Hurricane Ian’s winds regained strength after departing Florida and heading north along the East Coast, heading toward a third landfall somewhere around Charleston, South Carolina Friday afternoon, CBS News reports.

Officials in the Charleston area are preparing for rainfall of up to twelve inches and significant storm surge in the Low Country.  The impact of the storm could reach as far south as Florida and as far north as the Delmarva Peninsula.

In Florida, more than 2.6 million people are still without power, and officials warn people that if they cannot get to safe ground or a shelter, to stay in their homes until they can be rescued because alligators and snakes are traveling the floodwaters into neighborhoods.  USA Today reports that at least fourteen people have been confirmed killed in Florida during the storm.

Host Trevor Noah announced during The Daily Show’s Thursday taping that he was leaving the show after a seven-year run, Variety reports.  The date of his departure was not disclosed.

A South African native who related his parents’ mixed-race marriage was illegal when he was born, Noah was a relative unknown when he took over the show after a dominating 17-year tenure by Jon Stewart.

The number of Americans who say they trust the Supreme Court fell 20 percentage points in the last two years, with only 47% saying they have a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust in the Supreme Court, USA Today reports.

The percentage of Americans who trusted the Court dropped by 13 percentage points in 2021, after Donald Trump and Senate then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pushed through the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett while voters were casting their ballots in the 2020 election.  In 2016, McConnell refused to recognize a SCOTUS nomination made by Barack Obama, saving the seat for the winner of the 2016 election because, McConnell claimed without merit, voters should decide the seat, which sat vacant for more than a year.

The poll also shows the public’s disapproval of the Court’s work, with only 40% stating they approved, down 18 percentage points from 2020.  Unsurprisingly, Republicans disproportionately supported the conservative-stacked Court.

Seven women and nine men were selected for the jury in the trial of Stewart Rhodes and four other members of the far-right nationalist paramilitary group the Oath Keepers facing charges of seditious conspiracy for their role in planning and executing an attack on the Capitol on January 6th, Reuters reports.

The jury, pulled from the voting registration rolls of Washington, DC, including people who work for the Departments of State and Homeland Security, as well as people who work in healthcare, a youth center worker and a government contractor.  Twelve members will make up the jury while the other will serve in reserve.  Opening arguments are expected on Monday.

Rhodes, Kelly Meggs, Thomas Caldwell, Jessica Watkins and Kenneth Harrelson also face charges of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and obstructing an official proceeding, charges which themselves carry a maximum 20 year prison sentence.

Two former senior executives at online retailer eBay were sentenced to jail for a sustained harassment and cyberstalking campaign against a Massachusetts couple who published a newsletter about e-commerce because eBay executives felt the newsletter disparaged the company, CNN reports.

The former senior director of safety and security Jim Baugh and former director of global resiliency David Harville were sentenced to 57 and 24 months in prison, respectively for the campaign, which directed eBay employees send David and Ina Steiner harassing emails and angry tweets, and to ship them a series of bizarre packages containing things like a bloody Halloween pig mask, a book on surviving the death of a spouse, and boxes of cockroaches.

Baugh, a former CIA employee, and Harville took to heart a message from then-eBay CEO Devin Wenig, who messaged another executive at the company that it was time to “take her [Ina Steiner] down” after the couple’s newsletter published something considering insulting and damaging to the company.  Wenig is not charged as part of the scheme and denies any knowledge of it.

A federal judge in Southern Indiana has tossed out a lawsuit brought by an Indiana man working for a libertarian think tank claiming that President Joe Biden’s plan to cancel up to $20,000 in federal student debt per loan holder violates the law.

Pacific Institute attorney Frank Garrison claimed that the forgiveness of his debt–he’s on Year 6 of a 10-year student loan payment plan, and the Biden loan forgiveness would erase his debt–would burden him because his home state, Indiana, taxes loan forgiveness as income, which would, Garrison claims, cause him irreparable harm because he would have to pay tax.  So because he would be inconvenienced to pay additional taxes, Garrison wanted the entire program scrapped.  (Curiously, on the Pacific Institute website, the rationale for the lawsuit is very different:  various claims that Biden and the Department of Ed don’t have authority to cancel the debt because something something Joe Biden declared the pandemic over and that the order referred to the wrong Act and it limits my personal liberties to not make me pay government-backed debt.

Judge Richard Young, a Clinton appointee, ruled that Garrison could not show an irreparable harm by the forgiveness of his debt because the Department has given loan holders the option to carry on paying their debt and opt out of the loan forgiveness program.

Political strategist predicts Trump-Clinton rematch in 2024 | Just The News https://t.co/ggW3rGdIv7

— John Solomon (@jsolomonReports) September 29, 2022

Federal Judge Alieen Cannon has again ruled in favor of her client, disgraced former President Trump, helping him escape from having to submit an affidavit on whether he agrees or disagrees with the FBI’s list of items seized from Mar-a-Lago just before Special Master Raymond Dearie’s deadline of Friday for the fat bastard’s legal team to “put up or shut up” once and for all in court on his assertion that the FBI planted evidence. She really came through for the Donald on this one.

“There shall be no separate requirement on Plaintiff at this stage, prior to the review of any of the Seized Materials, to lodge ex ante final objections to the accuracy of Defendant’s Inventory, its descriptions, or its contents. The Court’s Appointment Order did not contemplate that obligation; Defendant since has complied with the requirement to attest to its now-revised inventory; and the parties and the Special Master now are situated to proceed forward with the review process pending exchange of the actual materials. Should any additional matters surface during the Special Master’s review process that require reconsideration of the Inventory or the need to object to its contents, the parties shall make those matters known to the Special Master for appropriate resolution and recommendation to this Court,” Cannon wrote.

For all the Republican hype about a “good guy with a gun” and how more guns make people safer, somehow the guy in MacGregor, Texas shot and killed five people before being shot and taken into custody by police, KWTX CBS-10 in Waco reports.

Police responded to a call reporting a man had shot his wife and two children.  Upon arriving on the scene, they found the body of another woman lying in the street and a second body was found in a nearby home.

The site of murders is located two blocks away from a campus for the McGregory elementary and high schools, so the schools went on lock-down for around 15 minutes as police secured the area.

The company that produces paid rallies and events featuring appearances by Donald Trump reportedly hasn’t paid speakers, vendors and employees, according to the Washington Post, adding another victim to the “Everything Trump Touches Dies” roster.

The American Freedom Tour has canceled most upcoming paid events featuring Donald Trump because it’s been unable to secure venues and speakers are backing out of commitments because they haven’t been paid.  Some of the other speakers at the shows have been Candace Owens and screech owl Kimberly Giulfoyle.

Two top executives have left AFT, a Florida-based company that entered into an agreement with Trump to produce events after he left the White House.  According to sources, Trump made sure he got paid first so he is not at risk, but other speakers have not gotten checks for appearances. 

The Senate has passed a continuing resolution funding the federal government until December 16th when some other shitshow last minute thing will happen too, the Washington Post reports.

The US Department of Justice has indicted Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire and ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin who is subject to sanctions for Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014, for violating the sanctions to utilize US financial services, Reuters reports.

The DOJ alleges Deripaska sold a California music studio in 2019 for $3.1 million, using a naturalized Russian who lives in New Jersey named Olga Shriki, who is also charged in the case, to front the operation.  Shriki and another defendant, Natalia Bardakova, arranged for Deripaska’s lover, Ekaterina Voronina, to travel to the US in 2020 and earlier this year to give birth to two children fathered by Deripaska so the children could have US citizenship.

Following a briefing with FEMA officials on Hurricane Ian’s impact on Florida, President Biden gave brief remarks Thursday, warning the storm could be “deadliest in Florida’s history,” CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reports. This would be really fucking bad if true, given that the 1928 Lake Okeechobee Hurricane killed as many as 2,500 people in Florida. For that many people to die in a natural disaster in the 21st century, one they clearly saw coming at them for days is horrific. We should all pray that Ron DeSantis was right about something for once when he downplayed the potential death toll.

Two pro-Russian traitors were hit with a federal indictment to provide Russia with intel on American Army officers’ personal medical information and on training provided to Ukrainian military medical personnel by the US military, the Baltimore Banner reports. Johns Hopkins anesthesiologist Anna Gabrielian and her husband, Army Major Doctor Jamie Lee Henry met with an undercover law enforcement agent posing as a Kremlin goon in a Baltimore hotel room last month thinking the agent was working for the Kremlin, with Gabrielan telling the agent “she was motivated by patriotism toward Russia to provide any assistance she could to Russia.”

“My point of view is until the United States actually declares war against Russia, I’m able to help as much as I want,” Henry told the agent, according to the indictment. In another meeting a week later, Gabrielian was heard telling Henry he was a coward for worrying about violating HIPAA.

The Republican attorneys general of Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, South Carolina, and Arkansas plus the Republican governor of Iowa (their attorney general is a Dem) on Thursday will file a lawsuit against the Biden Administration over the student debt relief program, arguing that their state budgets will suffer a loss of revenue from the action, the Associated Press reports.

It’s not clear why these dumbasses think this is a good idea politically. Yeah, they’re probably insulated from any direct electoral consequences, but they’re forcing other Republican candidates to have to explain why their party is putting themselves in between Americans who could use some relief from crushing educational debt in the middle of a hotly contested midterm campaign.

Having already corrupted pro golf with his vast wealth and influence, evil autocrat Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bonesaw is setting his sights on the video gaming industry with a $37.8 billion investment into acquisitions and expansions in the publishing and eSports sectors, Axios reports.

Over $13 billion of the spend is earmarked “for the acquisition and development of a leading game publisher to become a strategic development partner,” meaning that in just a few short years gamers can expect exciting new titles like Call of Jihad: Holy Warfare, LIV Golf Tour 2K25: Trump Luxury Club Edition, Super Kushner Bros, Dissident-mon: Gotta Catch em All!, Democratic Opposition Crush Saga, and Infidel Exterminator. There’ll be something for every type of player!

Plastered with a grin that screams  “I’m going to get questioned about my attempt to overthrow the Constitution but I don’t care because I’m protected by my Supreme Court justice husband who you can’t question because we’ll yell ‘racism,'” Supreme spouse and stand-in Bumble from a holiday cartoon Ginni Thomas strolls into her interview with the House Select Committee investigating the Republican-led January 6th domestic terrorist attack on Congress and other efforts to stop the certification of the 2020 election.

Exhibiting the carefree attitude of someone overloaded on lithium and a certainty that no one can touch her, Mrs. Thomas is likely to attempt to claim she never, ever spoke to her husband, Clarence, about her career and lobbying efforts, for which she’s been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars annually from partisan groups like the Heritage Foundation.

This morning, I spoke with Governor Ron DeSantis to discuss the steps we're taking to support Florida in response to Hurricane Ian.

I've also directed FEMA Administrator Criswell to travel to Florida tomorrow to check in on response and survey where additional support is needed. pic.twitter.com/W6MDDDepe2

— President Biden (@POTUS) September 29, 2022

Michigan legislators on Wednesday approved a new law allowing election workers to begin processing absentee ballots two days before election day, finally straightening out the kink in the process that made so much room for disgraced former President Trump to claim voter fraud in the 2020 election in the three “Blue Wall” states, the Associated Press reports.

Now to partially self-plagiarize from an article we wrote back in March about the Wisconsin state Senate killing off a similar bill: There are now only nine states which do not allow any processing (meaning simply opening envelopes and otherwise prepping the ballots for tabulation, not even the tabulation itself) whatsoever of votes prior to election day and as shitty luck would have it in 2020 three of those ten are the “Blue Wall” triumvirate of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Prior to the 2020 election, the Republican legislatures of all three resisted any and all pleas to let ballots be counted beforehand, which caused the “Red Mirage” and guaranteed the “big, massive dumps” of late night ballots for Biden that look suspicious to the paranoid dumbasses MAGA Land.

Disgraced former President Trump’s lawyers are pushing back against Special Master Judge Raymond Dearie’s order that they either confirm or deny that the Justice Department’s inventory of the items seized during the FBI’s Great Raid on Mar-a-Lago last month, CNN reports.

Whining about technical issues like “the Special Master’s case management plan exceeds the grant of authority from the District Court on this issue,” and “Additionally, the Plaintiff currently has no means of accessing the documents bearing classification markings, which would be necessary to complete any such certification by September 30, the currently proposed date of completion,” in a Wednesday night filing, as if it hasn’t already been established by both Dearie and the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals that the docs marked classified are irrelevant to the special master review, they’re actually way more boxed in than was originally apparent in the order last week.

As Marcy Wheeler wrote in a Wednesday analysis, ANY affidavit or statement from Trump’s lawyers say about the validity of the DOJ’s inventory would constitute either an admission that their fat orange client committed a crime or the lawyers would be forced to lie in a court of law. So yeah, they’re kind of fucked, and could even drag down Aileen Cannon if she fires Dearie.