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Russian dictator Vladimir Putin on Wednesday announced a partial call-up of troops to action in Ukraine, a risky move that will certainly prove to be pretty unpopular, the Associated Press reports.

For the fifth consecutive day, women across Iran are demonstrating in the streets by burning their headscarves after a 22-year-old woman from Kurdistan died after allegedly being beaten by members of the country’s morality police for showing too much hair, the BBC reports.

Mahsa Amini died Friday after three days in a coma.  She had been taken into custody by members of Iran’s Gasht-e Ershad or “Guidance Patrol,” who examine women’s appearances to make sure their clothes are not too provocative or to determine if they’re wearing too much make-up.  Amini was detained earlier in the week because her head scarf did not cover enough of her hair.

Police allegedly beat Amini with batons and banged her against their police car as they were detaining her.  Authorities say that police treated Amini with respect and that she wasn’t abused, claiming that she had a heart attack while in prison.

Five members of the far-right white nationalist group America First, known as Groypers, were arrested by federal agents for their roles in the January 6th Republican-led domestic terrorist attack on Congress, the first known members of the group charged, NBC News reports.

Twenty-three-year-old Joseph Brody of Springfield, Virginia was charged with felony charges of assaulting, resisting or impeding law enforcement officers, causing bodily injury, interfering with a law enforcement officer during a civil disorder and obstruction of an official proceeding.  Brody allegedly entered Nancy Pelosi’s office during the attack.

The other four–Thomas Carey, 21, of Pittsburgh; Gabriel Chase, 22, of Gainesville, Florida; Jon Lizak, 21, of Cold Spring Harbor, New York; and Paul Ewald Lovley, 23, of Halethorpe, Maryland–face various misdemeanor charges.

Ah, to live in the certainty of ignorance that is Tucker Carlson’s world.  The prince of puerility now wants everyone to believe that we don’t know what happened during the Watergate scandal.  You remember the Watergate scandal, right:  when Republican Richard Nixon protected his Administration’s lackeys who authorized the break-in of Democratic campaign offices to obtain information that would help him win the election.  Nixon used the power of his office to direct Executive Branch agencies to cover up the break-in as well as the Administration’s involvement in it.  It cost him his presidency.

People will believe anything they read on the interwebs:  the Deep State has the bodies of aliens at a secret military base; burning jet fuel cannot weaken steel beams; Trump won the 2020 election.  All kinds of stupidity are propagated online and too many people believe them.

Add to the Tide Pods challenge the NyQuil Chicken Recipe.  A TikTok video purports a new poultry recipe, which includes frying the meat in NyQuil cold medicine.  Yeah, you read that right:  you’re supposed to deep fry your bird in blue cold medicine ’cause.. the internet never lies, lib!

Now, according to NBC News, the Food and Drug Administration has had to issue a warning because there are stupid people in the world:  Don’t deep fry your chicken in NyQuil.  Boiling NyQuil concentrates the medication and can alter how it reacts with a patient’s system.  Boiling concentrates the meds, making them hit harder, and obviously ruining the taste of the chicken. You don’t have to eat the chicken to be impacted:  simply breathing in the fumes from the boiling NyQuil can sicken people.

So for the people who need warning labels to remind them not to put forks in light sockets and not to use a toaster in the bathtub, add to the list the prohibition on using NyQuil as a frying medium.

Dems lead Republicans 48% to 44% on the generic congressional ballot question of the weekly Morning Consult poll, also finding Dems have an “enthusiasm edge” of 60% to 57% over the GOP.

Which probably means that the poll is fake, because the Democrats don’t have any boat parades. You never see a car covered in “DARK BRANDON” bumper stickers. Nobody owns a suit that looks like Biden’s infrastructure plan. People don’t camp out for days ahead of a Pelosi rally. No party has more enthusiasm than the one whose voters have literally murdered somewhere around 200 other Americans in politically motivated violence over the last five years. That’s the MAGA edge.

Trump’s remaining TeeVee lawyer Alina Habba–“remaining” now that his other TeeVee lawyer, Christina Bobb, has dropped out of sight after perhaps feloniously attesting that Donald Trump no longer had any classified or government documents at Mar-a-Lago–claims that the search of Trump’s Florida buffet club and fancy flophouse, Mar-a-Lago, was an “October surprise.”  The search warrant was executed in early August, nearly two months before October, but she looks good on television, which is why Trump hired the lawyer with her office down the street from his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club.

Habba, clad in what appears to be white overalls (after Labor Day!), made that claim on one of Trump’s lesser propaganda networks:  “Now the Department of Justice filed this crazy raid pretending it’s all these criminal actions because it’s around the corner to November and this is what we like to call an October surprise which we’ve seen before.”

“That’s not how this works, jackass. The burden of proof is on the FBI to prove they were classified in the first place. Sweet Jesus Trump really needs to fire some of his lawyers. Who the heck thought that this insane partisan hack was acceptable as special master????”

– The current top comment on the Gateway Pundit article “‘You Can’t Have Your Cake And Eat It’ – Special Master Raymond Dearie Blasts Trump’s Lawyers in Preliminary Conference,” on Tuesday.

The South Dakota Government Accountability Board, created in 2017 and comprised of three former or retired circuit court judges or state supreme court judges appointed by the governor, will not publicly announce its disciplinary measure levied on Republican Governor Kristi Noem for abusing her office to help her daughter get a state real estate appraiser’s license, the Associated Press reports.

After her daughter Kassidy Peters failed to meet the requirements for getting an appraiser’s license, Noem called the head of the state regulatory agency and the head of licensing to her office for a meeting, which Peters also attended, and pressured them to issue the license.  Later, the head of the licensing board, Sherry Bren, reported that she was pressured to retire at the urging of Noem.

Though the accountability board found Noem had likely engaged in a conflict of interest and malfeasance in using her office to push for her daughter to receive special treatment, they gave Noem the option of accepting “appropriate action,” thereby avoiding a public hearing and public disclosure of the consequences.  According to the lawyer for the Government Accountability Board, the issue has been closed.

The flight of Venezuelan migrants Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis planned to go to President Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware Tuesday never materialized amid mounting criticism of the political performance art that used unsuspecting migrants as pawns, USA Today reports.

According to FlightAware.com, an aircraft tracking app, Ultimate Air Shuttle 11 was originally scheduled to make a multi-leg trip from Longview, Texas, through Florida, to a community airport near Wilmington, Delaware, near Biden’s residence, before going on to Teterboro, New Jersey.  However, public outrage at using asylum seekers as props likely altered DeSantis’s intended stunt because his earlier charter fight, to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, was met with disgust and derision by Democrats and many conservatives.

Statements made in the filing of a class action lawsuit declare that many of the migrants were deceived to board the plane after being held in a hotel by a Texas airport for days while a DeSantis-hired coyote named Perla recruited passengers for the flight.  Although DeSantis claims the passengers–including families with children–boarded the flight voluntarily, it appears they were actually kidnapped by inveiglement via false promise.

The number people victimized by violent crime was at a statistical low for 2021, countering Republican campaign-year claims that violent crime is rampant in the United States, according to the 2021 National Crime Victimization Report, released Tuesday.  The calculated rate of 16.5 incidents per 1,000 residents was one-tenth point above from the 30-year low, hit in the pandemic year of 2020, with both sharing the same statistical margins.

Republican candidates and office holders, as well as figures like the titular head of the GOP, Donald Trump, have claimed violent crime is sweeping the country, but reality doesn’t match their rhetoric.  Apparently, the only violent crime Trump cares about is that which his followers commit, because they’re not violent criminals in his mind; they’re just tourists.

The court's request for support of the declassification was highly predictable and the absence of support at this stage is a striking. Even if Trump is claiming an oral order, they could have offered a declaration from Trump or a staff member on such an order.

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) September 20, 2022

The fourth largest iron ore producer in the world announced Tuesday it will spend $6.2 billion in five-year period starting in 2024 to become completely carbon neutral by 2028, with annual savings of $818 million starting in 2030, the Associated Press reports.

Fortescue Metals Group announced the plan to replace fossil fuel energy sources with renewable energy generators, which will produce 2- to 3-gigawatts for its operations.  It will also transition its fleet of cars and trucks to electric or alternative fuel vehicles, and it will also update equipment to alternative fuels if such versions are available.

The company plans on going “true net-zero emissions” for its operations, without the need to purchase carbon offsets regularly and incorporating them only when there’s an emergency.  The switch will keep 3.3 million tons of carbon, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases out of the environment annually. 

The Venezuelan migrants flown from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard on Tuesday filed a class action lawsuit against Florida dictator Ron DeSantis for his regime’s fuckery stranding them on the island.

“The individual Plaintiffs were harmed as a result of the Defendants’ intentional and unjustified confinement of them. The Plaintiffs’ participation in the federal immigration processes—to which they are constitutionally entitled – was impeded, as they were transported thousands of miles away from where they needed to continue immigration proceedings. Plaintiffs were not informed that they would be flown to an island off the coast of Massachusetts that can only be reached by plane or ferry. The first time that many of the putative class learned that their destination was Martha’s Vineyard was when they were in mid-air. When they arrived, they were not provided with any of the goods and services which they were promised by Defendants. They felt defrauded and tricked and were traumatized by the experience,” says the complaint seeking “compensatory, emotional distress, and punitive damages,” from the short and angry little bastard.

RT anchor tells Russians awaiting speech to go to bed.

After making media wait for over two hours past the scheduled start of a big press conference with his Defense Minister Sergei Shogyu on Tuesday, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has reportedly pushed it off until Wednesday. It’s not clear what specifically Putin had planned to address in the appearance that was to have been broadcast live on RT and other major national networks, though the planned collaborationist referendums to annex large swaths of Eastern Ukraine that were announced earlier Tuesday would’ve been safe bets. Some sources also hinted a declaration of a general mobilization something thus far which Putin has avoided, reportedly in fear of an uprising.

The Season 2 premiere of the smash hit House January 6th Select Committee hearings will be at 1:00 PM EDT next Wednesday, September 28th, 2022, per Luke Broadwater of the New York Times.

Mere minutes into their first hearing with Brooklyn Senior federal Judge Raymond Dearie, the special master shut down any chance he would, for his part at least, slow down the government’s criminal investigation into the theft of classified documents by disgraced former President Trump, dealing a serious blow to the overpriced lawyers whose job was to grind the gears of justice with frivolous claims of executive and/or attorney-client privilege over the material seized by the FBI during their August 9th raid on Mar-a-Lago, Law and Crime’s Adam Klasfeld reports.

“As far as I’m concerned, that’s the end of it,” said Dearie after declaring that the government had provided prima facie evidence of classification of the set of top secret documents recovered.

The Senate confirmed District Judge Florence Pan to take the seat on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit vacated by now Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, making Pan the first Chinese-American to sit on the influential Circuit Court, Reuters reports.

By a 52-42 votes, Pan moves up from the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, to which she was appointed by President Joe Biden in September 2021.  The 55-year-old Pan was originally appointed to the federal bench by Barack Obama in 2009.

Obama had originally nominated Pan to the US District Court in 2016, and her nomination made it out of the Republican-led Judiciary Committee, but was held up by then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who claimed lame duck presidents should not make judicial appointments, a position he dropped when a Republican was in the White House nominating a Supreme Court justice.

Editors’s Note:  An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated Pan would be the first Asian-American on the DC Circuit Court.  That was incorrect:  she is the first Chinese-American assigned to the court.

Full-time Trump minion and part-time right wing storybook author of the probably not-at-all-a-hit “The Plot Against The King” Kash Patel is back at it with a new sequel titled “The Plot Against The King: 2000 Mules.” Written in collaboration with fellow fascist Dinesh D’Souza, the book for children and is not to be confused with D’Souza’s similarly titled “2000 Mules,” which is for mental children.

“Kash Patel tells the fantastical story of how two inquisitive minds, Dinesh and Debbie, search for the truth and uncover evidence of a terrible scheme to elect Sleepy Joe instead of King Donald on Choosing Day. Come join Dinesh and Debbie as they try to answer some troubling questions: Why did the counting stop in the middle of the night? Why were there more votes than people in the Kingdom? And what is up with all the glowing poo?” says the promo page on publisher Brave Books.

At only $20, or $60 for a signed copy, it makes a great holiday gift if you hate your kids.