“We hadn’t really expected it to be this good, to be honest,” said planetary astronomer Imke de Pater, professor emerita of the University of California, Berkeley of the latest image from the James Web Space Telescope:  a photo of Jupiter showing aurora over its northern and southern poles as well as the storm known as the Great Red Spot.  Another photo shows Jupiter’s rings, a number of its moons, and even distant galaxies.

The release comes a day after a pair of astronomers released what’s being called the most detailed photograph of the Moon ever taken, a 174-megapixel composite shot.

Record levels of heavy rain have hit Dallas and north Texas, dumping more than nine inches of rain in a 24-hour period ending Monday, leading to flash flooding, overrunning riverbanks, and inundating millions of residents, KXAS NBC 5 in Dallas reports.

Instruments at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport measured 9.19 inches of rainfall ending at 2 p.m. local time Monday, the second most rain in one 24-hour period on record.  On September 4-5, 1932, the area recorded 9.57 inches of rain.

The massive amount of rain, which was very wet from the standpoint of water, strained city resources, with firefighters going out to secure closed roads and dozens of streets and highways shut down due to high water.  At least one person had died due to the storm.

In a highly unusual move, Donald Trump’s Save America PAC paid $650,000 for the official portraits for Trump and his third wife, Melania, that will hang in the Smithsonian’s America’s Presidents exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery, Politico reports.

Typically, the Smithsonian itself undertakes fundraising from private individuals to pay for the portraits, with commissions going to the artists and additional money going to costs such as those affiliated with displaying the painting, promoting the debut of the portrait, and maintaining the exhibition.

Trump, however, apparently directed his PAC to use money his rubes have donated to the self-proclaimed billionaire to either overturn the results of the 2020 election, pay for recounts, support his various lawsuits relating to the election, fund Trump’s legal defenses in dozens of lawsuits, and other Trump fundraisers.

A grand jury in North Carolina on Monday moved closer to charging Attorney General Josh Stein with violating the state’s questionable laws on truthfulness in political attack ads, the AP reports. The investigation stems from an ad in which Stein’s campaign called out his 2020 Republican opponent, Forsyth County DA Jim O’Neill on his office’s handling of rape kits. O’Neill had lodged a complaint with the State Board of Elections in September 2020 over the Shapiro attack ad, which said his office had “left 1,500 rape kits sitting on a shelf,” an assertion O’Neill said was false because law enforcement and not prosecutors are responsible for processing that evidence.

A federal judge last month suspended enforcement of this law and Stein’s campaign has a case pending before an appeals court for an injunction, which could come before Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman’s grand jury hands down an indictment. Like we wrote last month – partially misidentifying Stein as “Shapiro” because sometimes we fuck up and get Democrat North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein mixed up with Democrat Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro – the law is well-intended but really poorly written, even to laypersons who don’t know shit.

Sensitive data files from Dominion Voting Systems from Coffee County, Georgia, and Antrim County, Michigan were placed on a corporate server of a Georgia computer forensics firm hired by Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani and others, from which dozens of people and organizations downloaded the information, the Washington Post reports.

The Trump lawyers reportedly hired the firm, Atlanta-based SullivanStrickler, to download election software from various locations in Georgia and Michigan.  They then directed the firm to provide the code and data to various people.

Powell signed a retention letter with SullivanStrickler on December 6, 2020, promising $26,000 per day for work a team of four would do to access data in Michigan, Georgia and Arizona.  That same day the firm reports it accessed the Georgia systems.  Also on that day, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation opened a probe into reports of “computer trespass” into elections systems in Coffee County.  It’s unknown whether that investigation was a result of SullivanStrickler’s activities. 

The New York Times reports that the FBI and the National Archives have recovered more than 300 documents marked “classified” from Donald Trump from the time Trump left the White House in January 2021 through the seizure of documents at Mar-a-Lago last week.

In the initial group of 15 boxes recovered by the FBI from Mar-a-Lago in January, the National Archives identified 150 documents with classified markings on them.  Trump’s lawyers reportedly handed more over around the time of a June subpoena, and more documents were recovered by an FBI search team last week.

The fact that the FBI found additional documents–from routine administration papers to highly classified documents marked TS/SCI–demonstrates to people with knowledge of the recovery effort that either Trump was hiding the documents or that Trump and his team did not have a grasp on the amount of classified information they had taken from the White House and stored at Mar-a-Lago.  Either option would be a violation of the Espionage Act:  duplicity or carelessness.

In a statement that should have been made at the end of 2020 (but y’know, he’s a little slow), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said there is “very little election fraud” in the United States election system, NBC News reports.

Speaking to a local chamber of commerce gathering, McConnell was asked about a recent poll that showed Americans support investigations into Donald Trump’s efforts to undermine the Constitution and rig the results of the 2020 election to hand him a second term.

McConnell said that there is “very little” fraud going on in elections although “it happens occasionally,” and that there is no sign of any widespread voter fraud.  Asked about the poll results showing Americans feel the threat to the nation’s democracy is the greatest issue facing the country, McConnell said, “I do think it’s an important issue. There were those who were trying to prevent the orderly transfer of power for the first time in American history,”s

Following the lead of the Deepwater Horizon PR team, Hess Oil company revised the amount of wastewater leaking from oil field in North Dakota from an initial estimate of 8,700 gallons to more than 1.4 million gallons, an environmental disaster that could take more than a year to clean up, according to the Associated Press.

The leak in the six-inch pipe was first reported by Hess on August 15th, but state environmental officials believe the leak began sometime in mid-July.  The saltwater leak was first reported by an area farmer whose land the pipeline runs through.

The water, enough to fill two Olympic-sized swimming pools, was not at risk of contaminating drinking water; the nearest well is two miles away.  However, the risk to the farmland is significantly greater because the salinity of the saltwater used in fracking is many times higher than seawater and it can make acres of land unusable. 

The decades-long Republican war on law enforcement continues.  The current rage started with Watergate criminal G. Gordon Liddy telling his radio listeners in the 1990s that federal agents were “jack-booted thugs” and that if an ATF agent raided their homes, to “shoot for the head” to avoid the body armor.

Now, in the wake of the FBI executing a court-issued search warrant that netted boxes of government property, Republican candidates for office are taking up the mantle of targeting federal law enforcement agents who are carrying out their Constitutional duties.  And for some reason, they’re both based in Florida.  (It must be the water.)

First, Florida Man Luis Miguel, who’s running against the GOP incumbent to represent state district 12 in the Florida state house, proposed a policy that would allow any Floridian to murder a federal agent, Florida Politics reports.

The “journalists” at Fox know what’s important to the nation.  It’s not the ongoing investigation into the Republican attempt to undermine the Constitution.  And it’s not the ongoing investigation into Donald Trump hidden stolen classified documents in a basement of his Florida supper club.  And it’s not the legislative victories of Joe Biden that will help protect the environment, reduce inflation and lower prescription drug prices.

Nope, it’s none of those things.  It’s the discovery of the body of a dead attractive white girl.  The tragic death of 16-year-old Kiely Rodni has vaulted over lowering gas prices, Republicans working to stop price caps on insulin, Republicans blocking aid to sick veterans and ethics charges against the Republican governor of South Dakota (a Fox regular guest) to hit the top slot on Fox’s website.  Topping various reports of random violence in “Democrat-run” cities, Fox is concentrating on the discovery of a girl’s body found in a car submerged in a reservoir.

By dedicating three spots on the organization’s landing page, Fox is going back to what brought it glory in the early 2010s:  exploiting the tragic death of a teen instead of covering real news.

“President Donald J. Trump, through his undersigned counsel, respectfully files this Motion For Judicial Oversight And Additional Relief, which seeks an order that: (a) appoints a Special Master; (b) enjoins further review of seized materials by the Government until a Special Master is appointed; (c) requires the Government to provide a more detailed Receipt for Property; and (d) requires the Government to return any item seized that was not within the scope of the Search Warrant, and states as follows: Politics cannot be allowed to impact the administration of justice. President Donald J. Trump is the clear frontrunner in the 2024 Republican Presidential Primary and in the 2024 General Election, should he decide to run” and blah blah blah says the complaint in TRUMP V UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT.

Republican Arizona gov candidate Kari Lake’s campaign on Monday responded “Yes” to an inquiry from KPNX political reporter Brahm Resnik on whether she would withdraw her endorsement for anti-semitic Oklahoma state Senate candidate Jarrin Jackson, sort of ending a controversy that has dogged Lake for a few days after she and a few other Republicans backed Jackson.

The undorsement comes after Media Matters checked out Jackson’s livestreams, finding rants about “outline & detail the evil. Amen. The Jews. Illuminati. Covid shots kill. Rothschilds. Communists. Woke pastors. Social gospel,” and “an unholy alliance of leftists, capitalists and Zionist supremacists” working to outbreed white Europeans through “immigration and miscegenation… They want to get rid of white people because of their Christianity,”

Fresh off his big defeat in the Michael Sussman trial, the anti-Deep State legal squad led by fearless lawman John Durham’s star fuckup Andrew DeFilippis has withdrawn from the case against Steele Dossier source Igor Dachenko for unspecified reasons, the Washington Times reports.

The Times, a right wing rag owned by the Moonies cult, seems nonplussed by the sudden quit, writing “high-profile departure comes at an odd time in the case, with Mr. Danchenko’s trial scheduled to start Oct. 16,” seeming to give up any hope that there would be further prosecutions after Dachenko faces a jury in the long and fruitless quest to avenge the Russia investigation.

Oh, to be a blissfully ignorant Republican Senator, unaware–or unwilling to acknowledge–how much damage his Party has done to both individual rights and the Constitution in the United States. And so we give you Republican Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, the man who took a slate of fraudulent electors which was supposed to be given to Vice President Mike Pence on January 6th to give Pence the rationale for tossing out the certified set of electors from Wisconsin and thereby throw the peaceful transfer of power expected by our Constitution into chaos.

In Part I of our clip, Johnson tells a reporter from a local Wisconsin television station that he “had nothing to do with Janaury 6th,” when asked if he was called to testify before the House Select Committee investigating the Republican-led domestic terrorist attack on Congress.  Johnson then goes on to detail how he and his staff were part of a scheme to get false electors to Mike Pence, only to have Pence’s staff to stop trying to get Pence involved.  (He also notes that either he or someone in his office “destroy[ed]” the document, which could lead to a destruction of evidence investigation.)  While Johnson claims he had nothing to do with it, apparently he has a lot of information about the contacts that were made to activate the plan, so yes, apparently he does have some role to play in the plot.  (Johnson is not, apparently, very smart.)

A police bomb squad on Monday detonated a device found planted at a federal courthouse in Bluefield, West Virginia and are working on defusing additional explosives at a local Presbyterian church and at the home of a possible suspect, the Bluefield Daily Telegraph reports.

Further details were unavailable, however we’re going to go ahead and not so baselessly speculate that there’s a political motive here since a federal courthouse is being targeted two weeks after the Department of Justice conducted a raid on the Orange God Emperor’s palace in Florida on a warrant signed by a federal judge. That said, that a church was also on this maniac’s shit list could point to other motives, so we’re not going to call it MAGA terrorism just yet.

Republican South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem may have “engaged in misconduct” to obtain a state real estate appraiser’s license for her daughter, who had failed to qualify for one on her own, leading an ethics panel to suggest “appropriate action” against the governor, the Associated Press reports.  The panel also asked for a probe into Noem’s use of state-owned jets to fly to Republican campaign events around the country.

Noem had intervened for her daughter Kassidy Peters, who did not demonstrate enough industry knowledge and expertise to pass muster with the South Dakota licensing board.  Peters’s application included sample appraisals that the board determined lacked the detail and professionalism required by state standards.

Days later, Noem summoned Labor Secretary Marcia Hultman, who oversees the licensing board, and Sherry Bren, the lifelong civil servant who runs the appraiser licensing system, to her office, where she berated the pair.  Also attending the meeting:  Kassidy Peterson, who had no official government position or reason to attend a meeting with a state Cabinet secretary.

Fauci is stepping down in December to try and avoid scrutiny from a Republican House that will take over in January.

Understand this loud and clear, Anthony:

We are coming for you whether you retire or not. You will not get away with what you did to America.

— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) August 22, 2022

It’s kind of hard to nail down exactly what the hell this moron and her ilk are promising here with their “revenge” on Fauci. Like compare it to, say the Afghanistan withdrawal. House Republicans in a majority in 2023 might (we say might because they’ve already stacked up a shit ton of other grievances to fill airtime in the year since) haul military leaders in for hearings to find out who dropped the ball and how the Kabul evacuation was so chaotic. That makes political sense in its own way, and even though in practice it’ll be 95% bullshit, eventually they might uncover some documents saying the Biden Administration ignored intel reports warning it would be a shitshow and did not take adequate measures to evacuate local allies and so on and so forth.

Could we say anything as remotely coherent of a goal for a Fauci witch hunt? What the hell do they think is going to happen? They’ll get him sworn in to testify and then what? What could they ever hope to find that would somehow make Trump’s response to COVID look better after their Fauci-ghazi hearings? Trump never fired him, never took him to court to try to fire him in the nine or ten months he could have made the effort. Like we’ve said, Fauci was the scapegoat for Trump’s failures that they can’t acknowledge but what kind of mileage do they really expect here?

The city of Las Vegas, New Mexico–not the destination of gambling, debauchery and Wayne Newton fans in southern Nevada, but a community of 13,000 in northcentral New Mexico–is struggling to manage its water supply as sources of fresh water literally dry up, the Associated Press reports.  It recently announced it has less than 30 days’ supply of fresh water available due to various conditions related to climate change.

The county seat of San Miguel County, Las Vegas is like many communities in New Mexico that gets a significant portion of their fresh water from the Colorado River basin, which is in crisis due to a drought and serious strains put on it by allotments made by a regional compact.

The US Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the nation’s natural resources, announced last week that the recipients of the Colorado River water will have significant cuts to the allocations, and other water resources are being directed to Lake Powell, where the Glen Canyon Dam hydroelectric generator, which produces 4,700 gigawatt-hours of electricity for the region. 

The Congressional “Gang of 8,” the top leaders with near presidential-level access to the nation’s top national security secrets – Chamber caucus leaders Chuck Schumer, Moscow Mitch, Nancy Pelosi, Kevin “The Cuck” McCarthy, and the chairs and ranking members of each chamber’s intelligence committees – Mark Warner and Marco Rubio on Senate Intel, and Adam Schiff and Mike Turner on House Intel, have asked the Biden Administration for access to the unredacted docs on the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago to learn more about what Trump stole, Politico reports.

The request comes as Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart on Monday suggested in a filing that unsealing a redacted search affidavit would be all but useless to the public, hinting what he really wanted to say was “Trump and his minions are just going to act like the Justice Department has something to hide if we can’t unseal the whole thing,” which would make a read-in to bipartisan Congressional leadership a solid half-measure. Until of course McCarthy leaks selectively after Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene threaten to tie him down and use jumper cables and a car battery to get him to spill whatever might sound good for Trump on Fox News. Mike Turner also sounds like a dumbass given his “it depends on what the nuclear information is” prevaricating at a press conference earlier this month, so who knows what kind of bullshit he would pull.