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Asked by NBC’s Kristen Welker if he’ll take the witness stand in his defense testify under oath that he never told his guys to delete the footage of them hiding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, fat former President Trump said “Sure, I’m going to- I’ll testify,” and “Look, It’s a fake charge by this deranged lunatic prosecutor who lost in the Supreme Court nine to nothing, and he tried to destroy lots of lives. He’s a lunatic. So it’s a fake charge. But more importantly, the tapes weren’t deleted. In other words, there was nothing done to them. And, they were my tapes. I could have fought them. I didn’t even have to give them the tapes, I don’t think. I think I would have won in court. When they asked for the tapes, I said, ‘Sure.’ They’re my tapes. I could have fought them. I didn’t even have to give them. Just so you understand, though, we didn’t delete anything. Nothing was deleted.”

US intelligence officials tell CNN it appears the ChiComs have suspended their spy balloon program in the aftermath of the famous incident when American fighter jets shot down a wayward orb and its large gondola in the Atlantic following a week of aimless transcontinental drift and frenzied bitching by elected Republicans amplified wall-to-wall coverage in right wing media back in February.

Officials say they’ve observed no new launches and believe the Xi Regime to have deflated the program after the diplomatic blowback from the February shitshow. Reports also indicate leadership “reprimanded” the operators for fucking up and losing control of the balloon, especially now that the gondola underneath was recovered from the water largely intact by Navy divers.

So for all the screaming from MAGAmerica about the balloon and how Joe Biden just let it happen to the point where they literally demanded he be impeached over it here’s the final score: His response – waiting to shoot it down when it was over water where it could be recovered and not over land where 100 tons of wreckage falling from 80,000 feet might have just been dangerous to Americans, as well as ordering Secretary of State Tony Blinken to postpone a trip to China – scared the Xi Regime out of launching any more of the balloons that Republicans said were such a grave threat to our national security. Of course it’d be foolish to expect them to acknowledge it, especially since their goldfish brains already forgot about it, but here we are with no more ChiCom spy balloons coming to terrorize hardworking traditional American families who just want their kids to be safe.

House Republicans are a bit apprehensive with Oversight moron James Comer “being the public face of the inquiry” after he’s “undermined his credibility by being a sloppy communicator – especially in TV interviews during the past year in which he has overstated his committee’s findings,” Axios reports on the vibe coming from the caucus as the “inquiry” gets underway.

“Comer’s entire strategy has been too broad on the investigations, and too narrow on communications,” a leadership aide told Axios, adding “The committee should focus on firsthand testimony and bank statements,” rather than tailoring circlejerky stories for the Fox News audience.

“There is no valid basis, under the relevant law and facts, for the Honorable Tanya S. Chutkan, United States District Judge for the District of Columbia, to disqualify herself in this proceeding,” Special Counsel Jack Smith said in his response to the long-shot motion by Donald Trump to get the judge removed from Trump’s federal lawsuit in DC relating to his attempt to undermine the 2020 presidential election.

“The defendant cites only one case in which a court found that recusal was warranted on the basis of a judge’s statements. But that case—United States v. Microsoft Corp., 253 F.3d 34 (D.C. Cir. 2001)—undermines the defendant’s position rather than supports it, because the judge’s extrajudicial statements in that case are so easily contrasted with this Court’s, in both content and setting,” Smith stated, noting that in Microsoft, the judge was removed because he indeed made prejudicial statements in the antitrust case, including secretly telling reporters he believed Microsoft should lose the case.  Chutkan’s statements, made during sentencing hearings for January 6th convicts in response to the defendants’ statements, were milquetoast by comparison, with Chutkan saying the leaders of the coup had not yet been held responsible while she sentenced the defendants.

A new report from CBS News explains how Mexican drug cartels are getting Americans to smuggle guns over the border because guns are too hard to find south of the Rio Grande but plentiful in the US.  Called Project Thor, the five-year review of gun trafficking found networks of gun purchasing and shipping operations around the US sending guns to Mexican cartels.

It’s not a new problem, and it wasn’t a new problem when the GW Bush administration started Operation Wide Receiver, the prelude to Operation Fast and Furious, in 2006.  The US government has been tracking the massive illegal shipments of arms across the southern border for at least 50 years, and its been highly unsuccessful in stopping the flow.

In Mexico, gun sales are highly regulated, but illegal guns are plentiful for the gangs.  Mexico has been trying for years to stem the flow of weapons and hold those feeding the availability of weapons responsible.  The federal government of Mexico sued some of the largest gun manufacturers and distributors in the US, saying the loose practices with which they sell, distribute and market their guns is directly correlated to the rise of guns used to protect the fentanyl trade in Mexico.

The hypocrisy never ends.  It turns out Marjorie Taylor Greene‘s little bitch Lauren Boebert (LB²) likes to date men who produce drag shows, the same form of entertainment the Colorado Republican claims will send people to hell.  Per Pride.com, the man seen literally carrying Boebert’s purse as she was ejected from a Denver arts center for being loud and obnoxious during a musical performance is Quinn Gallagher, the owner of the Aspen, Colorado bar named the Hooch Craft Cocktail Bar.

Boebs apparently didn’t do a simple Google search on the man whom she’s reportedly been seeing since filing for divorce from Jason, the prick-exposing prick who impregnated the then-high school student when he was in his early 20s.  It turns out, Hooch regularly hosts drag shows, including an annual “Winter Wonderland Burlesque & Drag Show” and its one of the most active locations during Aspen’s Gay Ski Week.

Chunky teenage MAGA vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse on Thursday hastily deleted a pic of himself taken on Wednesday with far right Texas activist and former legislative aide Jake Neidert after a Twitter user going by @reallifesenator tweeted a screenshot of Neidert messaging her with “Is your name Sandy Hook, because I could shoot some kids in you,” the Texas Tribune’s Rob Downen reports.

And yeah, the pic was taken at a gun range. Shocker, right? The deletion came about the same time that Neidert’s former employer, far right Texas state Representative Tony Tinderholt told Downen that Neidert had been “let go” earlier in the summer, later tweeting had Neidert “made it while employed by my office, his employment would have been immediately terminated for it.”

Neither Rittenhouse nor Tinderholt commented on why the Sandy Hook “pickup line” was a dealbreaker and they no longer want to be associated with him but the time last year when Neidert said parents who bring children to drag queen story hour should be executed was not (it was before Tinderholt had hired Neidert). It’s pretty confusing how “jokes” about orphaning kids are considered in “good taste” in MAGAmerica but ones about murdering them at school aren’t, right?

Worried that the whims of a billionaire could at some point in the future cut off important civil functions needed to undertake a military operation, the Senate Armed Services Committee is opening up a probe into Elon Musk’s unilateral decision to suspend Starlink internet service to Ukraine because Kyiv was using it to attack the Russian fleet, Bloomberg reports.

At first, Musk claimed that he did it because he feared Russia would have retaliated using nuclear weapons.  Then he claimed that allowing the system to be used for military operations would draw the parent company, SpaceX, into the war as a potential target.  Musk contacted the Russian ambassador to seek his counsel, apparently tipping off the Kremlin.

“The committee is aggressively probing this issue from every angle,” Chairman Jack Reed said, adding, “Neither Elon Musk, nor any private citizen, can have the last word when it comes to U.S. national security.”

Saying at the end of his term in office, “I was given the option.  I could’ve done a pardon of myself.  You know what I said?  I have no interest in even thinkin’ about it,” indicted felon Donald Trump went on to say that if re-installed into the Oval Office, he’s “very unlikely” to give himself a pardon.

“Well, I think it’s very unlikely.  What did I do wrong?  I didn’t do anything wrong,” Trump told NBC News.  But he set up his rationale for issuing himself a pardon by claiming the “Biden charges” are all politically motivated.  Of course, a presidential pardon only covers federal criminal charges he’s facing, not the slew of state and local indictments and lawsuits.

It’s time billionaires paid at least a 25% minimum tax.

— President Biden (@POTUS) September 14, 2023

Donald Trump paid an effective tax rate of 0% in 2020; he paid no taxes after claiming nearly $5 million in losses.  In 2019, with declared income of $4.4 million, the Trumps paid just $134,000 in their joint tax filing, or 3%.  In 2018, with $24.3 million in income, he paid a 4% effective rate.  The average effective federal tax rate in the United States for people of all income levels was 13% in 2022.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will visit Washington DC next week, his second since that start of the Russian invasion in February 2022, Punchbowl’s Andrew Desiderio reports.

“Former NBA participant Brandon Hunter, who beforehand performed for the Boston Celtics and Orlando Magic, has handed away on the age of 42, as introduced by Ohio males’s basketball coach Jeff Boals on Tuesday. Hunter, initially a extremely regarded highschool basketball participant in Cincinnati, achieved vital success as a ahead for the Bobcats. He earned three first-team All-MAC convention alternatives and led the NCAA in rebounding throughout his senior season.”

“Hunter’s expertise led to his choice because the 56th general decide within the 2003 NBA Draft.
Throughout his NBA profession, he performed in 67 video games over two seasons and achieved a career-high of 17 factors in a recreation in opposition to the Milwaukee Bucks in 2004,” reports an apparent AI in an article that was yanked from MSN.com’s “community channel” called “Race Track.”

Like with Yahoo News, MSN is kind of a relic from the pre-social media age, an aggregator that reprints stories from other outlets – for example the home page’s top story is Bloomberg’s “Supreme Court Pauses Curbs on Biden Social Media Contacts” and there’s a Wall Street Journal article about Hunter Biden and so on and so forth. It’s not clear what the criteria qualifies a site as an MSN news “partner” but obviously it’s not too high since they carry The Hill, Mediaite, and RawStory articles.

And this “Race Track” AI nonsense. Now the channel’s page has a Portuguese URL that doesn’t lead to any site at all, which maybe kind of raises the possibility this was just a bad translation job. Really fucking bad, considerably worse and more awkward than Google Translate was 10 years ago. In what overly literal translation from a foreign language to English could “dead” become “useless”?

Disgraced former President Trump on Thursday filed a lawsuit against – yeah, the headline is correct, this is real – New York state Superior Court Judge Arthur Engoron, the jurist overseeing state Attorney General Leticia James’s $250 million suit against the Donald’s corrupt business empire that threatens to destroy his company, the Daily Beast reports on a very novel complaint.

Or suicidal if it doesn’t work. Trump is trying to force an “Article 78” proceeding against Engoron, claiming the judge “has yet to perform his lawful duty, Justice Engoron plans to proceed with the trial of the Attorney General’s claims on October 2, 2023 – just nineteen days from the date of this petition,” citing an appellate order for Engoron to exclude some older transactions from the scope of James’s case before the trial starts. Engoron has told Donald’s lawyers he’s working on it and will finish soon, but Team Orange doesn’t want to wait, especially after the judge recently tersely rejected their request to delay the trial by three weeks. It’s not clear how much merit there is to this complaint or if Trump is now even more fucked after it gets tossed and he’s still stuck with Engoron.

The Brazilian Supreme Court on Thursday sentenced a fan of disgraced former President Jair Bolsonaro to 17 years in prison for being part of the crowd who stormed the South American country’s Capitol back in January to protest the corrupt far right autocrat’s defeat against leftist then-former President Luiz Lula in the 2022 presidential election, the Associated Press reports.

Aécio Lúcio Costa Pereira, 51, who cops arrested on the day of the January 8th insurrection, is the first of several rioters facing time before the court to be sentenced. Pereira, charged with criminal association, staging a coup, violent attack on the rule of law, qualified damage, and destruction of public assets, was convicted on an 8-3 decision after being caught on tape waving a shirt and calling for a military coup in the middle of the Senate chamber while the place was sacked.

For those keeping score at home, Periera is only the first of an unknown number of Brazilian rioters to get tossed in the clink for their riot, but already his 17 year bid would rank third longest on the list of those who have been sentenced between the 2021 Washington, DC and 2023 Brasilia insurrections. Only Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio’s 22 years and Oath Keepers founder Stewie Rhodes’s 18 years are longer. In Brasilia there was no disruption to an ongoing transition as Lula had been sworn in a week earlier, no elected officials fled for their lives because it was on a Sunday so the Capitol was empty, and no cops or rioters were seriously hurt, let alone killed. Still, the very first Bolsonaro fan going down gets 17 years in what is surely a violent and squalid penal system.

Again, this is a lie. The “Blue Slip” is just a norm, not even an official statute, giving senators a veto over certain appointees serving in their state. The president still has to nominate them, and Trump did just that on November 17, 2017, announcing Weiss as among a slate of US Attorney and Marshal picks sharing “the President’s vision for ‘Making America Safe Again.’ Accordingly, the President today announced his intent to nominate these individuals to serve their respective jurisdictions.”

Of course if he didn’t try to lie about this to his fans, who don’t really understand how the federal government works, and bizarrely pretend that two Democratic Senators, then in the minority in the Senate, somehow unilaterally appointed and confirmed Weiss, then Trumpsters might be concerned their Messiah was indirectly responsible for Hunter Biden only facing 10 years in prison.

Next Trump wrote “This, the gun charge, is the only crime that Hunter Biden committed that does not implicate Crooked Joe Biden. One down, Eleven to go! The Democrats, with all of their horrible, very unfair, and mostly illegal Witch Hunts, have started a process that is very dangerous for our Country. They have opened the proverbial Pandora’s Box, and it is possible that the USA will never be the same again. SO SAD!!!” before screaming “THE DEMOCRATS MUST STOP INTERFERING WITH OUR UPCOMING 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION” in the next post on his lame Twitter clone.

A Delaware gun owner and Navy veteran was hit with two charges from a fascist Biden Regime prosecutor on Thursday for allegedly lying on his gun application about some drugs he did before he decided to turn his life around and sober up, CNN reports on another case of law enforcement being weaponized against patriots who simply want to exercise their God-given Second Amendment right.

“Today, Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom filed for a petition initiative to put the right to reproductive freedom on the ballot for Nevadans in 2024. The effort seeks to give Nevada voters an opportunity to codify their fundamental right to reproductive freedom in the state constitution after the loss of federal abortion protections in the summer of 2022. Advocates of the effort must collect 103,000 signatures by June 2024 in order to qualify for the ballot in November 2024. If passed next year by voters, the measure would automatically appear again on the 2026 general election ballot for final passage,” says a Thursday press release from Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom.

Expect a possible effort by Trump and Trump-aligned groups to try to oppose it. Not because of the politics of the measure – if anything they’re probably going to stay as far away from abortion as possible – but because having it on the same ballot is a serious threat to Donald’s path back to the White House. Nevada will be extremely tight in 2024 and anything that turns out pro-choice voters is a minus for MAGA. It might be marginally less of a motivator given Nevada isn’t anything like Texas or Arkansas in that there’s no current restrictions on abortion in the Silver State, per NARAL’s map.

The same can’t be said about neighboring Arizona, where a 15-week ban is now in effect and last month a coalition won approval to begin collecting the 383,923 signatures needed by July 3, 2024 to get a proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot. Trump reportedly freaked out ahead of the 2020 election over a legal weed measure in Arizona, fearing the effect on turnout. The measure passed by a far wider margin (655,018 votes) than Trump’s loss to Biden (10,457).

Last year’s abortion ballot measure in Michigan, which Republicans tried and failed to stop, was credited for helping Dems Gretchen Whitmer, Jocelyn Benson, and Dana Nessel run up the score over their MAGA opponents in the gubernatorial, Secretary of State, and Attorney General elections.

The Russian-backed Libyan warlord whose militia controls the region surrounding the now-ruined city of Derna, where as many as 20,000 people were killed in a massive dam burst during a torrential downpour on Monday, had overruled the mayor’s orders for citizens to evacuate the town, telling people to remain in their homes just hours before the deluge, the Wall Street Journal reports.

On Sunday Derna Mayor Abdul Moneem Al-Ghaithi posted an evacuation order on his Facebook page and directed excavators to start pushing boulders up to the shoreline to create a levee, as he mistakenly believed the flooding would have come from the sea as “Storm Daniel” approached the Mediterranean coastline. Haftar had other ideas, convening his cabinet for a meeting where they decided instead to order a curfew and a two-day holiday while the storm swamped the town. A text alert reading simply “Stay at home” then went out to locals, a message that was largely heeded.

Hours later the dams in a canyon upstream from Derna burst, sending an apocalyptic deluge into the city, killing thousands immediately. An NGO had warned on Saturday that the dams were in at serious risk of failure given the saturation of the soil holding them up. Though it does not appear either Al-Ghaithi or Haftar were aware of that danger specifically, Al-Ghaithi, the guy at least nominally responsible to voters tried to get people out of harm’s way. Then the asshole who took power by force and is responsible really only to the Russians decided he knew better.

Alcoholic white nationalist Steve Bannon on Thursday was, to put it gently, less than pleased with weak House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his “mouth breathing” minions Jim Jordan and James Comer, mostly ranting about the budget situation, but saving some hangover rage for the fecklessness with with they’ve run their Biden investigations. It’s a really entertaining meltdown.

Choice is back in Wisconsin as Planned Parenthood responded Thursday to a county judge’s ruling in an ongoing case challenging the 1849 prohibition that they’ll be offering the procedure again in anticipation that the new 4-3 liberal majority state Supreme Court will eventually concur with the ruling and abolish the antiquated law once and for all, the Associated Press reports.