Category: Uncategorized

A 19-year-old Florida Man–written like it’s a specific branch of paleolithic hominin–who was a brand-spankin’ new handgun owner decided to get into a fight at his local bowling alley so he had an excuse to brandish the weapon is now under arrest for aggravated battery with a deadly weapon after he shot a 17-year-old, WEAR ABC-3 in Pensacola reports.

Nicolas Vallia, a 19-year-old from Cantonment, last week started an argument with a group bowling in the lane next to his.  The disagreement spilled outside later in the night, when the victim declined to play in a “roll dice” game with Vallia and his friends.  The victim got into his car with his friends and drove away, followed by Vallia, who grabbed his gun and firing two shots into the victim’s car, hitting the victim in the stomach.  With the driver shot, his friends navigated the car to a shopping center parking lot and called 9-1-1.

Vallia’s girlfriend said he had just bought the gun six months ago and felt he needed more “protection.”  His friends said he was looking for an opportunity to flash the gun to “look hard in front of his girlfriend.”  There were no drag shows involved in the corruption and injuries of these children.

The immediate past Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, pulled his hat out of the ring to recapture the seat after a humiliating vote to oust him, making him the first Congressman to be removed from leadership in the middle of a term, per Olivia Beavers of Politico.  His title is now Congressman.

According to Jake Sherman, McCarthy gave a lengthy, self-pitying speech to the GOP caucus.  “I did it for the good of the conference. The Dems came to me to make a deal. I wasn’t going to make a deal. When eight people work with the Democrats, it’s not for the best of the conference. I got to be the 55th speaker — my goal has been to save the country. I love a lot of you. I saw your kids grow up. … I’m not going to sell my soul to Democrats. Ill still work to get you elected — maybe not all of you because I’m a free agent. When we come out of the next vote, let’s elect that person on the first round. if I have to be the sacrifice, so be it. We’re the only conservative face for America. I appreciate all of you.”  [For clarification, the quotation marks are from Sherman’s Twitter-telling of the speech; it may or may not McCarthy’s speech verbatim.]

Sherman goes on to report the House has shut down for the week.  The GOP caucus will hold a candidate forum next week and intend to bring a vote for the next Speaker to the floor on Wednesday, October 11th.

“Legitimate Governor of Arizona” Kari Lake on Tuesday filed the paperwork to run for the 2024 Senate race for the seat currently occupied by Kyrsten Sinema, ABC15’s Garrett Archer reports.

The National Republican Congressional Committee – the organization responsible for recruiting, funding, and electing GOP House candidates – on Tuesday put out a statement declaring that the “House Democrats are now officially the Chaos Caucus” because they “voted en masse following their extreme leader, Hakeem Jeffries, to throw the House into chaos on a motion to vacate.”

“Extreme House Democrats are arsonists complaining about fire damage. As House Republicans continue to try to do the people’s work considering critical funding bills, House Democrats are using every dirty trick to delay, deflect, and destroy the institution,” said NRCC comms chief Jack Pandol.

Thanks to a motion from a nihilist alleged child sex trafficker from Florida, Matt Gaetz, California Republican Kevin McCarthy has lost the House Speakership, becoming the first House leader in the history of the nation to lose his seat by being ousted by his Party during the session.

Having reached the 214 vote threshold to account for “half-plus-one” of all the members present, McCarthy becomes the fifth Republican to hold the Speaker’s office in the last quarter century and the fifth to lose the job.  Newt Gingrich was drummed out on an ethics charge; Denny Hassert left office after being exposed as a child sex predator; John Boehner and Paul Ryan resigned in what can only be described as a varying mix of shame, ineffectiveness, exhaustion and disgust.  Over that time, Nancy Pelosi was the only Democratic Speaker, having served for eight years before Hakeem Jeffries took over as Democratic leaders in the current session.

Republicans voting against McCarthy included the motion sponsor, Matt Gaetz, as well as Andy Biggs (AZ), Ken Buck (CO), Tim Burchett (TN), Eli Crane (AZ), Bob Good (VA), Nancy Mace (SC), and Matt Rosendale (MT).  The final count after the clerk caught up with those member who missed their official slot to vote was 216-210.

An Oklahoma City wildlife removal contractor tells KFOR he’s closing in on the 13-foot python that for five months has been feasting on mammals in the Burntwood Mobile Home Park.

“We’re talking, that thing has been eating opossums, foot-long rats, and cats,” said Red Beard Wildlife Control’s Trevor Bounds. “The mouth on that thing is the size of your foot and when it opens up you’re going to be able to fit something pretty large in there,” Bounds continued, saying he was worried his serpentine quarry could start soon begin preying on humans too. “The constricting is what can be the dangerous part. You can’t have small children or pets going near this thing that’s why this should’ve been tackled a whole lot sooner. Things could have gotten much worse.”

Bounds has only been on the job since Friday but already he’s learned a thing or two about how to track down the monster reptile. “We were using our thermal camera last week to find it but because it is cold-blooded we had to just look for an outline of him,” said Bounds, the pressure to bring the python to justice was growing. “They have an animal that large and I can imagine that each one of those cats put up a nasty fight. So, when it’s been attacked that many times and to that extent, the nice non-aggressive pet snake we once knew is no more. This thing is dangerous now.”

New York Superior Court Judge Arthur Engoron on Tuesday responded to disgraced former President Trump’s Truth Social post falsely attacking his court clerk as “Chuck Schumer’s girlfriend” by telling Trump to delete it and promptly issuing a gag order, Politico’s Erica Orden reports.

“Personal attacks on members on my court staff are unacceptable, inappropriate, and I won’t tolerate it [in my courtroom]… Consider this statement a gag order forbidding all parties from posting, emailing, or speaking publicly about any of my staff,” Engoron said in court.

And with that Engoron made Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s task of convincing DC Circuit Judge Tanya Chutkan to slap Trump with a gag order at next week’s big hearing became that much easier. Or Chutkan’s decision to do so got that much easier. Either way this is almost certain to have implications and not good one for Trump in his post-2020 election coup attempt case.

Remember back when we did four days in a row of live coverage of the 15 failed votes to make Kevin McCarthy Speaker of the House? Great, so let’s just pick up where we left off because the incredibly weak California Congressman is in the same spot nine months later.

During the recess of his New York State trial on fraudulently manipulating financial statements, indicted former president Donald Trump posted on his failing Truth Social platform a thinly-veiled threat against the court clerk in the case. Trump posted the “truth” shown below featuring a photo of the clerk standing with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, in an unknown place, at an unknown time, in an unknown circumstance.  We also will note that cannot confirm the unknown woman in the photo is actually the clerk.  (We have documented the post, but opt to hide the woman’s face for her protection.)

After the post quickly got traction on other, more popular platforms, Trump deleted it, apparently scared that he would be taken to task by one of the judges in his various legal cases who have warned him against intimidating witnesses and court personnel on social media.

It’s such a great look for a democracy when a former president targets a court bureaucrat for doing her job. To paraphrase Trump, “If he can do it to her, he’ll do it to you, too.”  [UPDATE:  3:10 p.m. ET:  Judge Engoron ordered Trump to remove the post, ordering “Consider this statement a gag order forbidding all parties from posting emailing or speaking publicly about any of my staff.”]

America’s northerly neighbors on Tuesday displayed that they have their shit together more than we do, as MPs in the House of Commons elected Liberal Greg Fergus to succeed the dipshit Anthony Rota, who resigned after stupidly inviting a 98 year-old Ukrainian Nazi WWII veteran to President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech to Parliament and saluted him in the chamber, CTV News reports.

“A variety of McCarthy rank and file allies are frantically reaching out to Dems right now to gauge what they want for a possible deal to save his speakership,” Politico’s Meredith Lee Hill reports citing an anonymous House Republican who also tells her “I don’t know if Kevin will take it.”

Which means that, before the vote to vacate the speakership has even happened, Republicans loyal to McCarthy are trying to sue for peace and are willing to form a coalition government in Congress.

QAnon “patriots” are almost certainly to erupt with joy after their Lord and Savior spoke the magic words “Do your own research” as he left court in New York on Tuesday. Trump’s utterance of the creed central to the apocalyptic death cult’s ethos of connecting random bits of information to each other to divine their inane conspiracy theories will no doubt be seen as a validation and encouragement of such lifestyle habits and will spur them to consume massive quantities of court documents and discovery evidence in the hopes of “exonerating” the failed one-term president.

In the real world Trump is simply admitting he was full of shit and is trying to claim there was no real harm caused by his fraudulent business practices, which would be like claiming that he never actually sold any of the classified documents he stole and the government got them back in the end.

Trump also told reporters he would take the stand to testify “at the appropriate time.” Then he accused the court clerk of being Chuck Schumer’s “girlfriend” on Truth Social.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries emerged from an all-hands caucus meeting on Tuesday to inform the media the Dems will “definitively” vote in lockstep against delaying or tabling credibly suspected sex trafficker and statutory rapist Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz’s motion to vacate against titular Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman reports.

“House Democrats will continue to put people over politics and hopefully find some common ground with a reasonable set of Republicans who are committed to breaking from their extremist colleagues and doing the right thing by the American people,” Jeffries said to reporters after the meeting.

Asking around at an Iowa Trump 2024 campaign event this week, NBC News reporters found several MAGA Cornhole Staters willing to talk about the twice-impeached and four-times indicted loser’s recent escalation violent rhetoric with calls for now-former Joint Chiefs Chair General Mark Milley to face the death penalty for treason and for shoplifters to summarily executed on the spot.

“Treason is treason. There’s only one cure for treason: being put to death,” said one woman. “Why was [Milley] not in there before a firing squad within a month?” asked another. “We used to execute or imprison people for all the treasonous actions I see,” said a man, who did not elaborate on all the “treasonous actions,” but added “Now, in this day and age, it’s just throw it underneath the rug.”

One woman “who supported Trump in 2016 and 2020” however told NBC reporters the bloodlust was going “way too far. It’s way too far.” The article then states she “said she plans to back him again,” without going further into the exchange with this supposedly reluctant Trump voter.

Opening day two of the trial in New York Attorney General Leticia James’s $250 million fraud lawsuit against disgraced former President Trump’s corrupt business empire, Judge Arthur Engoron told Team Orange they misunderstood him on his rulings on the statutes of limitation applied to claims, not evidence. “The attorney general is suing over over false financial statements, not over the underlying deals themselves,” Engoron said, per the Daily Beast’s Jose Pagliery. “Every use of a false financial statement in business starts the statute of limitations running again,” Engoron continued.

Upon leaving court on Monday, Trump had claimed “Well, I think that went very good… that last five minutes was outstanding, because the judge essentially conceded that the statute of limitations that we won at the court of appeals is in effect. Therefore about 80 percent of the case is over.”

Which means that the fat bastard was entirely wrong and 100 percent of the case is still very much not over. Well except for the part where Engoron ruled a default judgment for the state and ordered a shit ton of business licenses canceled and LLCs under the Trump Organization dissolved.

Earlier on Tuesday Trump wrote on Truth Social that “Judge Engoron has been given false and grossly misleading information about my Net Worth by a lying and incompetent Attorney General, such as Mar-a-Lago being worth $18,000,000 when in fact the number would be much closer to 1.5 Billion Dollars, like other properties, including two that were recently sold for numbers many times those that were listed in the Financial Statements. The NYS Attorney General, therefore, committed FRAUD for Political and Election Interference reasons. This case should therefore be dismissed!” and then continued melting down outside the courtroom, screaming the same to news cameras.

In a long feature on differing health outcomes in the continuous adjacent arc of three demographically and economically similar counties in three different states along the southeastern shore of Lake Erie – Ashtabula County, Ohio, Erie County, Pennsylvania, and Chautauqua County, New York – the Washington Post crunches the numbers and finds a pretty unambiguous reality that people in Ashtabula by and large die younger than those in Erie and Chautauqua.

Data from the 2020 census shows Chautauqua, Erie, and Ashtabula almost in complete lockstep: 86.3, 82.9, and 88.1 percent non-Hispanic white, median annual household incomes of $50,408, $55,949, and $49,680, and poverty rates at 17.2, 15.8, and 15.2 percent, all respectively. Yet the death rate in Ashtabula in 2020 was 650 per 100,000 between the ages of 35 and 65 compared to under 500 in Erie and about 525 in Chautauqua. The Post attributes the disparity to lax seatbelt laws (people are twice as likely to die in car accidents in Ashtabula than in Chautauqua), low cigarette taxes, and lack of Medicaid funding, three policy issues the Republican-dominated Ohio state legislature have refused to do anything about for fear of becoming a “nanny state.”

“Between 2015 and 2019, nearly five times as many Ashtabula residents in their prime died of chronic medical conditions as died of overdoses, suicide and all other external causes combined, according to The Post analysis of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s death records,” the Post writes in the article, which is interspersed with a profile of a local funeral director’s long hours. Mike Czup told the Post he recently had to prep the body of a 34 year-old heart attack victim whom the 52 year-old Czup had coached on a YMCA basketball team when he was a kid.

Titular House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told CNBC on Tuesday the first vote on whether to kill off Matt Gaetz’s palace coup attempt – expected at about 1:30 PM EDT this afternoon – “will tell everything,” and denied he was talking with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to try to gain their support. “I’m not asking for any special deal or anything else,” McCarthy said.

“Proving yet again how hopelessly juvenile Democrats are” – The current top comment on the Breitbart article “Rep Matt Gaetz Formally Makes His Move to Oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy.”

Breitbart’s home page displays it as “Matt Gaetz Files Motion to Oust Kevin McCarthy – Dems Erupt in Laughter – Reports: Blames Speaker for ’Gaslighting’ Ethics Investigation,” emphasis added to refer to what the commenter was so offended by. If you try to put yourself in the Crocs of a Breitbart reader then you actually can kind of see how Democrats laughing at Matt Gaetz trying to take down the Speaker of the House isn’t as funny as “Let’s Go Brandon!” or the time that QAnon-pilled freak bashed in Nancy Pelosi’s husband’s head with a hammer. Those things are hilarious to MAGA folks.

Big news over at Fox:  Donald Trump is expected to attend the second day of his civil trial brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James for fraudulently valuing… well… everything.  Interestingly, Fox touts Trump’s tantrum during today’s lunch recess, when he’s not under oath or in the presence of the judge, in which Trump “rage against Judge Arthur Engoron.”  Because it’s not kabuki theatre at all.  (Cue Lauren Boebert inquiring, “Did someone say ‘theatre’?”)

Original Report:  A report from Nicholas Wu at Politico that a member of Congress was carjacked at the DC Navy Yard Monday evening, with Jake Sherman/Heather Scope co-reporting that the member was Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar.  There are no reports on the status of Cuellar or if he was hurt.

Update:  10:43 p.m. ET:  Sarah Ferris of Politico confirmed with the Congressman’s office that Cueller is unharmed.

Update:  12:02 a.m. ET:  The Associated Press reports that Cueller was driving in the Navy Yard neighborhood when he was confronted by three men.  His office released a statement:  “As Congressman Cuellar was parking his car this evening, 3 armed assailants approached the Congressman and stole his vehicle. Luckily, he was not harmed and is working with local law enforcement.”