Drew McIntyre ready for WWE title reign, explains why Clash at the Castle is bigger than WrestleMania for him https://t.co/9hZRY988mu

— Fox News (@FoxNews) September 2, 2022

Bulls in Spain have had an unusually productive year killing human participants in runs, stomping or goring at least eight to death in the ritual chases in 2022, the AP reports. Bulls on The Street Associations President Alejandro Cano told the AP the brutal deaths are “part of the festival,” and there’s no practical way to prevent such carnage except running faster than an angry bull.

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump
If you look at the words and meaning of the awkward and angry Biden speech tonight, he threatened America, including with the possible use of military force. He must be insane, or suffering from late stage dementia!

7,326 20,762 Sep 02, 2022, 24:09

Keep in mind this fat bastard had no problem threatening Americans with military force back in 2020, when he wrote “Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!” on Twitter in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder.

Republican Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate (and persistent Uncle Fester cosplayer) Doug Mastriano has filed a pre-emptive lawsuit in federal court that would bar the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th Republican-led domestic terrorist attack on Congress from compelling him to testify, CNN reports.

Mastriano testified remotely in early August, but reportedly refused to answer questions and ended the session after around fifteen minutes.  He claims compelling his testimony is a political move designed to hurt his campaign and that the committee has no authority to compel a witness’s testimony.

“Because the Select Committee has absolutely no authority to conduct compelled depositions, Plaintiff was willing to sit for a voluntary interview,” the complaint states. “However, because Plaintiff is currently the Republican nominee for Governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, he asked the Committee to agree to certain prophylactic measures that would ensure that his participation would not run the risk of improperly influencing the Pennsylvania state election.”

An assassination attempt on Argentinian Vice President Cristina Kirchner failed because of an apparent malfunction of the handgun, which was pointed inches away from the Vice President’s face.  There is speculation that that gun may have been a prop, but having a gun that close to the Vice President at her home is still a problem.  The Daily Mail reports a 35-year-old Brazilian man has been taken into custody.

A federal judge tossed out former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page’s $75 million lawsuit against the Justice Department, the FBI and individual officials of those organizations, Politico reports, saying the Congress had not imagined any possibility of lawsuits in the scenario Page claimed.

Page’s lawsuit targeted the FBI, the DOJ and individuals like James Comey, but Judge Dabney Friedrich, a Trump appointee, dismissed the case saying she questioned if Page could pursue a case claiming the FISA warrant violated his Constitutional rights.

Friedrich said a major problem with Page’s suit, which may have also been filed after the applicable statute of limitations expired, was that Page could not identify who specifically was surveilling him.  Instead, Page sued people who were part of the “paperwork chain,” but who were not actively involved in his surveillance.

I’ll just let NASA explain this image, the first direct photo of an exoplanet (a planet outside of our solar system):  “This image shows the exoplanet HIP 65426 b in different bands of infrared light, as seen from the James Webb Space Telescope: purple shows the NIRCam instrument’s view at 3.00 micrometers, blue shows the NIRCam instrument’s view at 4.44 micrometers, yellow shows the MIRI instrument’s view at 11.4 micrometers, and red shows the MIRI instrument’s view at 15.5 micrometers. These images look different because of the ways the different Webb instruments capture light. A set of masks within each instrument, called a coronagraph, blocks out the host star’s light so that the planet can be seen. The small white star in each image marks the location of the host star HIP 65426, which has been subtracted using the coronagraphs and image processing. The bar shapes in the NIRCam images are artifacts of the telescope’s optics, not objects in the scene. (Unlabeled version.) Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA, A Carter (UCSC), the ERS 1386 team, and A. Pagan (STScI).

Unity. pic.twitter.com/AtjFb2B0pN

— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) September 2, 2022

• Odd that Jill Biden would make the long walk with Joe.  Not sure why he wanted to make this a “family” thing.
• Joe’s on point in calling out the MAGA Republicans, and now, those Republicans who watched it have to make a decision:  are they for the Country or are they for Trump?
• Calling out the heckler and saying “this is democracy” is a wonderful bit of improvisation by Biden.  He’s telling all Americans, “Yes, there are people on the fringe.  They’re not going away, but you don’t have to join them.”

President Joe Biden will call out the threat to American democracy in a prime-time address, saying, “MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards.  Backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love. … For a long time, we’ve reassured ourselves that American democracy is guaranteed.  But it is not.  We have to defend it.  Protect it.  Stand up fo rit.  Each and every one of us.”

Ginni Thomas emailed more than two dozen state legislators in two states, urging them to appoint a fraudulent set of electors to reinstall Donald Trump for a second term as President, records reviewed by the Associated Press show.

Thomas’s communication with more than twenty lawmakers in Arizona was previously known, but the revelation of her outreach to state legislators in Wisconsin was not previously known.  Thomas reportedly contacted at least two lawmakers in the state.  “Please stand strong in the face of political and media pressure,” Thomas wrote in the emails received by the Wisconsin lawmakers. “Please reflect on the awesome authority granted to you by our Constitution. And then please take action to ensure that a clean slate of Electors is chosen for our state.”

The wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Ginni Thomas was highly active in efforts to undermine the results of the 2020 election, including texting with Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows urging Trump to take unconstitutional action to void the certified election results.  Clarence Thomas has not recused himself in cases that relate to his wife’s communications, and was the only justice on the Court to vote against the release of presidential records, which would have included his wife’s texts.

“Joe Biden and a politicized Department of Justice launched a raid on the home of his top political rival:  Donald Trump.  THAT is an assault on democracy,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy asserts in a very starched posture, saying Donald Trump IS democracy… which is kinda funny given that if this was an actual democracy, Hillary Clinton would have won in 2016, but, y’know, civics and stuff.

The House Select Committee investigating the Republican-led domestic terrorist attack on Congress on January 6th announced that it has sought an interview with Newt Gingrich, a history re-writer, former Republican Speaker of the House who has been a Trump gadfly for the last six years, MSNBC reports.

The Committee asserts Gingrich was in contact with senior advisors of Donald Trump prior to the January 6th rallies and subsequent attack on the Capitol.  At the same time, Gingrich was in contact with media figures and others who were dictating a narrative to support conspiracy theories.

Since we started National Zero, we’ve put together probably – to the best of our recollection – at least five long retrospectives, all covering delimited periods since the 2020 election and its aftermath: The Fall of the Trump Regime: One Month Later, The Fall of the Trump Regime: Six Months Later, The Tulsa Disaster: One Year Later, Six months of Republicans wishing the Capitol riot never happened, Enter the Cancel-verse: Six months of insanely stupid grievances and bullshit conspiracies that went nowhere for MAGA Nation, plus a few pieces that were more essays than roundups (and some unfortunately aborted efforts). What they all had in common was that they were milestones in time that had passed since they happened, not the time period itself.

August 2022 was different. The calendar itself neatly contained an absolute fucking nightmare month for MAGA fascism in the United States. Nearly all of what happened was the culmination of threads that had been a long time coming beforehand and nearly all of them will continue twisting and turning long into the future afterward, but for whatever reason the fates decided to weave them together in a tapestry on which so much started going right for Democrats and wrong for the MAGA cult. We have no choice but to do our first ever month-in-a-month recap.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell isn’t the only one who is less-than-enthusiastic about the crop of Republican candidates running in this cycle of elections.  While Democrats are racking up victories in special elections–including Tuesday night’s victory in Alaska over half-term governor and reality TeeVee start Sarah Palin–two major Republican donors have signaled they won’t be putting money behind any campaigns in the upcoming midterms.

Miriam Adelson, the widow of megadonor Sheldon Adelson, has not expressed her late husband’s ardor for political causes since his death at the beginning of 2021, according to Bloomberg.  In the last ten years of his life, Sheldon Adelson donated an average of $50 million per year to Republican causes, PACs and politicians.  So far this election cycle, however, she’s donated just $5 million to the conservative Congressional Leadership Fund, a Super-PAC for GOP House candidates.

The Widow Adelson may also be weary given that the fortune she inherited from her husband, a casino magnate, plummeted during the coronavirus pandemic, as the 433 million shares in the Sands casino empire lost 45% of their value.  Now, the Widow Adelson has an estimated net worth of *just* over $27 billion. 

Federal Judge Aileen M. Cannon of the Southern District of Florida did not issue a decision about appointing a special master to review documents recovered by the FBI from Donald Trump’s Florida rehabilitation home and wedding venue, Mar-a-Lago, saying she would issue a written opinion “in due course,” the New York Times reports.

Appointed to the federal bench by Trump less than a week after the 2020 presidential election was called for Joe Biden, Cannon did say, however, that she was leaning toward appoint one.  However, Cannon did not issue an injunction to stop the FBI and the Department of Justice from using the documents seized, nor did she instruct them to turn them over to a court officer.

Cannon also noted that she would unseal a more detailed list of items the FBI recovered from Trump’s property that would provide further inside into the government documents Trump had absconded to Florida with.

DC Circuit Judge Amit Mehta on Friday sentenced former New York City Police Officer Thomas Webster to 10 years in prison for assaulting cops as he attacked the Capitol during the MAGA insurrection on January 6th, 2021, CBS News’s Scott MacFarlane reports. Webster, a former Marine, was convicted in May of six felonies for his actions during the attack which he had claimed were “self-defense.” Prosecutors showed video in which Webster swung a metal flagpole at police officers and attempted to choke one out using the strap of the officer’s gas mask.

trains

— Amtrak (@Amtrak) September 1, 2022

news

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) September 1, 2022

Scotland

— The Scotsman (@TheScotsman) September 1, 2022

Just a day fellow Republican shitbag Wisconsin Senator Ron “RonAnon” Johnson was revealed to have a fake Trump 2020 elector on his campaign staff,the Arizona Mirror is now reporting that Republican Arizona Senate candidate Blake “Beijing Blake” Masters has not one, but two, of the assholes who attempted to defraud the United States on his payroll. Even more fucked up is that each were involved in two separate and distinct efforts. Greg Safsten signed the Arizona state GOP’s main fake electors group, while Lori Osiecki signed on with “The Sovereign Citizens of the Great State of Arizona” in their fake “certificate of ascertainment” of a Trump victory submitted to the National Archives, purporting to also be a set of electoral votes for Trump.

During a Thursday hearing on their request for a special master, fat former President Trump’s lawyers opposed the unsealing of a more detailed inventory list of items the FBI seized during the August 8th Mar-a-Lago search, to which the Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon obliged.

The implication of this was laid out by former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissman, apparently laughing his ass off: “Trump team in court now opposes this more detailed inventory becoming public! Tells you everything, as govt said it was okay unsealing this. Why doesn’t Trump team want this detailed MAL search inventory made public – because it would be inculpatory, not exculpatory.”

UPDATE 9/1/2022 3:05 PM EDT: The judge ended the hearing without making a ruling on the special master, however it does appear she will actually in fact unseal the inventory list.