One-time Trump lawyer turned defendant John Eastman has asked the US Circuit Court of Appeals to order the January 6th House Select Committee to destroy or return emails Eastman provided to it in accordance with a court order, but he asked the committee to not look at them until he appealed the lower court ruling, Politico reports.

A court order required Eastman to give the committee investigating the Republican-led domestic terrorist attack on Congress eight emails that U.S. District Court Judge David Carter characterized as likely describing a crime in which Eastman and Donald Trump committed.  Eastman had provided a link to the emails to the committee, but requested the committee not access the emails until Eastman filed an appeal of Carter’s ruling.

The committee decided to deny the request, saying the documents were turned over after the deadline and that Carter denied Eastman’s earlier request to reconsider.  Committee staffers accessed and downloaded the emails, Eastman said in a new court filing, but could destroy the information, a request that is unlikely to be granted by the court.

“I send my congratulations to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on his election to be the next president of Brazil following free, fair, and credible elections. I look forward to working together to continue the cooperation between our two countries in the months and years ahead,” wrote President Biden in a statement on Sunday, importantly solidifying US recognition of the victory. Fat former President Trump has yet to “congratulate” his buddy Jair Bolsonaro on his “win.”

Police searching the grounds of Paul and Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home found an unspecified number of zip ties after Paul Pelosi was held hostage and attacked by a QAnon believer demanding to see his wife, the Speaker of the House, NBC News reports.

Police have yet to specify why David DePape, a 42-year-old man from Berkeley, broke into the Pelosi house Saturday morning.  Paul Pelosi tricked the intruder into letting him use the bathroom, where he was charging his phone, allowing him to call police.  When officers arrived on scene, Pelosi and DePape were fighting for control of a hammer, which DePape got and used to strike Pelosi.  He had surgery Saturday for a fractured skull and injuries to his hand and arm; his doctors expect him to fully recover.

As the Washington Post reports, right-wing media and anarchist-minded individuals like Elon Musk continue to spread uninformed and debunked conspiracy theories regarding another violent attack by a follower of QAnon.  Musk retweeted a claim from a far-right blog claiming Paul Pelosi met his attacker at a gay bar and that this was a rendezvous gone wrong.  Others have claimed this was a false flag operation to help Democrats in the midterms.

Leading Brazilian Datafolha projects former Brazilian President Luiz Lula has defeated incumbent autocratic President Jair Bolsonaro, Reuters reports. Lula was sitting at a full percentage point lead with 90% of the vote tallied Sunday evening, according to an update from Bloomberg as they tracked an election that came much closer than had been expected over the course of the year and the first round in which Lula led with 48 percent to Bolsonaro’s 43 percent.

UPDATE 10/30/2022 6:59 PM EDT: Brazil’s electoral court has seen enough. Leftist former Brazilian President Luiz Lula defeats incumbent far-right fascist President Jair Bolsonaro.

This is a BIG notch on the old shillelagh for @NationalZeroUSA on Twitter. What prompted the block is unclear, as Greenwald’s fanboys piled on NZ in a Sunday morning melee that started when we challenged his “just asking questions” bullshit about Paul Pelosi getting his head smashed in with a hammer. It may have been far down thread when we responded to one of the MAGA tweeters who suggested suspect David DePape was a male prostitute hired by Pelosi with “Paul Pelosi is worth $120 million… If he is into gay escorts then why the hell would he picking up a 42 year old slob and not a 19 year old Brazilian hunk?” We should try to be a little more subtle when throwing shade.

The Brazilian Supreme Court justice who chairs the country’s election authority on Sunday ordered the head of the federal highway police department to answer widespread allegations his cops were gaming the election for fascist President Jair Bolsonaro by stopping buses driving voters to polling places in regions that heavily support his rival Luiz Lula, the New York Times reports.

Dozens of reports and images circulated on social media showed cops stopping people for questioning and setting up roadblocks across Brail’s northeast, a stronghold of support for the leftist former President Lula. Just for comparison, during the first round of the presidential election on Sunday, October 2nd, the patrol conducted 300 stops of buses on Brazil’s federal highways.

This Sunday, during the runoff, that number nearly doubled to 550 stops recorded, a source within the federal highway police that had access to real-time data told the Times on the condition of anonymity. Further raising alarms is the fact that the highway patrol chief, used his official Instagram account to urge people to vote for the far right incumbent. What a fucking asshole.

I just noticed – @elonmusk deleted his tweet about Paul Pelosi to Hillary.

Never cave to the leftist mob. NEVER!

— Catturd ™ (@catturd2) October 30, 2022

For context: On Sunday morning Elon Musk replied to Hillary Clinton’s tweet condemning the attack on Paul Pelosi with “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye” and a link to a story on a bullshit right wing website suggesting David DePape was actually a male escort hired by Pelosi. Never mind that the website, the Santa Monica Observer, once pushed a story that Hillary had been replaced by a body double during her 2016 debate with Trump, or that the Pelosi article said shitty Trump lawyer Harmeet Dhillon is the chair of the Republican National Committee. It’s just that since it said what the fanboys wanted to hear and that Musk walked it back is “caving to the left” in MAGAmerica.

Thousands of Italian fascists flocked to Benito Mussolini’s grave on Sunday, commemorating the 100th anniversary the dictator’s march on Rome, the AP reports. The crowd in Predappio, Mussolini’s birthplace and gravesite in Italy’s north, was estimated to be between 2,000 and 4,000, a much larger turnout than in previous years, likely owing to the centennial and the recent ascension of far-right, basically fascist, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. This, we remind readers, is now what’s happening in the same country that 77 years ago hung Mussolini’s corpse upside down at a gas station after he was executed. The body was then punched in the face so many times that the US military just had to take people’s word for it that the body was really Mussolini’s.

Fun fact: Learning of Mussolini’s fate was what drove Hitler over the edge. Just two days later he committed suicide, having ordered his troops to burn his body immediately afterward. They did, depriving the Soviets a chance to do the same thing or worse to Adolf. Supposedly they kept what was left in storage until the 1970s and then buried it somewhere in East Germany.

CBS News’s Battleground tracker update forecasts a 228-207 GOP House majority after the midterms at current trends, but ran a high youth-turnout scenario into their model, finding that Dems would hang on to a 218-217, single seat majority in the chamber if voters 18-30 turn out on election day at the same levels they did in 2018. “We ran our estimates through a turnout model in which younger voters turn out in much higher numbers than our baseline model indicates, bailing Democrats out late in the game. This would run counter to what we’ve seen in recent weeks, both from what young voters tell us in surveys and from early ballot returns, but it isn’t impossible. It’s more akin to what happened four years ago, with voters under 45 and people of color voting in droves,” writes CBS’s election jargon egghead team.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586693291231178753

Voters in Brazil head to the polls Sunday for the hotly contested runoff election between fascist autocrat current President Jair Bolsonaro and former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva after Lula took 48% of the vote to Bolsonaro’s 43% in the first round on October 2, the AP reports.

Typically the candidate who leads in the first round ends up winning the runoff in Brazil, but Sao Paulo Mackenzie Presbyterian University political scientist Rodrigo Prando won’t rule out Bolsonaro closing the gap against Lula. “Politically, Bolsonaro is stronger than had been imagined. Mathematically, Lula is in front,” said Prando. For his part Bolsonaro hedged against a possible loss by continuing his “Stop the Steal”-style bullshit which definitely helped land him an endorsement from his hero, disgraced former US President Trump.

Asked by an Israeli reporter to comment on his anti-Semitic attacks on Democratic Pennsylvania gubernatorial nominee Josh Shapiro–claiming Shapiro sending his children to a religious school meant he didn’t “like the rest of us” (paraphrasing), and his association with white nationalist, anti-Semitic platform Gab, for example–GOP nominee Doug Mastriano hesitates at the microphone, so his wife, Rebecca, steps in… with a doozy:

“I-I would like to make a comment on this,” Rebecca starts as Doug happily avoids the issue of his anti-Semitism.  “Y’know, I-I’m just gonna say this as a family, we so much love Israel, and I’m gonna say we probably love Israel more than a lot of Jews do, I do have to say that because, and the reason that I say that is because I’ve given and done, we’ve given for (huff) at least ten years to outreach to Israel and Jerusalem.  Um, we have, I have visited, uhm, Israel, um, we say for five years.  We’re just an average family.  We’re not wealthy, wealthy people.”

Pro-Israel does not necessarily mean you’re not anti-Semitic, particularly when you’re one of the so-called “christian” sect who thinks Israel must exist before your savior re-enters the picture riding on the back of a white stallion and handing out Starbucks gift cards or something.

King Misuzulu Sinqobile kaZwelithini, known as Misuzulu Zulu, officially assumed the crown of the Zulu nation, becoming the ninth monarch in the first coronation since South Africa became a democracy in 1994, the BBC reports.  The ceremony also marks the official recognition of his reign by the South African government.

The 48-year-old Misuzulu succeeds King Goodwill Zwelithini kaBhekuzulu, who ruled the nation for 53 years.  While Misuzulu is Goodwill’s third oldest son, he is the first son of Goodwill’s Great Wife, Queen Mantfombi Dlamini, who died last year one month after her husband’s death.  Misuzulu’s status as heir to the crown had been negotiated among the various houses.

The first King of the Zulus was Shaka Zulu, who united various tribes in southern Africa in 1816, turning the nation into a warrior people and shifting warfare among tribes from largely ceremonial practices with minimum loss of life to full warfare leading to the massacre of enemies.

The 75-year-old man who held the dubious distinction of being the oldest person still held at Guantanamo Bay by the US military was released and returned to Pakistan after nineteen years of imprisonment, CBS News reports.

Legally living in the United States at the time of his capture, Saifullah Paracha was captured by US forces in 2003 after being lured to Thailand with the promise of business meeting with executives from the retail store Kmart; he was kidnapped in Thailand, flown to Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan and then transferred to Gitmo.

Paracha was never charged with a crime.  US officials claim he had met Osama bin Laden as part of a Pakastani delegation and helped to facilitate financial transactions for al Qaeda.

There’s been a marked shift and escalation in the types of threats and violence facing political leaders and officials since the start of the 2020 election season, much of it encouraged by Republican leaders who will not accept the fact that Donald Trump lost his reelection bid by a wide margin.

According to Capitol Police, more than 8,000 threats to members of Congress were reported in 2020, nearly 10 times the amount in 2016, prior to Trump coming into office, the Los Angeles Times reports.  Like the shooting of Democrat Congresswoman Gabby Gifford in 2011 or the 2017 attack on Republicans playing baseball–both of which done by men with mental health issues–these incidents are included without regard to the Party of the victim or the supposed motive of the attacker.  The list below shows threats of violence that went beyond mere threats.

2020:  Angry about various things they didn’t like, an anti-government militia planned to kidnap Democratic Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, hold a show trial, and then execute her.  Three men were recently convicted for their roles in the plot.

November 2020:  numerous threats against local elections officials throughout the country, including two Virginia men traveling to Philadelphia to disrupt the vote count being undertaken by local elections officials.

Officials in Seoul say at least 146 people are dead and 150 injured after an apparent stampede on narrow street packed with Halloween party revelers, the AP reports. Seoul Fire Chief Choi Seong-beom warned the death toll could further rise as personnel continue to assess the scene.

Local media indicated the crowd may have rushed due to rumors that an unidentified celebrity was hanging out at a bar in the Itaewon district. More than 100,000 revelers may have been out as Saturday was the first Halloween weekend since COVID restrictions on partying were eased. The victims were mostly people in their 20s and 30s, with foreigners of various nationalities among the dead and injured. It is the second incident of mass deaths in a crowd this month in Asia, as more than 125 people died October 1st in a stampede in Indonesia as they tried to flee a massive brawl between rival soccer hooligan gangs at a match in Malang, East Java.

Four years ago this week MAGAmerica was feeling a lot of heat coming from the left. Though the economy was doing pretty well because of the ongoing recovery Trump had inherited from Obama, the Mueller Investigation still loomed over the White House, as did the public backlash from their quasi-genocidal abuses of migrants on the southern border. Democrats were crushing it in generic congressional ballot polls and turnout was on its way to hitting then-historic levels for a midterm election, while Russian trolls and right wing media were working around the clock to hype up the “caravans” of migrants headed through Northern Mexico toward the border and those lame #JobsNotMobs and #WalkAway hashtags in a desperate bid to avert electoral catastrophe. Trump, in his panic over realizing that a Dem House meant impeachment (he was right), had even said he wanted to end birthright citizenship, as if he could just abrogate the 14th Amendment.

In the midst of this high tension came the MAGA Bomber. First one to George Soros. Then the next day to Hillary Clinton. Then Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Maxine Waters, CNN, so on and so forth as an incompetent right wing terrorist who couldn’t even build a working explosive sent at least 16 packaged bombs to the targets he meant to kill. Or just wanted to scare them. Who knows.

The White House blocked the promotion to four-star general for the Army officer who questioned sending National Guard troops to the Capitol during an emergency conference call on January 6th because he worried about the optics of military in Washington, DC, the Washington Post reports.

Although his promotion was endorsed by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, and General James McConville, the Army’s top officer, the White House denied the promotion of Lt. General Walter E. Piatt, the director of the Army staff.  Piatt was up for the promotion as part of a plan to take over the Army Future Command, a joint military-private industry effort to advance technology used on the battlefield.  In September, the White House nominated Lt. General James Rainey for the position, and he was quickly approved by the Senate.

Piatt participated in a conference call with civilian and military leaders as Republican-led domestic terrorists attacked Congress to prevent the certification of Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election.  Civilian leaders beseeched the Pentagon to send troops to reinforce police on the scene, but according to testimony by then-Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, Piatt claimed he couldn’t make the recommendation to deploy the Guard to his superior because it would be a bad look for the country.

Apparently feeling like he or she had something to prove to the world, a young bar-tailed godwit flew 8,435 miles non-stop in 11 days, taking off from the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta on the Bering Sea in Alaska to the Australian island of Tasmania, the AP reports. The cry for attention was recorded by a team of researchers who had attached a tiny solar-powered GPS tracker to the bird’s leg shortly after it hatched in April or May. The feathered attention whore took flight on October 13th, cruised over the Aleutians, then turned southeast towards Kiribati and New Caledonia, then past the Australian mainland, before touching down in Tasmania on the 24th, rubbing it in the faces of not just other birds, but animals that can’t even fly at all. What a dick.