“A former U.S. Congressional candidate was sentenced today to 30 months in prison for his scheme to use COVID-19 relief funds for personal expenditures and filing a false report with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) by concealing thousands of dollars of in-kind contributions by employees. Nicholas Jones, 36, of Boise, Idaho, pleaded guilty to wire fraud and falsification of records on June 1. In addition to the prison sentence, Jones was also ordered to pay a $100,000 fine and $90,564.84 in restitution. According to court documents, Jones was a small business owner who applied for and received $753,600 in COVID-19 relief funds, primarily from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program.”

“Despite certifying that the funds would only be used for business-related expenditures, Jones used a significant portion of these funds for personal expenses, including car payments, life insurance policies, and political advertisements. According to court documents, in 2020, Jones ran as a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives and told employees of his small business that they could continue to be paid their normal wages if they worked on his congressional campaign. Employees reported to work on behalf of Jones’s congressional campaign and were paid thousands of dollars in wages through Jones’s small business including, in part, with funds Jones had received as part of a PPP loan. After losing the primary election, Jones caused his campaign committee to file a campaign finance report with the FEC that omitted any in-kind contributions from any entity or individual other than Jones, including the thousands of dollars of in-kind contributions to his campaign in the form of employee time and work,” says a Justice Department press release. Jones co-founded a fast food chain called “Good Burger” which we guess is named after the 1990s Nickelodeon skit and movie starring Kenan Thompson and Kel Mitchell. Kind of lame.

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump
Who’s this Clinton appointed “Judge,” David Carter, who keeps saying, and sending to all, very nasty, wrong, and ill informed statements about me on rulings, or a case (whatever!), currently going on in California, that I know nothing about – nor am I represented. With that being said, please explain to this partisan hack that the Presidential Election of 2020 was Rigged and Stolen. Also, he shouldn’t be making statements about me until he understands the facts, which he doesn’t!

1,904 6,275 Oct 20, 2022, 10:05

Donald is correct when he says he’s not being represented in this case in which fascist coup attempt lawyer John Eastman sued the House January 6th Select Committee to hide the emails they sought in a subpoena. But that’s on him as it’s been going on since January 2022 and he could at any point have at least tried to join as a plaintiff alongside Eastman. Sucks for him.

The Department of Justice has told Congress they need more funding to track down and prosecute the hundreds of MAGA insurrectionists who have been identified by online volunteers but have yet to be arrested, NBC News reports. More than 870 of the rioters have been arrested and charged since the failed coup attempt, but that represents only a fraction of the thousands estimated to have entered restricted Capitol grounds during the attack, and the DOJ estimates it needs at least $34 million to pay for more attorneys to process the workload. The window for securing more funding would probably be closed with a House GOP majority taking over in January, so it’s on Democrats to get it done before the end of the year by attaching it to the annual spending bill.

Election data eggheads TargetSmart have modeled the numbers for early and absentee vote turnout by party and determined that, as of Wednesday afternoon, 55.7% of early ballots nationally have been cast by Dems, 33.5% by Republicans, and 10.8% by unaffiliated voters. On their dashboard they compare this to the same point two years ago, showing that 20 days before the election 54.5% of early votes by Dems, 34% by Republicans, and 11.5% by unaffiliateds.

TargetSmart CEO Tom Bonier offered some tips on how to use the data, writing “The early vote is going to give us a decent indication of Dem enthusiasm (though not entirely, more on that soon) but not so much on GOP enthusiasm, since they are much more likely to vote on [election day]. The comparison to previous cycles is important and very imperfect. Almost every state has significantly expanded early voting access since ’18 and many have since limited access somewhat since ’20. So neither is a perfect point of reference… We have breakdowns by party registration and modeled partisanship. Party reg isn’t available in every state. We model party everywhere, but it is a model of self party ID, NOT a prediction of candidate preference. And comparing party models across years is difficult,” among other important caveats to think about when injecting hopium.

“Perhaps my most important note – these are not projections of outcomes or candidate vote totals. This is turnout data in the context of prior elections. We hope this will enhance your understanding of the electorate, but please take it in context,” Bonier concluded.

UK Prime Minister Liz Truss has resigned after just 45 days in office. The most remarkable part of her tenure besides the economic clusterfuck she exacerbated is that the other leader of the United Kingdom named Liz died after a much, much, much longer time at the helm.

The UK’s political clusterfuck continued Thursday as members of the “1922 Committee,” a group of Conservative MPs, told embattled Prime Minister Liz Truss she has hours left to figure out how to save her job before they move forward with a vote of no confidence in her leadership, CNN reports.

Journalist James Smartwood from upstart cable news network TOTN, or “Tooning Out the News,” actually got Herschel Walker of Texas, the GOP’s Senate candidate for Georgia’s seat, on the phone to assist him in investigating his stolen laptop, taken from his car the night before.  Walker says, “We’ll report your thing and all that stuff.” Smartwood, a real journalist in the same way Tucker Carlson is a real human being, gets the wannabe Senator to fire up a new episode of Walker, Texas Faker in the search for the missing item.  And yes, the Daily Beast confirmed that Walker himself did take the call.

Among 59 pages of text messages from former Senator Kelly “Left Eye” Loeffler’s obtained God knows how by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution are pleas from asshole Senator Ted Cruz and unfaithful wife Marjorie Taylor Greene trying to get Loeffler to object to Georgia’s electoral votes for Biden on January 6th, 2021. Another lowlight features Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s wife Tricia telling Left Eye “I hold you personally responsible for anything that happens to any of my family, from my husband, children and grandchildren,” after Loeffler and former Senator David “Chickenshit” Perdue publicly called on Brad to resign in the days after the 2020 election.

The House January 6th Select Committee have yet to formally deliver their subpoena to disgraced former President Trump as they haven’t been able to find one of his lawyers willing and authorized to accept service of the subpoena, ABC News reports. The fat bastard and his idiot son Eric had managed for weeks to avoid being served in New York Attorney General Leticia James’s $250 million lawsuit against them until servers finally caught up with them this week.

The Sean Hannity Telethon for Needy Multimillionaires finds us today in York, Pennsylvania, a town I spent a week in one afternoon, known for the York Peppermint Patty, York Barbells and little else.  But dog killing New Jerseyan Mehmet Oz, the GOP nominee for the Pennsylvania Senate seat, is trailing in the polls and Trump advisor Hannity needs to donate his hour of Fox airtime to Oz’s campaign.

Democratic Pennsylvania Senate nominee John Fetterman, the only Pennsylvanian in the race, released a letter from his personal doctor declaring, “He has no work restrictions and can work full duty in public office,” CBS News reports.

Dr. Clifford Chen of UPMC said Fetterman still has some effects of a stroke he suffered five months ago, but is overall healthy.  Fetterman uses a speech-to-text device at times due to an auditory processing difficulty, common among stroke patients, which short-circuits the brain’s processing of words.

“He spoke intelligently without cognitive deficits,” Chen wrote. “His speech was normal and he continues to exhibit symptoms of an auditory processing disorder which can come across as hearing difficulty. Occasional words he will ‘miss’ which seems like he doesn’t hear the word but it is actually not processed properly. His hearing of sound such as music is not affected.”

After the Fox graphics department apparently lost Georgia, it feels almost too cheap to note they misspelled the ethnicity of the people they claim to support, the Rwandans.  But the bigger issue is, how far down the fucking rabbit hole is Fox going to let Tucker Carlson go in his obvious race-baiting?  Seriously, if you want to start a race war, try to figure out spell-check first, ‘kay?

The Home Secretary in UK Prime Minister Liz Truss’s Cabinet resigned Wednesday after it was disclosed she sent a classified document to a member of Parliament using her personal email account–apparently safeguarding national secrets is still a thing in Britain–marking the second major departure from Truss’s new administration, the New York Times reports.

Truss addressed the issue at Wednesday’s prime minister’s questions in Parliament, during which Members taunted Truss with demands for her resignation.  “I’m a fighter and not a quitter,” Truss responded.

Suella Braverman, the former Home Secretary (equivalent to the Attorney General and DHS Secretary rolled into one), wrote in her resignation letter, “I have made a mistake; I accept responsibility; I resign,” an apparent reference to the earlier firing of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who implemented a harsh economic plan that sent the pound falling and rattled financial markets.

“Just hopin’ to clarify for midterm voters’ top domestic issue,” poster child for nepotism Peter Doocy drones.  “Inflation or abortion?”

“All important,” President Joe Biden asserts.  “Unlike you, there’s no ‘one thing.’ It crosses the board.  Domestic–  Ask me about foreign policy, too.  There’s multiple, multiple, multiple issues, and they’re all important.  And we ought to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.”

CNN reports that Donald Trump is considering allowing federal investigators to conduct a search of Mar-a-Lago to close the book on if more government documents–particularly classified documents–are stored illegally there.

The Department of Justice and the National Archives and Records Administration have stated in letters and in court filings that they believe Trump holds additional government documents although his lawyers have submitted sworn statements that they know of no documents at the overvalued Florida supper club where Trump sometimes sleeps.

Trump has claimed at various times that he’s given all the documents back (he didn’t); that he had an absolute right to possess the documents (he doesn’t); that all the documents were declassified (they weren’t); and that the FBI planted all the documents it recovered (it didn’t).

Although minorities made up the majority of early pandemic fatalities, the trend has turned:  current data show white people being the largest racial demographic for coronavirus deaths, largely due to having the greatest percentage of unvaccinated people.

In an analysis by the Washington Post, which looked at records concerning coronavirus deaths in the United States going back to April 2020, researchers found that white fatalities surpassed Black fatalities in October 2021 and stayed there, except for the period when the omicron variant swept through the country.

The spread of the virus in some ways dictated who would be infected:  the first waves impacted cities where minorities make up the majority of the population.  Now, according to the Post, Covid deaths have shifted significantly in primarily-white rural and suburban areas.

Sheriff’s department investigators in the town of Maple Grove, Wisconsin have said they won’t issue any tickets to the underage drinkers present at a bonfire party last Friday, a decision meant to encourage any witnesses to come forward with information about which one of them rolled a fucking 55-gallon drum full of diesel fuel into the fire, upon which it promptly exploded and injured more than at least 17 people, several of them critically, ABC 7 Chicago reports.

In a statement the sheriff’s office emphasized that catching the party animal who went overboard at the now definitely legendary rager is more important than citations. “We understand there may be some apprehension for some to meet with us based on the evidence of underage drinking, and although underage drinking is something law enforcement agencies take seriously, we can assure those who were there, that our detectives do not have intentions on issuing citations for this, as our main focus and concern is gathering the facts of this tragic event,” said the sheriff’s office.

Yeah, things aren’t going well in not so Great Britain’s politics these days as Prime Minister Liz Truss’s reign has gone to absolute shit and her party support evaporates.

In a story that’s got “FLORIDA” emblazoned all over it, a 73-year-old Florida Man and his underage 15-year-old Florida Son have been arrested for firing more than a dozen rounds at a woman who was sitting in her SUV looking at her phone who they thought was a thief trying to steal a package from their porch because a neighbor dropped off a delivery of medications that had been mistakenly left at his door.  Simple.  Got it?

Let’s go over the elements of this story from NBC News:  73-year-old Gino Colonacosta of Coral Gables, Florida got a Ring doorbell notification that someone was on his front porch Saturday morning around 7:30 a.m.  Watching the video footage, Colonacosta and his 15-year-old son–yes, our 73-year-old protagonist has a son too young to drive legally–jumped to the incorrect conclusion that they had caught a porch pirate on tape; in fact, the person caught by the camera was dropping off a medicine delivery that had been mistaken left at his door but was meant for the elder Colonacosta.

So in their early morning haze, Colonacosta and his underage son take guns to hunt down the suspected porch pirate who didn’t exist.  They reportedly didn’t call the police, but decided to be Florida Men and take the law into their own hands.

At least seven Floridians are dead and 28 more are sick with Vibrio vulnificus aka “flesh eating bacteria” infections in the areas affected by Hurricane Ian, as the nasty little bug seeps into minor wounds on people wading around in the floodwaters, the New York Times reports.

“When you have standstill water in environments such as tropical Florida, it creates a perfect cocktail for these bacteria to develop,” said Florida Health Department spokeswoman Jae Williams.