“Early this morning, an assailant broke into the Pelosi residence in San Francisco and violently assaulted Mr. Pelosi. The assailant is in custody and the motivation for the attack is under investigation. Mr. Pelosi was taken to the hospital, where he is receiving excellent medical care and is expected to make a full recovery. The Speaker was not in San Francisco at the time. The Speaker and her family are grateful to the first responders and medical professionals involved, and request privacy at this time,” says a Friday press release on the attack from Pelosi’s office.

We’re going to give it 3:2 odds that the attacker is a homeless drug addict over MAGA scumbag. If it’s a homeless person then the right wing media are going to run wild as it fits into their “exploding crime rate” propaganda, but if it was politically motivated then they’ll say nothing. Maybe a little bit about how it was somehow justified or whatever, but not much beyond that.

Dipshit MAGA Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson told his fans this week not to vote early – or maybe not vote at all – if their county clerk is not a Republican, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports.

“I would recommend early voting if you have a Republican election clerk,” Johnson said during a virtual town hall Monday night in a clip which was tweeted by lefty news outlet Heartland Signal on Thursday. “I’m not sure I would recommend a Republican go vote in Milwaukee. I don’t know about the bipartisan observation of those early votes. It might be possible,” Johnson added.

RonAnon’s campaign tried to play it off like he was just joking. “Obviously the senator meant that as a tongue-in-cheek comment,” Johnson spokesworm Alexa Henning said, probably after realizing her asshole boss depressing his own turnout in Blue counties could actually end up making the difference between winning and losing to challenger Dem Lt Gov Mandela Barnes.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says his country’s military has downed 23 of 30 or so Iranian Shahed drones launched by Russia in the past two days, Bloomberg reports. Also, per Zelensky, Ukrainians have shot down a Kh-59 cruise missile, two Ka-52 attack helicopters and another Su-25 fighter jet over the same period. Over 4,500 missile strikes and 8,000 air-raids have been carried out on Ukraine since the beginning of its invasion in late February.

Fascist MAGA lawyer John Eastman, already under federal criminal investigation for his role helping fat former President Trump in the failed attempt to overthrow American democracy after the 2020 election, is at it again in New Mexico, as a recording obtained by Politico shows him coaching “poll watchers” on how to challenge ballots and meddle in voting on election day next month.

“Document what you’ve seen, raise the challenge. And [note] which of the judges on that election board decline to accept your challenge. Get it all written down,” said Eastman at a meeting last week. “That then becomes the basis for an affidavit in a court challenge after the fact,” he added, obviously planning a self-sustained feedback loop of fake “irregularities.”

Anticipating a cold winter and sky high fossil fuel costs for heating, suppliers of firewood in Europe are cranking up prices amid a surge in demand – and thefts – the AP reports.

Remember “the Right Stuff,” the dating app run by the sister of former White House Binder Barbie Kayleigh McEnany catering to closed-minded conservatives?  Well, they have a new ad out, and apparently, they’ve pivoted to become an app to help sleeplessness.  Oh my gawd, it looks so boring.  Besides the rampant transphobia, there’s really nothing attractive about any of this for anyone…. except people who splurge on mayonnaise.  I mean, this make beige look exciting.

“Think Bi– Think Biden can do that?” notorious cheater Donald Trump blares after what was likely a shot following four mulligans and a “practice swing.” “I don’t think so.” Once again, Donald Trump demonstrates he has no idea what skills are needed to lead a nation.

Also News:  Kanye West runs a school!  (Or, ran.)

Donda Academy, a Los Angeles school run by temperamental presidential candidate and artist Kanye West, abruptly shut down Wednesday “at the discretion of [its] founder, the Times of London reports.

The pre-K through 12th grade school, which charged an annual tuition of $15,000, has around 13 teachers and 100 students.  School administrators sent an email to students’ parents Wednesday reading “at the discretion of our founder, Donda Academy will close for the remainder of the 2022-2023 school year effective immediately. … There is no school [Thursday].”

None of the four children the celebrity, who wants to be called Ye, has with reality TeeVee star Kim Kardashian attend the school.  Parents who send their children to the school sign a confidentiality agreement about the academy’s operations and activities.

Yay! Free Speech! Woo!

Great Britain’s Royal Mint has started striking its first currency featuring King Charles III:  a 50-pence coin that will start distribution in December.  It’s the first piece of UK currency not featuring the King’s late mother, Queen Elizabeth, since 1953.  The coin features a portrait of the King, which helps to cut down on the width of a coin needed if it were a head-on shot.  The reverse is a designed used on a coin issued to commemorate the Queen’s coronation in 1953.

The DC Circuit Court affirmed a three-judge panel’s decision that Donald Trump cannot block the House Ways & Means Committee from obtaining his tax returns as part of the Committee’s authority to research government policy, NBC News reports.

“The law has always been on our side. Former President Trump has tried to delay the inevitable, but once again, the Court has affirmed the strength of our position,” Neal said. “We’ve waited long enough—we must begin our oversight of the IRS’s mandatory presidential audit program as soon as possible.”

The House Ways and Means Committee has been attempting to get Trump’s returns from the Internal Revenue Service to proceed with a number of different probes, including why the agency had such a difficult time auditing Trump’s taxes, which Trump himself had promised to release as long ago as 2015, but claimed they were constantly under audit.  In reality, Trump could have released them himself.

“It’s on everybody’s radar screen.  Everybody’s concerned.  I mean, pe-people are afraid to rele- to leave their homes to go geh, get prescription drugs,” suspected Russian agent and insurrection abettor Ron Johnson (Q-WI) tells bloated talking walrus John Solomon.  “You hear that from seniors, so….  Skyrocketing crime is front and center, together with inflation and record gas prices.”  [Editor’s note:  Gas prices hit a record high in June and dropped for nearly 100 straight days, and are now 33% below the peak.]

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron are so concerned that Joe Biden’s programs to attract, keep and support companies in the United States will successfully encourage investment, they’re planning countermeasures to protect European businesses, Politico reports.

While the previous administration’s policies sought to inflict wounds on foreign industries in a massive trade war that failed miserably, Biden crafted bills like the Inflation Reduction Act and various infrastructure bills to attract foreign companies to grow their operations in the United States.  The IRA also incentives companies and consumers to buy American-made products–particularly in the growing renewable energy and electric car markets–putting European-made products at a disadvantage both intra- and internationally.

As inflation nearly double that of the US hits across Europe–’cause y’know Bidenflation is global–the leaders of the European Union’s two largest economies met for a three-hour lunch in Paris that included wine, fish and Champagne.

The House January 6th Select Committee is looking to conduct some more interviews with Secret Service personnel, including Tony Ornato and Bobby Engel, the two Trump loyalists who were supposed to be voluntarily coming in to testify again to “debunk” Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony about Donald’s presidential SUV meltdown but strangely never did, CBS News reports.

Disgraced former President Trump is having trouble deciding on a nickname for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to use when their ongoing cold war inevitably turns hot, stuck on whether “Potato Boy” or “Fat Ron” will be his verbal his weapon of choice, Huffington Post’s SV Date reports.

A massive deluge of tumbleweeds covered a Colorado Springs-area couple’s property this week, with piles of the spherical balls of dead xeric vegetation towering as much as 12 feet high blocking the driveway and doors of the home, ABC News reports. “It’s a horrible situation,” said El Paso County woman Marlies Gross. “Like a horror movie… It’s very eerie and very creepy.” High winds with gusts of up to 60 miles an hour are almost certainly the real cause, but that’s not as much fun as baselessly speculating that the tumbleweeds somehow developed a taste for human flesh but haven’t figured out yet how to open the door to overwhelm the Grosses while they’re sleeping.

Georgia man Mark Andrews, who was falsely portrayed as a “mule” in footage used to “prove” Dinesh D’Souza’s bullshit movie “2000 Mules” about a fake plot to steal the 2020 election from disgraced former President Trump, on Wednesday filed a federal defamation complaint against D’Souza and his partners in the film, Gregg Phillips and Catherine Engelbrecht of “True the Vote.”

Andrews asserts he was simply dropping off he and his family’s ballots, hence why he had more than one, and an investigation by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation found no evidence otherwise. The complaint is 123 pages and appears to be extremely well-sourced. In other words Andrews is not fucking around and some heavy hitters are working the case anticipating a big payout.

In a development that no one could have predicted unless they weren’t fucking stupid, the new hand count of ballots policy in rural Nye County, Nevada has been a total shitshow, as volunteers struggle to come up with matching totals on repeated counts of just 1,950 votes received so far in the county, a hotbed of MAGA conspiracy bullshit about Dominion and what not, the AP reports.

The county ended the day having counted just 900 of the 1,950 ballots received. An AP reporter watched for three hours as two groups of five volunteers sat there and struggled to count just 50 ballots correctly, counting again and again as their totals mismatched. I can’t believe it’s two hours to get through 25 [ballots],” one volunteer said. “It was a process of learning here,” interim Nye County Clerk Mark Kampf said in an interview. Yeah, Kampf really is his name.

Nye County has over 50,000 residents and turnout hit 17,557 in the 2018 midterms, back when presumably they trusted tabulation machines to do the counting. Crunching the numbers at the current pace and assuming a similar turnout to 2018, they should have all the ballots counted sometime around November 13th. If everything goes smoothly and there’s no MAGA-on-MAGA violence between angry local Republican voters and the right wing “election integrity” volunteers doing the count amid a heated fight over the results. That’s crazy talk though.

A suspect has been arrested in connection to the Tuesday break-in at Dem Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs’s campaign headquarters in Phoenix, Fox 10 reports. No details on the suspect have been revealed yet, so fingers crossed our preexisting biases about motive are confirmed.

Lawyers representing disgraced former President Trump argued with the Justice Department over something related to the Mar-a-Lago docs investigation in a sealed court hearing on Thursday, CNN reports, having spotted Trump lawyers James Trusty, Evan Corcoran and Lindsey Halligan, and prosecutor Julie Edelstein headed into Judge Beryl Howell’s courtroom in the morning.

Reporting by Politico and the New York Times appears to indicate that the sealed hearing has something to do with the DOJ’s push to force shitty children’s book author Kash Patel to testify under oath on what makes him believe that Donald ever actually officially declassified the top secret documents he stole from the White House following his humiliating defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Like really declassified them, not just thinking about having declassified them. Patel reportedly did not answer any such questions and pleaded the Fifth in recent testimony.