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In a rare piece of actually original reporting – or at least more “original” than assigning a writer to watch The View or listen to a Joe Rogan podcast – Mediaite on Friday broke that antisemitic anti-vax freak Robert F Kennedy Jr is going to drop out of the Dem presidential primary and mount a third party run, news that was received well, not so well, and then like “Oh fuck” by the MAGA internet:

“If this is true RFK Jr just fired a shot across the bow of Biden’s sinking ship” – The current top comment on The Right Scoop’s story. That’s exactly the kind of enthusiasm we like.

“If he can get on the ballot as an independent, it will eliminate any chance the democrats may have had at winning. He should watch his back” – Top comment on Fox News’s article. Same as above.

“Awesome news, he will suck up demoRat votes” – Top comment at the Daily Caller. Still excited.

“Kennedy knows how corrupt the Democrats are” – Top comment at Breitbart and about the most generic take possible, like they couldn’t bring themselves to contemplate the actual real-world consequences of the anti-vax cult’s champion being on the ballot in crucial swing states next year.

“I hope he splits the Democrat vote in half. MAGA vote MAGA! Trump 47!” – Top comment on the Gateway Pundit’s article. Key word is “hope” followed by the call for Trump fans to vote for him again, like “Please don’t fuck around on this. The COVID vax thing isn’t more important than MAGA.”

A necropsy of an orca whose body washed ashore in Russia’s far eastern Bering Strait revealed the killer whale had eaten seven sea otters by simply swallowing them whole, with the last one getting caught in the beast’s esophagus, Live Science reports citing a recent study of the 2020 death.

“It is very unusual because orcas don’t normally eat sea otters,” study author and Moscow University marine biologist Olga Filatova told Live Science adding that the killer whales “normally don’t swallow prey whole – they usually tear it apart and eat only the best (most fatty) parts.”

• Dianne Feinstein was forced to remain in the Senate until her dying day because of a callous political calculation by Mitch McConnell and the GOP.  She should have been allowed to retire and spend her last days with family in California with her successor seated in DC, but because of McConnell’s craven desire to manipulate rules to his political advantage, Feinstein was denied that dignity.  That is disgusting and inhumane.  May she finally have peace.
• Notable:  in his Thursday speech, Joe Biden didn’t implore people to go out and vote for him to save our democracy.  He just implored people to participate in our elections.  Biden will never say “Only I can save you!” as Trump does.  Biden knows only the People can save the nation, at the ballot box.
• Remember when Lauren Boebert claimed she had a super-secret parliamentary way to force an impeachment vote on the floor of the House?  That ploy, like her high school education, failed.
• If it isn’t obvious enough, Trump is now trying to throw his Georgia racketeering case so he can (1) appeal and (2) play up how unfair the System is to him before the election.  It’s why he doesn’t want to remove the Fulton County case to federal court:  he believes he’ll appear more of a victim at the hands of those naughty (Black) Atlantans.
  Read More ▶ “Random thoughts Friday, Volume CXL”

Saying “The defendant should not be permitted to continue to try this case in the court of public opinion rather than in the court of law,” Jack Smith’s Special Counsel’s office argued Trump’s ongoing efforts to threaten and intimidate people necessitate a gag order to protect the integrity of the trial and keep court officers, witnesses and prosecutors safe.

“The need for the proposed order is further evidenced by a review of the defendant’s prejudicial statements in the weeks since the Government initially filed its motion on September 5. Since that date, the defendant has continued to make statements that pose a substantial likelihood of material prejudice to this case and that fall within the narrowly tailored order proposed by the Government.”  Smith then goes on to list a number of violence-tinged statements made by Trump, including calling for the execution of retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.

“On September 22, on Truth Social, the defendant falsely claimed that the retiring Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a witness cited in the indictment, had committed treason and suggested that he should be executed,” says Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith in his motion in support of gag order on disgraced former President Trump in the DC coup attempt case.

Which means Trup already violated his release terms with the post calling for Milley’s execution.

Asked if the federal government will shut down this weekend, the bane of sandal designers, Georgia Republican Congresswoman Majorie Taylor Greene, shares a unique take on the week’s news, being certain to pat herself on the back in the process:

Yes, I do agree with that, Eric.  Um, now this is coming after a very successful week here in Washington, DC.  Ah, one of the biggest success that we had this week was passing our defense appropriation [sic] bill and stripping the Ukraine war money out of it.  That was a big win that I personally worked on, um, and I’m very proud to say that 117 Republicans, which is over half of our conference, voted against Ukraine war money.

The appropriations bill Marge refers to won’t make it through the Senate, which will fund the defense of Ukraine, regardless of what de factor Speaker Marge declares, so her claimed success for the week is a loss.  The dysfunction of the GOP was on full display this week, with a comical presidential debate and a hysterically meaningless “impeachment hearing” exhibiting Republican incompetence.  And calling the week successful when her antics will push the nation over a fiscal cliff demonstrates Marge is concerned with nothing more than her ego.

Regardless of if the federal government shuts down at midnight Saturday, student loan borrowers will have to restart their loan payments October 1st unless a different continuing resolution is passed by the House and Senate in the next two days, CBS News reports.

While President Biden has worked to forgive much student loan debt or at least tried to waive repayment requirements, Republicans are insistent that loan holders keep payments up, even while forcing federal workers to miss paychecks because of Matt Gaetz’s desire for notoriety.

A new set survey from Public Policy Polling finds President Biden leading disgraced former President Trump 48 to 45 in Pennsylvania and 48 to 44 in both Michigan and Wisconsin. This result was posted six hours ago and we just randomly see it on Twitter when New York Magazine’s Eric Levitz joked about how funny it would be if Biden won the Electoral College but not the popular vote.

Weird how we had to happen upon it rather than seeing it being reported by like say, Axios, the New York Times, NBC, Fox News, the Washington Post, The Hill, CNN, Politico, Mediaite, CBS, and so on and so forth. Now of course there’s a lot of other shit going on these days but it’s hard to escape the feeling that they might’ve kind of picked it up if the finding was reversed so they can be like “HOLY SHIT! TRUMP LEADS BIDEN IN SWING STATES TOO!” the way they were like “HOLY SHIT! THIS NEW ABC WASHINGTON POST POLL FINDS TRUMP UP 11 POINTS OVER BIDEN IN 2024! IT’S PROBABLY ACCURATE! NOT AN OUTLIER! AMERICAN DEMOCRACY IS FUCKED! SO DEVASTATING! VOTERS ARE REALLY CONCERNED OVER BIDEN’S AGE TOO! THEY SAID IT! LOOK!” on Sunday.

And it’s not like Public Policy Polling is some fringe bullshit propaganda operation like Rasmussen or Trafalgar on the right or Center Street PAC on the left. The MSM outlets cite PPP findings all the time. They might not be a “household name” like Pew or Gallup, but they’re close enough. Their record’s okay, tracks with the industry at large in both 2020 and 2022. So there’s really no excuse for the MSM not to want to pick this up unless they want to further anger the liberals already constantly accusing them of, unconsciously or otherwise, pushing a certain narrative.

Christopher Worrell, a member of the Proud Boys who went into hiding days before his sentencing for his convictions for crimes related to his actions during the January 6th Republican-led domestic terrorist attack on Congress, was captured in East Naples, Florida Thursday night, and apparently his neighbors were too pleased with the media attention their local insurrectionist spawned.

Scott Hall, a bail bondsman who was one of the Republican operatives who illegally accessed voting machines in Coffee County, Georgia, became the first of the 19 co-defendants in the Fulton Trump coup attempt RICO case to take a plea deal on Friday, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

Hall and several other unindicted co-conspirators had accompanied another defendant, fake elector and former Coffee County GOP chairwoman Cathy Latham to the county clerk’s office, where the then-clerk Misty Hampton (another one of the 19 defendants) had let them into the server room to take whatever software and voter data they wanted from the county’s Dominion Voting Machines equipment. Hall was charged with a RICO violation count, two counts of conspiracy to commit election fraud, conspiracy to commit computer theft, conspiracy to commit computer trespass, conspiracy to commit computer invasion of privacy, and conspiracy to defraud the state.

His buddy Sidney “Kraken” Powell was hit with same charges so it might be a safe bet we’ll see Hall on the witness stand (live on television) in her and Kenny Chesebro’s trial in November. NBC News reports that Hall has copped to all charges and is looking at five years probation with no jail time in exchange for agreeing to “testify truthfully in this case and all further proceedings.”

Not satisfied with Republicans’ failed efforts to block Joe Biden from taking office and their subsequent campaign to find a reason to impeach Biden, Florida Republican Congressman and man who creepily volunteers to be the girls’ school playground monitor Matt Gaetz is making the ballsy move to ask Democrats to help him oust House Speaker pro tem, Politico reports.

Emboldened by the mirage of power created by a razor thin Republican majority in the House, Gaetz has threatened to oust McCarthy if McCarthy sought Democratic to pass a continuing resolution to avoid a shutdown.  Ever the spoilt child, Gaetz demanded McCarthy acquiesce to every one of his petty demands–demands which would certainly plunge the country into a fiscal crisis.

But without an iota of self-awareness, Gaetz has now reportedly approached Democrats to enlist their help.  Gaetz approached Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal, who advised he delay the maneuver until after the impending shutdown.  “He’s been talking to everybody about it,” she said. “I told him in our caucus, in the Progressive Caucus, we’re not planning to save McCarthy — for a whole host of reasons. And so, we really need to get through the shutdown first.”  Jayapal has stated the Progressive Caucus would demand a power-sharing agreement if McCarthy asked for help to save his position, and she’ll likely demand Gaetz bow to her demands if he wants her help.

Federal judge Steve Jones denied indicted coconspirator Jeffrey Clark’s effort to have his Fulton County, Georgia racketeering case removed to federal court, claiming that he was acting as a federal official while he tried to disenfranchise millions of Georgia voters.  According to Jones’s opinion, Clark was not working in his official capacity as Assistant Attorney General for the Environmental and Natural Resources Division of the Justice Department as he tried to undermine the certified elections from Georgia to illegally reinstall Donald Trump for a second term in the White House.

“Accordingly, the Court concludes that Clark has not met his burden to show that he was acting within the scope of his federal office as AAG of the Civil Division in drafting the December 28 letter,” Jones wrote.  “The letter pertained to election fraud and election interference concerns that were outside the gamut of his federal office. Consequently, Clark has not shown the required nexus for federal officer removal.”

House Speaker pro tem Kevin McCarthy failed in his effort to pass a funding measure as the nation hurdles toward a fiscal cliff with the latest GOP funding bill failing by a final count of 198-232.  With his grip on the Speakership tenuous at best, this likely signals the beginning of the end for McCarthy’s leadership in the chamber, as the far-right wing of the Party will call for his ouster.

Liberal group Free Speech for People on Friday filed a lawsuit seeking to block disgraced former President Trump’s eligibility for the ballot in Michigan under Section III of the 14th Amendment, the fourth major challenge but the first in a 2016-2020 swing state, the Associated Press reports.

It’s not clear from the AP’s article if Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson was named as a defendant, though it would seem likely given that Steve Simon, her counterpart in Minnesota, is named in Free Speech for People’s petition there and Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold was in a separate group of plaintiffs’ case as well. Earlier this month Benson ruled out any unilateral action to boot Trump off the ballot, writing in a Washington Post op-ed that she would only do what a court told her to do. It’s worth noting here that the Michigan state Supreme Court does have a lib majority though we think it unlikely that the final ruling would come from them and not Samuel Alito.

In his farewell speech to Defense Department personnel, outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley on Friday had some choice words for the fat tyrant who called for his head recently, saying “We don’t take an oath to a king, or queen, or a tyrant or a dictator. And we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We take an oath to the Constitution. We are willing to die to protect it.”

In a Friday hearing ahead of MAGA lawyers’ Kenny Chesebro and Sidney “Kraken” Powell’s upcoming October 23 trial for their part in the massive Trump Georgia post-2020 election coup attempt conspiracy, Fulton County Judge Scott McAfee handed Chesebro back-to-back defeats in his motions to claim immunity from prosecution and suppress the content of emails from the evidence.

On the immunity bid, McAfee ruled Chesebro’s claim having “simply performed his legal duty to a client” is “irrelevant in the pretrial context of immunity, and this Court declines the invitation to supplant the jury’s role as the factfinder.” Almost literally writing “save it for the jury, my dude.”

Chesebro relies on more or less the same argument in the attempt to suppress email evidence, that it was a legal work product and thus subject to attorney-client privilege ends the same way, with McAfee ruling Chesebro had “not sufficiently particularized why the attorney-client privilege applies, nor does he contend inclusion of these materials affected the viability of the warrant itself” and that his motion “fails to state a legal violation that would require suppression… DENIED.”

Still ongoing flash flooding hit New York City hard on Friday, with low-lying streets becoming inundated with wetter than usual garbage and rats, National Zero reports citing its founder’s firsthand account of his building’s basement storage unit steadily filling up with water leaking in from the adjacent IND line line of the subway system. Service on which is experiencing heavy delays along with the every other route that wasn’t already suspended partially or entirely.

“A FLASH FLOOD WARNING is in effect for this area until 12:30 PM EDT. This is a dangerous and life-threatening situation. Do not attempt to travel unless you are fleeing an area subject to flooding or under an evacuation order,” said an emergency push alert sent to locals’ phones at around 9:25 AM EDT Friday. It may have kind of lowballed the estimate for the end of the rain given that the NWS also says that the region will remain under a flash flood watch until 6:00 EDT on Saturday.

California Dem Senator Dianne Feinstein died Friday at age 90, CBS News reports on a merciful end to the sad and frankly pretty disgraceful way she was treated by her staff and family members in her final year or so as they wheeled her around without gently and respectfully talking her into retiring.

Feinstein’s death leaves vacant a seat already contested in campaigns launched by California US House Democrats Adam Schiff, Katie Porter, and Barbara Lee beginning months before the now-late Senator had announced earlier this year she would not be running for reelection in 2024.

Just weeks ago NBC News reported that Governor Gavin Newsom’s plan is to appoint an “interim” replacement and let a special primary and general election play out between the three California representatives, whom now will not need to vacate their House seats to run in a 2024 primary.

Trump minion and shitty right wing children’s book author Kash Patel was more than underwhelmed with the Republicans’ performance during Thursday’s “Biden impeachment inquiry” hearing, complaining the House GOP members present were “more worried with getting their 30 second headline on mainstream media and being glorified in your little caucus circles on Capitol Hill than doing the damage op for the American people.” This guy’s such a freaking douche he can’t help but slip into MAGA conspiracy lingo and give away a little more than he intended by calling what was supposedly at least ostensibly legitimate function of congressional oversight a “damage op.”