Now former Republican Colorado state Senator Kevin Priola announced Monday he’s betraying the traditional family values party and joining the Marxists, Axios reports. “I cannot continue to be a part of a political party that is okay with a violent attempt to overturn a free and fair election and continues to peddle claims that the 2020 election was stolen,” said Priola, who obviously hates Trump and the Constitution. What part of “shall not be infringed” doesn’t he understand?

Dr Anthony Fauci, the hated right wing scapegoat for all of Trump’s failures in handling the COVID-19 pandemic, tells the New York Times he will retire in December. Cue all the MAGA members of Congress screaming they’re still going to try to throw him in prison anyway.

Yeah, we did it again. We’re assholes. It’s not Trump. It’s former Pakistani President Imran Khan, who was removed by parliament earlier this year. Khan was charged with violations under the country’s antiterrorism act on Sunday, the New York Times reports. Like Trump, Khan still commands a loyal fanbase and draws tens of thousands of supporters to rallies for candidates he’s backing in local races. Khan also vowed legal action against his opponents and will fight the charges in court. “We will not spare you,” said Khan, threatening cops and judges over the case.

For the fourth straight month, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee outraised its GOP counterpart, raising more than $10 million for its candidates in July, two million more than the Republican National Senatorial Committee, NBC News reports.

While some Republican candidates enjoy the largesse of billionaires like Peter Thiel, who has dumped more than $15 million into the coffers of Arizona GOP Senate nominee Blake Masters, Republican candidates are finding it harder to get donations from small-dollar donors in the wake of the Supreme Court revocation of reproduction rights by overturning Roe v. Wade.

The Democrats’ total for July was down slightly from the $12 million it raised in June, the month the court released its decision in the Roe case. Democrats have $54.1 million cash on hand versus just $23 million for Republicans with less than three months to the election.

Officials in Crawford County, Arkansas have called in the Arkansas State Police to investigate a Sunday morning incident caught on a 34-second video that shows three police officers beating an individual they’ve subdued on the ground, with one officer hitting the individual in the head no fewer than ten times and slamming his head into the ground multiple times.  Another officer is shown kicking the individual in the midsection.

According to KTHV CBS-11 in Little Rock, the two Crawford County deputies and a Mulberry police officer, all unidentified, were responding to a call at the Kountry Xpress convenience store in Mulberry, about 27-year-old Randall Worcester of South Carolina making threats to a store employee.  Police claim Worcester fled the scene on a bicycle, with the officers quickly catching up to him.  While they interviewed Worcester, police claim Worchester alleged pushed one of the officers onto the ground and started striking him, which led to the beat down. 

The recount of the August 2nd Kansas ballot measure asking if abortion should be subject to a ban by the state legislature found 6 more votes for “yes” and 87 less votes for “no,” a result still far short of the 165,000 vote gap that the pro-forced-birth “yes” lost by, the AP reports.

The result really sucks for MAGA activist Mark Geitzen, who had racked up nearly $120,000 in credit card debt to pay for the recount of Kansas’s nine most populous counties and would’ve gotten his money back if the outcome had been reversed in the recount.

“It paid a, played a big toll on me.  I mean, there was times where sitting there and you’re saying they’re accusing me of these unbelievable thrings [sic],” Donald Trump’s son-in-law and skinwalker Jared Kushner whines.  “I’m watching CNN, MSNBC and I’m, I’m watching these media properties that I always held in great esteem like the New York Times and the Washington Post writing things about me that I know aren’t true, ah, but in our country, it’s supposed to be innocent until proven guilty but in our case, it was guilty until proven innocent.”

A former New York newspaper publisher himself, Kushner’s whines about being the subject of scrutiny by journalists tells you as much as you need to know about Jared’s media knowledge.  But we should feel sorry for him, because after serving his country for four years as a White House advisor who was supposed to oversee everything from reforming the VA to solving the opioid crisis to modernizing the West Wing with successful Trump-based business practices, Jared just got $2 billion from the Saudi royal family.

McDonald’s will extend the restaurant testing of a chicken version of its classic Big Mac sandwich, expanding a highly-successful debut in the United Kingdom to the US, USA Today reports.  The iconic Big Mac will have its two beef patties switched out for two tempura-battered chicken breasts paired with the iconic special sauce (cough, cough Thousand Island dressing) but no onions.

A man at a Walmart in Lovejoy, Georgia mishandled the handgun he was carrying and discharged a round that injured himself and three other people, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

For some reason, 29-year-old Michael Walton unholstered his loaded handgun while in the store, and subsequently, the gun fired a round that struck him in the leg and then ricocheted, hitting three other people.  None of the injuries are considered life-threatening.

Walton has been charged with a single count of reckless conduct.  Police have not explained why Walton had a loaded gun unholstered in the store nor what caused the gun to fire.

With the delivery of a guy who refers to his seven stints for Open Mic Night at the local Chuck-a-Luck’s as his “comedy career,” Don Jr. claims a lot that’s wrong, starting with the lie that he has friends to claiming that Navy SEALs talk to him:  “I have friends on SEAL teams that tell me they spend more time now in diversity training than they do shooting.”

The Alaska crab industry is in serious peril as the numbers of its two most popular species are falling to record lows, another effect of climate change that consumers are seeing in the supermarket and the pocketbook, the Washington Post reports.

Popularized by the cable television series “Deadliest Catch,” the Alaska fisheries were the major supplier of king crab and snow crab to consumers and restaurants around the world.  However, in recent years, their numbers have shrunk significantly.  King crab harvests in Alaska have fallen from 27.2 million pounds in 2008 to 6 million tons last year.

Snow crab populations in Alaska have gone from an estimated 202,000 metric tons in 2019 to 26,700 metric tons in 2021, a drop of 90%.  The snow crab population is so endangered, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game closed the area to snow crab fishing in October 2021; it’s not yet decided if it will open for the upcoming season.

https://youtu.be/Eo1TrMOrCoA

About 60 people, the vast majority of whom are over 60, and with a median IQ of… well, you get it… gathered for a rally (?) for QAnon activist and Republican nominee for Florida’s 21st Congressional District.  (Note the two children they’re grooming for a life of misery and Trump rallies.)  The white campaign t-shirts just magnify the tapioca-esque quality of the mob.  After losing the race in 2020, the 29-year-old former Project Veritas producer threw her adrenochrome-soaked hat in the ring again, perhaps because bilking Republican donors out of money is a lot easier than a real job.

“We still do not know exactly what they are up to.  We know that it is broad and it has been far-reaching, going for documents anywhere between 2017 and 2021,” Republican Tennessee Senator and elderly Farrah Fawcett circa 1978 cosplayer Marsha Blackburn says.  “It wasn’t a focused raid, if you will.  What we do know is that the Tennesseans I’m talking to say if they can do this to President Trump, they can do it to me.”

Well, yeah, Marsha, “they” can do “it” to you or anybody… if by “it” you mean to go through the Constitutional process of obtaining a search warrant from a court if “they”–duly appointed law enforcement officers–suspect you of committing a crime.  That’s how our justice system works.  And not just for average Tennesseans, either; it also applies to a former president who sometimes stays at a supper club in Florida.

Asked by an Australian newscaster if she believes her father-in-law Donald Trump will run for the presidency again even though he’s lost the popular vote every time he’s campaigned, dutiful daughter-in-law and woman who married Ewic because she thinks his “Duh” is witty repartee Lara Trump claims, “I don’t know if that’s something he wants to do.  I can tell you this, though:  the American people have never been more eager for Donald Trump to get in a race.

According to a poll released four weeks ago–before the FBI searched his Mar-a-Lago supper club and luxury flophouse, finding cartons of classified documents illegally stored there–57% of Americans did not want Trump to run for public office again.  Another poll found just 57% of young Republicans want Trump to run again.  So no, Lara, there’s no excitement for Trump to run for office.

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, made up of a majority of Trump-appointed jurists, issued a stay allowing Republican South Carolina Senator and man who just adored Scarlett O’Hara’s dress in Gone With the Wind Lindsey Graham to temporarily avoid testifying before the Georgia grand jury investigating efforts by Donald Trump and his acolytes to overturn the certified results of the November 2020 election, the New York Times reports.

The ruling does not bar Graham from testifying; it sends the case back to the federal district court to determine if Graham is “entitled to a partial quashal or modification of the subpoena to appear before the special purpose grand jury.” The lower court must determine if Graham’s conversations with Georgia election officials were part of his official duties as a Senator and if so, if they are therefore protected under the Speech and Debate Clause issue.

While the hearing would not make a specific determination, the court could rule that Graham’s actions were not covered under the Speech and Debate Clause protections because he contacted Georgia election officials in furtherance of a crime–that is, to obstruct the official duties of Georgia election officials and to undermine the integrity of elections.

A new NBC News poll found that the plurality of Americans think the number one threat facing the nation right now is ongoing threats to democracy in the United States, surpassing concerns about inflation and the cost of living.

The poll, conducted August 11-16, found 21% of respondents listing “threats to democracy” as the number one issue facing the country, versus just 16% who said it was the “cost of living.”  In a May poll, “cost of living” was listed first by 22% of Americans, with “voting rights and election integrity” garnering top concern from just 12% of respondents.

President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which addresses climate change, reduces prescription drug costs for seniors, and standardizes corporate taxes for businesses with more than $1 billion in revenue, gets significant support, with 42% of people saying it’s a good program and only 31% saying they don’t like it; 27% had no opinion.

“It, It’s hard to justify what the Department of Justice did here, in my opinion,” the man Tucker Carlson dubbed “Eye Patch John McCain,” Texas Republican Congressman Dan Crenshaw says mistakenly.  “And, and here’s why.  Here’s what it really boils down to:  it, it, it’s not a question that it’s bad to have classified material in, in a non-SCIF [Secured Compartmented Information Facility] environment, right, (mumble) it’s a non-secret compar- commar-compartmentalized infrastructure, er, that’s wrong.  But there’s ways to, to, to mitigate that, there there’s ways to resolve that issue, and I-I still haven’t seen any evidence that he was even asked, that Trump was even asked to give these documents back.  He’s been cooperating with them on these issues for awhile now, for months, and so why take it to this extreme extent.”

Crenshaw might not have seen reports–or heard the admission from the Trump camp–that they received a subpoena for the documents back in June.  Or that a Trump lawyer fraudulently told government officials that all documents had been returned.  Oh, and let’s not forget the little detail that the documents never should have been sent to Mar-a-Lago in the first place.  They are not Trump’s property.  The Trump cabal was instructed that all documents generated during Trump’s single term in office are government property.  They should have been shipped to the National Archives.  And the Trump camp knew they had illegally taken documents as demonstrated by the fact that they returned 15 boxes to the government at the beginning of the year.

Darya Dugina, daughter of ultra-nationalist “philosopher” Alexander Dugin, considered to be Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s “spiritual guide” to the invasion of Ukraine, was killed in a car bombing near the village of Bolshiye Vyazemy, on Saturday night, CNN reports.

In a place where lush gardens and green lawns decorate the yards of wealthy families and celebrities, resource authorities are taking extreme steps to cut down on the amount of water used by their customers–many times with the help of neighbors who turn them in, USA Today reports.

The Las Virgenes Water District, which serves wealthy neighborhoods like Calabasas, Hidden Hills and Agoura Hills, has been installing restrictor plates into the service lines of particularly egregious offenders of district’s water conservation rules.  People caught watering lawns (which are not native to the Southern California), filling pools (also not native) or failing to repair water leaking devices in their homes–as well as those who defiantly exceed their granted allotments–are being informed that they will have greater restrictions placed on their water supply via metal discs with a 1/16th-inch hole placed in their water meters.

The discs impede the flow of water into the house’s water meter, physically limiting the amount–and pressure–of water the system can use.  This can automatically turn ever shower into a “low-flow” device and it can render most lawn-watering systems useless.

“The only thing extreme or that people take issue with on Donald Trump is his dish, disposition or his personality, his bravado.  Not his politics!” Fox Sunday couch denizen and guy who never stopped using Dep after 1983 Pete Hegseth claims.  “If you look at his policies that are labeled extreme [note use of air quotes], they are quite mainstream by, on both the Republican Party and formerly the Democrat [sic] Party.”

Of course this isn’t true.  For example:  in four years, Trump raised the federal debt by $10 trillion.  He told people to inject disinfectant, to use a horse dewormer, and to swallow a malaria drug to treat Covid.  He allowed the economy to collapse because of his mismanagement.  He demonized LBGTQ people.  He cozied up to dictators.  He diminished American influence in the world.  He wanted to build a stupid border wall.  He brought about the revocation of women’s bodily autonomy.  Oh, and there’s the whole massive corruption and thinking he’s above the law thing.

Pete might want to note that Trump never won the popular vote in an election and never reached over 50% in a job approval poll, so it’s significantly more than “people thought he was too flashy.”