It can’t be flattering to be compared to fellow Canadian Ted Cruz (R-Quintana Roo), but that’s the best way to understand the radicalness of the new leader of Canada’s Conservative Party, Pierre Poilievre.

According to the Associated Press, a Canadian political scientist describes Poilievre as “Ted Cruz without the anti-abortion stance.”  Poilievre is also as much an opportunist as Cruz as well, frequently switching political positions on things like LGBTQ marriage as is politically convenient.

The 43-year-old holds many populist positions:  he supported the Canadian trucker blockade protesting US vaccination laws, which cost businesses in Ottawa tens of millions of dollars and paralyzed trade across the border.  He was also a supporter of anti-vaccination efforts.

Sluagh manifestation and former White House advisor Stephen Miller has been subpoenaed by the US Department of Justice in its investigation of the activities around the January 6th Republican-led domestic terrorist attack on Congress, CNN reports.

Officials are also looking for information on other investigations, including the funding and operation of Donald Trump’s Super PAC and money laundering raising operation, Save America PAC, as well as the efforts of Trump loyalists to submit slates of fake electors to the Electoral College.

The subpoena was issued as part of a federal grand jury investigation taking place in Washington, DC.  The grand jury’s probe has expanded into the funding and operation of Save America PAC, which took in money raised by Trump to fund a reported legal defense fund to challenge the 2020 election outcome.

Credit card processing company Visa announced Saturday that it will start categorizing gun sales as a separate processing category, not “general merchandise” as it sorts them now, providing a significant victory for gun control advocates, the Associated Press reports.

Gun control groups pushed for Visa to adopt the International Organization for Standardization’s new merchant code for gun sales, which was announced on Friday, rather than use the general classification.  Sales data from gun stores, sporting goods stores and big box retailers can give a more accurate picture of gun proliferation in the United States.  It may also be able to be incorporated into background check systems to prevent illegal gun purchases.

Proponents for gun proliferation say that specifically classifying gun sales is a violation of their Constitutional rights to bear as many goddamn arms wherever they want because it’s their goddamn constitutional right to try to compensate for a penis so laughingly small he wasn’t actually sure he had technically lost his virginity that night in Tijuana.  Well, no, they didn’t actually say that, but they claim it will cause irreparable harm to gun buyers, just like they said about waiting periods and red flag laws.

“I pray for the leaders in the federal government, God, and on the sixth of January that they will rise up with boldness,” guy who thinks it’s okay to worship both Yahweh and the Golden Calf Doug Mastriano, then a state senator and now the Republican nominee for Pennsylvania Governor, said during a rather creepy prayer on January 5, 2021 for people organizing protestors to Washington, DC, where they would later become domestic terrorists.

The two Republican members of the Michigan Board of Canvassers on Friday certified the ballot measures to expand voting rights and abortion access after being ordered to so so by the state Supreme Court, the Associated Press reports. The two shitweasels, who had refused to allow the referenda on the ballot over kerning of the abortion proposal’s wording and some bullshit technical pretexts on the voting rights one, had no choice but to submit to the iron will of democracy. They probably cried afterward, especially about the voting rights one which, if passed, will allow up to nine days of early voting for all Michiganders, which Republicans really hate.

An update to a New York Times piece on the legal troubles face by Trump’s legal team–not regarding Trump’s malfeasance, but exposure due to their own personal actions–drops in a new snippet of information:  Christina Bobb, one of Trump’s attractive-enough-for-TeeVee-appearances legal team and spokespeople, has reportedly retained her own counsel to represent her in potential upcoming legal issues.

.@drsimonegold is a patriot and an American hero. https://t.co/APiotH7ve5

— Louie Gohmert (@replouiegohmert) September 9, 2022

You may remember Dr. Simone Gold, the founding member of America’s Front Line Doctors who claimed the coronavirus vaccine “is not a vaccine,” apparently struggling with the meaning of words, and who called pandemic isolation policies “a mass casualty event,” not the pandemic itself.

Besides trying to decimate the population by ignoring the pandemic, Gold is also an insurrectionist who took part in the January 6th Republican-led domestic terrorist attack on Congress, and for that, she was sentenced to 60 days in prison.  Upon her release Friday, lame duck Congressman and asparagus aficionado Louie Gohmert (Q-Tx) presented her with a flag that flew over the building she attempted to invade. … ’cause theatrics.

Two days ago at an event at National Harbor in Maryland, President Joe Biden called out Republicans who are taking credit for funding projects in their district but who voted against the federal funding bills that made those projects happen.  Yesterday–a day after Dark Brandon mocked those who did that–Equus cosplayer and baby with a perpetual soiled diaper Congresscritter Marjorie Taylor Greene (Q-Ga.) sat in the audience at the groundbreaking of a vocational school in her district, praising the effort and tweeting our her attendance, but failing to note that she voted against a federal funding bill for vocational schools.  Greene was one of 15 Republicans and three Democrats to vote against HR 7664, the Supporting Small Business and Career and Technical Education Act of 2022, back in June.

There will be tears in Tucker Carlson’s house tonight.  The Fox host and Putin booster, who just two weeks ago definitively declared Russia was winning the Ukraine invasion, will now have to rectify his boosterism with the fact that the Kremlin has announced it is withdrawing troops from most of the Kharkiv region to reinforce its forces in the Donetsk region, the Associated Press reports.

Saying the move is being done “in order to achieve the stated goals of the special military operation to liberate Donbas,” the Kremlin has repeatedly altered its declared mission following its invasion of Ukraine in late February, when it made widespread incursions across Ukraine, as if it was trying to conquer the entire country, only to be repulsed by still opposition.  In May, after months of trying to capture the capital city of Kyiv, Moscow pulled its troops back saying it was concentrating on liberating Donbas.  Presumably, after Russia fails to qualify for the upcoming World Cup, the Kremlin will say it never intended to compete in the tournament because it was focusing forces on the Donbas region.

Moscow said it was going to concentrate troops in the areas around Balakliya and Izyum, two cities in the eastern part of the Kharkiv Oblast on the eastern shore of the Donets River, giving the Russian forces a significant nature defense to ground troops, but not Ukrainian artillery, missiles and drones.

Ukrainian leadership on Saturday claimed “astonishing” progress in the ongoing counteroffensive against the Russian invaders, retaking the smaller city of Balakliya, pre-war population 30,000, and closing in on larger hubs Kupiansk and Izium, AFP reports. “Ukrainian troops are advancing in eastern Ukraine, liberating more cities and villages. Their courage coupled with Western military support brings astonishing results,” said foreign ministry spokesman Oleg Nikolenko in a statement.

The push from Kyiv is reportedly taking a serious toll on Russian troops. Desertions have reportedly gotten so bad this week that the Russian army are dispatching helicopters to spot troops fleeing back toward the border amid the counteroffensive. “In the temporarily occupied territory of Kherson region, in the area of Babenkivka Second settlement, the enemy had to deploy helicopters and weapons to search for fugitives and return them to combat positions,” said a post from the Ukrainian military command. “In addition, through Kalanchak, in the direction of temporarily occupied Crimea, intensive movement of unarmed Russian soldiers was noted.”

Five Hong Kong speech therapists were sentenced to 19 months in prison Saturday following their conviction in Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott’s wet dream trial over the content of children’s picture books they published which depicted the ChiComs as dirty, disease-carrying wolves invading a village populated by democracy-loving sheep, the Associated Press reports.

There, it’s done. We reported it because there’s nothing else new at 5:09 AM on the East Coast on a Saturday. Yayyyyyy for Charles! Woooooooo! CONGRATS ON YOUR NEW MONARCH ENGLAND!

• Look, folks, I get it:  she was an icon.  But she wasn’t our queen.  
• Republicans are upset that the traditional greeting “Merry Christmas” is at risk.  Democrats are upset that our traditional constitutional republic is at risk.  Priorities.
• Kudos to Steve Bannon.  He is such a consummate conman that even though he’s going on trial for defrauding people out of tens of millions of dollars, he has the Trump supporters he bilked money from believing that he’s the true victim and giving money to a legal defense fund.
• I don’t know if Joe Biden himself has seen the Dark Brandon meme, but he’s been more aggressive in his rhetoric and projecting the Dark Brandon aura since it went viral.  
  Read More ▶ “Random thoughts Friday, Volume LXXXVI”

From the filing, the prosecutors and defense attorneys nominated the four following people to be special master in the Trump documents case.

“Government’s Proposed Candidates:

• “The Honorable Barbara S. Jones (ret.) – retired judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, partner in Bracewell LLP, and special master in In re: in the Matter of Search Warrants Executed on April 28, 2021 and In the Matter of Search Warrants Executed on April 9, 2018.
• “The Honorable Thomas B. Griffith (ret.) – retired Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, special counsel in Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP, and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School.

“Plaintiff’s Proposed Candidates:

• “The Honorable Raymond J. Dearie (ret.) – former Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, served on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, formerly the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York.
• “Paul Huck, Jr.—founder, The Huck Law Firm, former Jones Day partner, former General Counsel to the Governor, former Deputy Attorney General for the State of Florida.”

“Remarkable story.  We don’t know the full parameters of it, but apparently, the FBI has launched a full scale purge of supporters of Donald Trump, that would be Joe Biden’s likely opponent in the coming presidential election, and that purge has intensified significantly today,” eternal fraternity pledge and guy trying fascism on for size Tucker Carlson said on his Fox program.  “So Steve Bannon just said that yesterday alone the FBI raided the homes of dozens of Trump allies.  We want to get to the bottom of this.”

So to be clear:  Carlson has only an allegation by a man who was just indicted yesterday on fraud charges of this alleged purge–which actually isn’t a purge because no one is being assassinated or un-personed.  And they’re not “Trump allies,” Tucker; they’re called “co-conspirators.”  And there are a LOT of them.  But couldn’t Carlson even try to find one corroborating source? … or call the FBI to get official comment?  … or do an ounce of actual reporting rather than gossip mongering?

Brigham Young University said it lifted the ban from attending the school’s sporting events on a man who had been accused of saying a racial slur to a Black volleyball player from Duke, claiming it conducted a thorough investigation and found no evidence the slur was even said, the Associated Press reports.

During the August 28th women’s volleyball game against Duke, spectators noted that a university police officer was stationed between the student’s section and the visiting team’s bench.  Duke’s Rachel Richardson, a senior outside hitter from Ellicott City, Maryland reported someone would say the slur every time she went back to the service line.  Another time, the person told the player to “watch [her] back on the way to the team bus.”

Even though it was a packed arena holding 5,500 fans, officials were able to identify a single fan through, they said at the time, an identification from the Duke team.  The individual was not a student at the university, although he was sitting in the student section at the time.

It was a busy summer at the White House. pic.twitter.com/xYxx9KmWEs

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) September 9, 2022

Alcoholic Nazi degenerate Steve Bannon on Friday claimed on his show that at least 35 “senior MAGA Republicans, allies of Donald Trump” saw FBI agents execute search warrants on their homes on Thursday. Now Bannon is obviously a lying piece of shit who had other legal problems going on that day, though this doesn’t exactly sound like the kind of thing he would want to make up. Embellish sure, but it’s a safe bet something happened if he’s saying this. Remember that back in June when there was sweep on a single day where the FBI came and served subpoenas and search warrants against fake Trump electors and other minions. We were reporting individual contacts for a week after that – first it was in Georgia, then in Arizona, then it was that Jeffrey Clark got raided, then it was John Eastman’s phone, so on and so forth. The FBI doesn’t exactly issue press releases for these kind of things, it comes from the targets themselves or their associates.

Amid declining sales, Burger King announces 2-year, $400m restaurant upgrade and remodeling campaign | Just The News https://t.co/FKevep9BYa

— John Solomon (@jsolomonReports) September 9, 2022

Team Sunflower say they’re kicking ass in the fight to liberate their country from Ivan, with Ukrainian forces pushing toward Russian-held Kharkiv with the help of Western firepower and collapsing morale among Putin’s stormtroopers, the New York Times reports.

“In total, more than a thousand square kilometers of the territory of Ukraine have been liberated since the beginning of September,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in an address to the United Nations on Thursday. The successes could not be verified on the whole independently, however social media and witness reports do not at all contradict Zelensky’s claims. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley on Friday remarked on the gains, with Milley saying “There is fighting – both offense and defense – all the way from Kharkiv all the way down to Kherson,” while cautioning the war is still very far from over.

In Moscow, Putin’s propagandists were both uncharacteristically sober about the losses while characteristically shitfaced on cheap vodka. “I’m worried. Naturally, we want for our guys to crush [the other side] and only to advance, but life doesn’t work that way,” said Vladimir Solovyov, Russia’s Sean Hannity, on his radio show “Full Contact” on Wednesday. Solovyov had a large bruise on his face visible on the live streamed version of the program but would not or could not say why he got it. The bruise was covered in makeup while Solovyov hosted his later nightly TV show.