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Demonstrations of public outrage against Israeli dictator Benjamin Netanyahu’s government failing to secure a peace deal with Hamas continued Monday following the deaths of six hostages abducted into Gaza during the horrific October 7th, 2023 attacks, with labor leaders calling for a general strike as crowds estimated to be 500,000 strong flooded the streets of major cities, Reuters reports.

“Hvaldimir,” the white Beluga whale suspected of being a Russian-trained spy mammal – on account of him being strapped with a camera-mounter harness that said “Equipment St Petersburg” in Cyrillic – has turned up dead in one of the Norwegian fjords he was known to frequent over the past five years or so, the Associated Press reports on a chainsaw gig for Robert F Kennedy Jr.

The 14-foot long whale – whose nickname was a clever portmanteau of hvald (“whale” in Norwegian) and Vladimir, for his boss, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin – was a beloved figure who enjoyed playing with locals despite his ostensible mission to spy on Norwegian civil and military infrastructure, known to follow people around and even respond to hand signals.

“Unfortunately, we found Hvaldimir floating in the sea. He has passed away but it’s not immediately clear what the cause of death is,” said marine biologist Sebastian Strand, who told local media he had examined the whale’s corpse and found no evidence of external injuries. Strand said he’d been following Hvaldimir’s movements for the past three years and was deeply affected by his death. “It’s absolutely horrible,” Strand said, adding that the whale had seemed happy and healthy. “He was apparently in good condition as of (Friday). We have to figure out what might have happened here.”

Germany’s far right extremist Alternative for Deutschland Party (AfD) made some serious gains in Sunday’s state elections, placing first in the eastern state of Thuringia with a third of the vote and grabbing a close second in neighboring Saxony, the BBC reports on the first state parliamentary win for a nationalist party in Germany since World War II. The victory in Thuringia is mostly symbolic however, as the other parties are very unlikely to want to work with the AfD and will form a coalition to shut them out of governance in the state. Obviously they can forget about it in Saxony too.

Still, the gains in the poorer, formerly communist east were a foreboding sign of AfD’s momentum going in the wrong direction for a country that prides itself on being a modern, plural democracy it infamously was not eight decades ago. “The AfD is damaging Germany. It is weakening the economy, dividing society and ruining our country’s reputation,” Chancellor Olaf Schultz said.

.⁦@KamalaHarris⁩ looking for 'escape hatch' to get out of @ABC debate against President ⁦@realDonaldTrump⁩

“[T]he Harris team's push to change the terms of the upcoming ABC debate and election integrity ahead of the November faceoff.” https://t.co/ThIm1jRn4a

— Jason Miller (@JasonMillerinDC) September 1, 2024

In a long, rambly interview with angry little man Mark Levin aired Sunday, angry obese man Donald Trump said “It’s so crazy that my poll numbers go up. Whoever heard – you get indicted for interfering with a presidential election where you have every right to do it – you get indicted and your poll numbers go up,” per CNN. Trump also told Levin that the way his 2024 opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, “treated Mike Pence was horrible,” referring to their 2020 Vice Presidential debate, even though it was Trump himself who kind of tried to get Pence killed a few months later.

A 62 year-old California man has filed a lawsuit against the Venetian Resort and Casino in Las Vegas alleging that the staff of the hotel knew the place had been infested with poisonous scorpions and failed to do anything about it before one of the vicious arachnids crawled into his room and stung him in the balls while he was asleep during his stay over Christmas 2023, resulting in ongoing post-traumatic stress and a decreased ability to function sexually after the attack, KLAS reports.

Scorpion balls sting victim Michael Farchi has retained a high-powered lawyer specializing in a similar field: “My Bed Bug Lawyer” Brian Virag, who told KLAS he “can also indicate, as you saw in the complaint, we’re also making a claim for loss of consortium for Mr Farchi’s wife,” before clarifying that “consortium” meant fucking. Farchi’s complaint alleges the Venetian had been aware of an “infestation of poisonous, deadly scorpions,” and the staff mocked him by grabbing their crotches after he told them what had happened to his loins. “It really doesn’t matter, so much, how [the scorpion] got there. The fact that it was there and they were on notice that there were prior issues of scorpions at the subject property that’s obviously the main point here,” said Virag.

Senator @TomCottonAR SHUTS DOWN the Fake News Arlington hoax: "He didn't take campaign photos there. These families — Gold Star families — whose children died due to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris's incompetence, invited him to the cemetery, and they asked him to take those… pic.twitter.com/H1jvKt0XQ2

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) September 1, 2024

At this point the Trump Campaign’s management of the Arlington shitshow is simply devolving into their usual strategy: base maintenance to prevent any erosion of his support. If they felt like they were winning this argument, they would be much more confidently on the offensive and not making basic fuckups like undermining the argument that it was the Gold Star families who posted video of the campaign event at Arlington and not literally “@realDonaldTrump” on TikTok. Cotton also blamed the New York Times for “finding” the family of the other fallen soldier whose gravestone Trump was standing next to when he smiled and gave a thumbs up to the camera.

Brainwormed not-really-independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr on Friday filed a lawsuit in North Carolina to get himself removed from the ballot, claiming that “practicality” of throwing out absentee ballots that are already being printed is not a legal basis to keep him on it and that the Dem-majority state Board of Elections was aware of his intent to withdraw and endorse convicted felon former President Trump before he did, the News and Observer reports.

“To the extent NCSBE claims it is ‘impractical’ to remove him from the ballot, it is an issue of NCSBE’s own making,” the lawsuit states. The Board’s executive director, Karen Brinson Bell, told board members that any halt in ballot printing could have caused the state to miss its statutory deadline for sending out absentee ballots, as well as cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

A new national survey by ABC News and Ipsos finds Vice President Kamala Harris leading convicted felon former President Trump by 52 to 46 percent in a head-to-head and 51 to 46 percent among likely voters in the full field with Russian assets Robert F Kennedy Jr, Jill Stein, and Cornel West included. Noting that Bobby Jr still polls at 5 percent after dropping out, they asked his fans if him backing Donald makes them more likely to support the Orange Tyrant, to which just 12 percent said yes, 9 percent said no, and the rest said it makes no difference, they’re still voting for him anyway.

On the pretty novel question of “Regardless of whom you support, how would you rate the job Kamala Harris/Donald Trump is doing handling her/his campaign for president?” the poll found a wide gap in reviews of how the Harris and Trump campaigns are being conducted – even between the respective partisan sides: 56 percent of all respondents and indepdents said Harris was doing good to Trump 41, among indies it dropped to 38 percent. Significantly more Dem respondents – 93 percent – said Harris was running a good campaign than Republicans – 79 percent – who would say the same about Trump. Vice versa it was 24 percent of GOP respondents saying Harris was running a good campaign to just 13 percent of Democratic voters saying Trump is doing the same.

“Comrade Kamala Harris lied about working at McDonalds. SHE NEVER WORKED THERE, they think she’s ‘nuts.’ Likewise, she lied about Fracking, the Border, Crime, the Economy, and the Democrat’s ‘Suckers and Losers’ HOAX, concerning our great military. She also lied about Arlington Cemetery and Afghanistan. She lies about everything!!!” posted convicted felon former President Trump on Saturday, wading into the “Stolen McValor” scandal by claiming McDonald’s Corporation – or maybe just one McDonald’s franchise – thinks Vice President Kamala Harris is “nuts” and lying.

Earlier this week we had pondered how serious a schism was developing inside MAGA world between Team Forced-Birth and Team More-“Babies”-Will-Die-If-Kamala-Harris-Is-Elected-So-Shut-The Fuck-Up, comparing it to the Blue Coalition’s inner turmoil over Israel’s ongoing malevolent depraved indifference to human life in Gaza, given the electoral similarities. While the admittedly clunky premise and framing of “Maybe this is all just Twitter bullshit, and maybe it isn’t” left some readers lost on the significance of a growing revolt inside of the MAGAverse – and that’s on us – it seemed plenty others did in fact get it but outright dismissed that the rift could be metastasizing.

Is convicted felon former President Trump telling NBC “six weeks is too short, it has to be more time, and I’ve told them that I want more weeks, I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks” when asked about how he would vote on the Florida Amendment 4 abortion ballot measure and then, less than 24 hours later, telling Fox News that he was going to vote against it a strong enough signal that, yeah, maybe it was metastasizing and Trump was in fact getting worried?

You really have to step back and appreciate just how hard of a U-turn the hardcore “pro-lifers” just forced out of him. Months and months of the fat bastard “moderating” on abortion to try to sap President Joe Biden’s strongest issue with voters – one now even stronger for Vice President Kamala Harris – to the point where he literally posted “My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights” eight days ago. Then a week later he endorses keeping in place a pretty hard six-week ban that’s a non-starter with pro-choice voters. Why the hell else would they have gotten hundreds of thousands of people to sign a petition to get it on the November ballot?

In an incredibly not shocking development, convicted felon former President Trump’s defense team on Friday asked DC Circuit Judge Tanya Chutkan to adopt their schedule for the next steps in the newly-superseded post-2020 election coup attempt conspiracy case, a very lax one with just two filing deadlines prior to November 5th, because “The Special Counsel has returned a superseding indictment that includes substantial changes to its prior allegations. President Trump correspondingly requires time to review the new charging instrument as he determines what steps and procedures to undertake regarding, among other motions, his Presidential immunity defense.”

Yes, “substantial changes to its prior allegations” is objectively true. It’s just that claiming Smith’s team giving them less homework means they need more time now is like, what the fuck do they think is going to happen after Chutkan reads that? Is she going to say “Oh this is a compelling, good-faith argument, as is the part where he’s trying to say tweeting ‘Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,’ is privileged communication with his Vice President. I’ll go with Trump’s proposed schedule”?

• There’s a lot to mock in politics on both sides of the aisle.  You can have fun with a lot of things.  The drama gives you a lot to laugh at.  But nothing is more grotesque than the exploitation of the graves of the honored dead who defended this country by a grinning con man set on undermining the Constitution.
• Trump’s Kennedy bump in the polls has been predictably underwhelming, hasn’t it?
• When you start shoving staff at a national cemetery, you stop being campaign staff and you start being Brown Shirts.
• It was in no way overwhelming, but that was the point.  The Harris-Walz interview was happily normal, with politicians answering questions in normal politician ways–sometimes being direct sometimes slightly obfuscating–but never once bemoaning about how personally attacked they are and what a victim they’ve become by campaigning for the highest office in the land.
  Read More ▶ “Random thoughts Friday, Volume CLXXXIX”

Two female elephants at the Columbus (Ohio) Zoo will give birth to calves fathered by the same male next year, if all goes as planned, the Washington Post reports.  The 36-year-old Asian elephant Sabu impregnated both 37-year-old Phoebe and 15-year-old Sunny.  (Look, don’t judge.  It’s different for elephants, just like it is for Republicans like Matt Gaetz.)

This will be Phoebe’s third pregnancy and Sunny’s first.  It will greatly assist the efforts to breed the endangered Asian elephant.  “This is a big step for us,” a zoo official said. “Baby elephants are rare, and this showcases our ability to help the population as a whole, with sustainability over the next 100 years.”

Unseen from the fixed-view camera used for most rallies, a Donald Trump fan allegedly took his reichmarshall’s words seriously, charging the press pen during Trump’s Johnstown, Pennsylvania rally as Trump complained about media coverage, Politico reports.

Police officers had to use tasers to subdue the man as members of the crowd booed.  It’s unclear if they were booing the police officers who stopped the man or the man for interrupting Trump’s speech.  Police have not released the man’s identity.  It’s unclear if he’ll face charges or if Trump will pay his legal fees.

Sentenced to nine months in a correction facility for taking part in the January 6th Republican-led domestic terrorist attack on Congress, Antony Vo of Indiana failed to show up for his incarceration date at the federal prison in Terra Haute earlier this summer and now authorities believe he has fled to Canada, CBS News reports.

Convicted on four counts, Vo attended the attack with his mother.  They went through the Capitol with Vo taking multiple selfies and videos of himself yelling “Freedom!”  Overseeing the case, Judge Tanya Chutkan chided Vo at his April sentencing for repeatedly violating his parole terms and calling the trial a “kangaroo court” on social media.

A judge in Sao Paulo ordered the social media platform previously known as Twitter to suspend operations in Brazil after petulant billionaire Elon Musk refused to comply with the court’s order to appoint a representative in Brazil, the Associated Press reports.

The order from Justice Alexandre de Moraes orders internet service providers in the country of 215 million people five days to block access to the site, which has repeatedly ignored Brazilian orders to remove disinformation about domestic politics and other topics to comply with national law.  Musk refuses to comply with the court’s order, claiming it’s demanding censorship of right-wing speech.

Convicted felon former President Trump is rallying his cult in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, site of one of the deadliest disasters in American history: A dam collapse and flood that killed at least 2,200 people in 1889. Funny enough it was the result of the kind of lax oversight of industry the obese autocrat and his far right buddies want to bring about with their Project 2025 reich.

Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s interview airing Thursday night on CNN pulled in 5.92 million viewers, the network’s best night in the 9 PM time slot since the Biden-Trump debate and before that Biden’s inauguration, media analyst Brian Stelter reports.

Listed in convicted felon former President Trump’s latest financial asset disclosure is a random, tiny condo in Palm Beach, Florida, just 10 minutes away from Mar-a-Lago. Forbes looked into it and found that the fat bastard received the deed to it last year because its previous owner, Barbara J Fischer, had listed him as the beneficiary in her will in 2019. Fischer had no personal connection to Trump whatsoever, she was just a fan who wrote that he should take the condo “to sell as he sees fit” and “hopefully the monies of which shall be used for the continuation of the wall between the United States of America and Mexico,” but crossed that out in May 2021.

In his disclosure, Trump valued the property in the $100,000 to $250,000 range, but will have to wait a few years before he can start renting it out to a tenant. Obviously he’s not going to sell it to use the proceeds to build a wall with Mexico or for some other MAGA-worthy cause.