremlin, with Gabrielan telling the agent “she was motivated by patriotism toward Russia to provide any assistance she could to Russia.”

“My point of view is until the United States actually declares war against Russia, I’m able to help as much as I want,” Henry told the agent, according to the indictment. In another meeting a week later, Gabrielian was heard telling Henry he was a coward for worrying about violating HIPAA.

The Republican attorneys general of Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, South Carolina, and Arkansas plus the Republican governor of Iowa (their attorney general is a Dem) on Thursday will file a lawsuit against the Biden Administration over the student debt relief program, arguing that their state budgets will suffer a loss of revenue from the action, the Associated Press reports.

It’s not clear why these dumbasses think this is a good idea politically. Yeah, they’re probably insulated from any direct electoral consequences, but they’re forcing other Republican candidates to have to explain why their party is putting themselves in between Americans who could use some relief from crushing educational debt in the middle of a hotly contested midterm campaign.