Fat former President Trump’s lawyers were present at a sealed hearing before DC Circuit Judge Beryl Howell on Friday, at which Politico legal reporter Kyle Cheney says they may have been held in contempt by the judge for failing to comply with the DOJ subpoena for the Mar-a-Lago docs.

“It’s entirely possible that Donald Trump is currently in contempt of court but no one knows because it’s all under seal,” Cheney wrote, with his colleague at Politico Josh Gerstein separately adding that a media lawyer was barred from the hearing, which according to the Washington Post’s Thursday reporting was indeed over whether the 2020 election loser should be held in contempt of court for failing to comply with the May 2022 subpoena for the documents he stole from the White House.

UPDATE 12/9/2022 4:57 PM EST: Judge Howell declined to hold Trump in contempt.

“The FBI investigating the FBI ?”

– The current top comment on the Gateway Pundit article “FBI Reportedly Investigating at Least Five Electricity Substation Attacks in Washington and Oregon Similar in North Carolina,” posted Friday.

The Kremlin offered to release Paul Whelan along with Brittney Griner in exchange for Viktor Bout and Vadim Krasikov, a former Russian colonel currently serving a life sentence for murder in Germany, CNN reports. The Biden Administration had offered a list of names of other Russians jailed in the US for Whelan, but the Kremlin had insisted on Krasikov, even though obviously it’s not the US’s decision what Germany does to their prisoners.

European upstart Croatia ousted the Yankees of international soccer, Brazil, in the World Cup in one of the biggest upsets in the tournament’s history.  Croatia and Brazil were tied in regulation at the end of regulation in the quarterfinal round, with Croatia winning on penalty kicks.

Right wing fanboy pollster Rasmussen Reports definitely fucked something up on Thursday as their daily presidential approval tracking poll finds President Biden hitting 50 percent, the highest it’s been since the last time it cracked the halfway mark in July 2021.

Biden’s approval has sunk as low as 36 percent in the MAGA-biased tracking poll for which his disgraced predecessor would celebrate every time they managed to show his approval at 51 or 52 percent. Special thanks to Political Polls on Twitter for posting this one. We would not have seen it otherwise since Rasmussen’s account blocked National Zero at some point in the fall of 2020.

Roads in Anchorage are slowly being cleared two days after a devastating snowstorm which dumped between one and two feet of snow on Alaska’s largest city, Anchorage Daily News reports.

Public schools in the city are still closed on Friday due to the blizzard-like conditions and lack of snow-clearing equipment available to clear the roads from the frozen precipitation. Again, this is in Alaska, the only one of 50 states which is crossed by the Arctic Circle.

An undated incident report from corrections officers inside the DC jail block where dozens of MAGA insurrectionists are being held details an attempt at inciting another mini-insurrection from inside their wing of the facility. “The inmates are yelling and screaming calling me a bitch, calling me by my first name as an intimidation tactic, yelling that I am racist and the inmates inside their cells are now banging and screaming from their cells. Everything is getting out of control at this point,” wrote an unnamed corrections officer, who we’re going to go ahead and assume is Black as he’s being called a “racist” by the perpetual victim Caucasian Trump fans under his charge.

The report then details a lengthy struggle to restrain the angry, chair-wielding inmates with chemical spray before backup arrived to force the miserable red-hatters were forced back into their cells. Named in the report are defendants Ronnie Sandlin (who already pleaded guilty and is being sentenced sometime within the next few hours), Ryan Nichols, Ronald Mcabee, and Barton Shivley.

Hey @GOPLeader, @EliseStefanik did you guys see this?

It’s now deleted because I’m sure @RepGosar expects to be disciplined…. Right? pic.twitter.com/p3TSaIy9Dz

— Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱 (@AdamKinzinger) December 9, 2022

Some attention-whoring woman needs attention, so she decided to “shake things up” and get more attention for herself after it became clear she wouldn’t be getting as much attention as she used to, Politico reports. All the other big websites reported it so we should too, we guess.

Most South Koreans will officially become younger as the government consolidates three different methods for calculating one’s age used in Korean culture, NBC News reports, resulting in people dropping as many as two years off.

In Korean culture, people commonly calculate their age by starting at Age 1 at birth and then adding one year every January 1st.  For purposes such as drinking ages and driving ages, people start at Age 0 at birth and add a year every January 1st.  In the health care industry, patients’ ages are calculated the most common international way, with the actual birthday.

Starting in June 2023, the international method will be used on all official government documents across all levels of administration, with implementation starting in some areas as soon as everyone’s cultural “Yay, We’re All One Year Older” Day, which must be a helluva weekend at South Korean bars:  New Year’s Eve, then New Age Year for Everyone back-to-back.

“I’m gonna take it farther.  I think the shadowbanning actually could have–well, did, y’know, a few steps removed, i-it led to deaths,” skinwalker-adjacent Fox hostess Laura Ingraham rants without evidence at some doctor who thinks this is the worst Tinder date ever.  “I mean, I think kids, because of these lockdowns, the mental health evidence that is piling up now all across the country.  Suicide, depression, anxiety, self-harm.  Everything we’re seeing that came out of those lockdowns– we couldn’t talk about it without being suppressed.  You were called a conspiracy theorist and so was I.”

Here’s the thing Ingraham doesn’t acknowledge:  the lockdowns saved lives–and unlike Ingraham, we’ve provided evidence–and people knew that the unique situation was going to lead to problems of various kinds going forward.  You know what didn’t save lives?  The bungling of the pandemic by the Trump administration and the reckless disregard for human life displayed by people like Abbott and DeSantis.

In the largest spills on the continental US in nearly a decade, more than half a million gallons of oil leaked from the Keystone Pipeline in Kansas, just south of the Nebraska border, contaminating a creek that ran by the pipeline site, Reuters reports.

Equivalent to about 14,000 barrels, the leak constitutes a small portion of the overall volume the pipeline, that carries more than 600,000 barrels per day from Alberta, Canada to the Gulf Coast of Texas.

This is the third large spill measuring thousands of barrels of oil to hit the 2,100-mile pipeline since it opened in 2010.  The cause of the leak is unknown.

The Republican Florida legislator who crafted GOP Governor Ron DeSantis’s infamous “Don’t Say Gay” bill that promotes homophobia has resigned from the state house after his indictment on federal fraud charges, the Miami Herald reports.

Rep. Joe Harding of Ocala was charged with using two defunct companies that he once owned to falsely apply for $150,000 in pandemic assistance for the companies that had no revenue and no employees.  He was removed from his committee assignments on Wednesday, and announced his retirement, effective immediately, Thursday.

“If my time in the Legislature was meant, by Providence, to only be two years, I can say with confidence that I left it all on the field for those two years,” he said, apparently forgetting that it was not Providence but pure greed that cut his term short.

Low information voters aren’t bad people for the most part. They’re by and large good Americans who work or study too hard to stay on top of all this shit political junkies like us and our readers obsess over day in and day out. They’re still frustrating as hell. If you’re a liberal you’ve no doubt spent much of the last six years ripping your hair out hearing dumb shit like “Didn’t Hunter Biden take lots of money from some bad guys in Japan or something?” from the mouths of the uninformed.

Get your hot takes here

For most of the last two years there was this ever-present fear that the Republican Party and their MAGA media universe would capitalize on real inflation plus fake culture war grievances to crush the Democrats in the midterms with a 2010-style Red Wave, taking 60+ seats in the House and sweeping all of the swing state Senate, governor, attorney general, and secretary of state races. The warning signs were certainly there, despite signs of momentum for Dems over the summer.

The Iranian government conducted its first known execution of a protestor arrested during the demonstrations for women’s rights, prompted by the death of a 22-year-old Kurdish woman arrested for showing too much of her hair, NBC News reports.

American and European leaders called their Iranian ambassadors to admonish them after learning of the death by hanging of Mohsen Shekari, the first of eleven people sentenced to death to be executed for their participation in the demonstrations.  Iranian officials say Shekari injured a militiaman with a machete; he was convicted of “waging war against God.”

Attorneys for the US Department of Justice have asked a federal judge to hold Donald Trump’s team in contempt of court for submitting to the court false sworn statements that their client had returned all classified documents to the government, the Washington Post reports.

Citing various false statements the lawyers attested to claiming that all appropriate documents had been returned and to increasing reticence with which the Trump side have been responding to requests, prosecutors asked U.S. District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell to hold lawyers representing the former president in contempt for repeatedly misleading the court.

Trump’s cabal took issue with the request, with the Mar-a-Lago Mussolini’s spokesperson asserting against reality that they “continue to cooperative and transparent… This is a political witch hunt unlike anything like this country has ever seen,” when Trump lawyers have signed a series of documents claiming all government and/or classified documents had been returned only to have FBI agents or independent investigators find more classified documents, as happened yesterday.

UPDATE 12/8/2022 4:48 PM EST: In very much related news, Politico’s Kyle Cheney reports the one week stay for Trump to appeal the 11th Circuit Court’s decision overturning MAGA Judge Aileen Cannon’s appointment of a special master has ended and with it Judge Raymond Dearie’s review. Props to Judge Dearie for stepping up to the pointless job and taking no shit from Trump’s lawyers.

Asked by Dem Congressman Eric Swalwell if he denounces the House Judiciary GOP’s moronic “Kanye. Elon. Trump.” tweet, House Judiciary GOP leader Jim Jordan panicked and lied, saying “That tweet was not our account,” as if it hasn’t been fucking obvious from the beginning that the spandex-wearing grapple freak operates that account and writes all the tweets.

The dispersal of educated professionals in remote work-friendly jobs from cities out into suburban, exurban, and rural areas during the COVID-19 pandemic helped stem the bleeding for Democrats in the House in 2022, according to a new analysis by George Mason University political scientist Justin Gest in Politico. And yeah, Gest also mentions the disproportionately high deaths from the virus among Republican voters after the vaccines became widely available.

“Data from the U.S. Postal Service and Census Bureau shows how the pandemic drove urban professionals who were able to work remotely – disproportionately Democrats – out of coastal, progressive cities to seek more space or recreational amenities in the nation’s suburbs and Sun Belt. This moved liberals out of electoral districts where Democrats reliably won by large margins into many purple regions that had the potential to swing with just small changes to the map. And because partisan gerrymanderers carved up new districts before the extent of pandemic mobility data was understood, they could not neutralize the population shifts,” Gest writes.

Not really that much of surprise considering Donald told his fanboys Clay Travis and Butt Sexton in an interview back in July that Griner basically deserved it. “She knew you don’t go in there loaded up with drugs… It certainly doesn’t seem like a very good trade, does it?” he said.

The Supreme Court of The United Kingdom on Thursday upheld a Northern Ireland law banning the presence of pro-forced birthers from a 100-meter radius of any abortion provider, Fox News reports.