This is one of those times when starting with the background context is more appropriate than a traditional lede that expands on the headline: Indiana Lt Gov Micah Beckwith is a pastor and a hardcore Evangelical douchebag whose greatest hits include saying the January 6th insurrectionists were “sent by God,” vowing to fire any staffer who uses pronouns in their email, and – this last one’s a clue – getting over 2,000 books banned from the Hamilton East Library’s young adult section for “depictions of sex, violence and repeated profanity” – or “pornographic” in MAGA hyperbole.

Beckwith’s boss is not Gov Mike Braun. Not even if they liked or respected each other, which they don’t. His true overlord is Nathan Peternel, founding pastor of the “Life Church” chain of MAGAchurches, who elevated Beckwith to lead pastor of the Noblesville campus of the Life Church, the pulpit from which Beckwith continues to preach his fire and brimstone while serving as Lt Gov.

Oh and they still podcast together on a show called “Jesus, Sex, and Politics.” Why “sex” has to be in the name says enough, but pornography and child exploitation are regular topics. Also a hint here.

Kentucky GOP chair Robert J Benvenuti III on Saturday issued a statement saying “The Republican Party of Kentucky condemns hate in all its forms. The post is vile and reprehensible, and is directly adverse to all that we stand for as a party and a nation. We are actively investigating the matter and will take the harshest action available to us against those involved. We remain committed to the values of Lincoln and advancing liberty and prosperity for every American,” after the chair of the Hardin County Republican Party posted what the Lexington Courier Journal reports was a video depicting former President Barack and former First Lady Michelle Obama as apes.

Which is pretty standard for how Republicans, particularly the ones in impoverished rural podunks, regard African Americans. Thus making the condemnation more of a self-affirmation exercise for MAGA voters who like to believe that, deep down inside, they aren’t really racist so much as maybe merely edgy or just not so politically correct like those bitchy, overly sensitive libtards.

Hardin County GOP chair Bobbie Coleman seconded that in her “apology” Facebook post. “Earlier today, I shared a video that was intended to celebrate President Trump’s successful policy achievements by depicting him as a Lion King, triumphing over liberal Democrats. I thought this video was a silly way to celebrate the policy victories of the past nine months – including tax cuts, peace in the Middle East, a strong border, and lower gas prices. I apologize for sharing the video and for amplifying offensive imagery of former President Obama. As someone who does not engage with racist tropes, I did not consider the underlying meaning that this video may have had. I am not racist and any suggestion to the contrary does not reflect my values or character,” Coleman wrote.

The “I am not racist” was for her, not for anyone who would’ve been offended by the content.

Speaking with ABC News on Sunday, a real modest soybean farmer who also happens to work in public service on the side said that he’s been hurting financially from access to Chinese markets being cut off due to President Trump’s trade war but nevertheless professed a deep conviction that in the end everything will work out for him as long as he continues to support the policies.

And yeah, Treasury Suckretary Scott Bessent really does own $25 million worth of North Dakota soybean and corn fields, which was supposed to be scandalous that he didn’t divest from it and now here he is saying he feels the pain of guys in John Deere caps and flannel out there in MAGAmerica.

Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, the would-be 2028 presidential contender who’s been in jail since July on a 20 month bid for the crime of pointing out that Turkish dictator Recep Erdogan’s regime stifling democratic opposition was, per the AP, hauled into court on Sunday for questioning on suspicion of “espionage” for some bullshit pretext too vague to even entertain dignifying here.

Hundreds rallied outside the courthouse, led by Ozgur Ozel, chair of Imamoglu’s Republican People’s Party (CHP). “As long as these interrogations continue, as long as this cruelty continues, as long as this oppression continues, we will struggle democratically – without harming anyone and without allowing anyone to trample our dignity,” said Ozel. It’s not clear if the rallygoers were harmed or trampled by cops loyal to Erdawg’s increasingly insecure authoritarian regime.

In an interview aired Sunday on CBS, California Governor Gavin Newsom was asked whether he’d been giving “serious thought” to a White House bid in 2028, to which he said “Yeah, I’d be lying otherwise,” Newsom replied. “I’d just be lying. And I’m not – I can’t do that,” which sure as hell sounds like “yes” but he’s just not ready to actually announce it and launch yet.

The hint comes a day after the BBC aired an interview in which fellow Golden Stater former Vice President Kamala Harris strongly hinted she would make another run for the top job following her catastrophic but fairly narrow loss to convicted felon President Trump last year.

Prosecutors in Paris on Sunday announced the arrest of two suspects in the heist on the city’s iconic Louvre museum in which they made off with $102 million worth of jewels, France 24 reports.

Seriously stop laughing! This is important health news! Yes like “Lol they’re ALL ‘from contaminated meat'” hah hah, very funny… For real, CBS News reports that a four year study of urinary tract infections in Southern California were linked to E Coli from the consumption of contaminated animal flesh from an abattoir. The rest were presumably from, well, contaminated human flesh.

That freaking sucks for the people who just ate from some greasy spoon and their partners thought they were fucking around on the side. Had to have happened to at least a few of them.

With the holidays and off-year elections coming up often too does politics in conversation. Maybe too often for some, not enough for others, but either way it’s a good prompt to start talking about talking about politics, starting with an example of the kind of dense topic you should not open with…

Speaking with NPR this week, House Oversight Committee Ranking Dem Robert Garcia was asked about his team’s launch of what Fox News and other MAGA media outlets described as an “ICE tracker” akin to the now banned “ICEBlock” app. “Well, first, to be clear, this is a misconduct tracker that documents civil rights violations by the administration. Yeah. It includes, you know, cases where ICE has detained US citizens, of course. This is not a live location tracker. This is not putting officers at risk. We’re publishing records after the fact to expose any patterns of misconduct. And so this is not tracking anyone or putting out officers’ names. This is about documenting something that’s already happened. So they’re creating a fake controversy,” Garcia said, as Dems so often have to these days. The interview aired after MAGA Congressman Bryan Steil’s committee tweeted this:

Statement from Chairman Bryan Steil:

“The House of Representatives absolutely will not maintain a website that tracks and doxes ICE agents.” https://t.co/VJHeEERNh6

— House Admin. Committee GOP (@HouseAdmin) October 22, 2025

Irony’s dead, hypocrisy’s the law of the land, nobody gives a fuck about intellectual dishonesty anymore, and yet the tweet still manages to transcend it all. Now assume the very real possibility that this asshole simply did not even look at Garcia’s press release in which his staff announced that they’re “establishing a misconduct tracker to systematically document abuse and civil rights violations by this administration — including cases where ICE has detained US citizens and violated federal law. The tracker documents unconstitutional actions after they occur — it is not a live location tool” and just got the Fox News version of it instead. Assume that he doesn’t know the Oversight Dems already have a generalized “Report Potential Wrongdoing” tipline and web form like various committees under both parties have operated for years in search of bad shit to amplify.

Around 190 MAGAmericans who donated in total over $30,000 worth of crypto to the effort to expose Charlie Kirk’s murderer(s) – and then dox people who mocked his death – in the immediate aftermath of his assassination are understandably feeling like the rug was pulled out from under them because it was pretty textbook rug pull scam that took only a few days, Drop Site reports.

Pizzagate asshole Jack Posobiec’s site Human Events has EXCLUSIVELY “obtained undercover footage of an Abigail Spanberger campaign organizer laughing and rolling her eyes when discussing the campaign’s reaction to murder of Charlie Kirk. Spanberger is running to serve at governor of Virginia against Lt Gov Winsome Earle-Sears.” OH MY GOD SPANBERGER IS SOOOOOOO FUCKED!!!

The article continues with “In the video dated Sept 16, just six days after Kirk’s murder, campaign organizer for Spanberger Maame Ama Deegbe responds to questions about the atmosphere in Virginia following his death,” eventually getting to the part where Deegbe rolls her eyes to the “undercover” person, but the stated reason for the meeting Deegbe in a Starbucks or wherever to surreptitiously record her more than a month ago is never really explained in the article.

Nor is why Posobiec and pals waited more than a month to print this article. Like THIS is what they think is going to destroy the Spanberger campaign at this point in the race?

“At 500 AM EDT (0900 UTC), the center of Tropical Storm Melissa was located near latitude 16.3 North, longitude 75.0 West. Melissa is moving toward the northwest near 3 mph (6 km/h). A slow west-northwestward to westward motion is expected today through Sunday night. A turn to the north and northeast is forecast on Monday and Tuesday. On the forecast track, the center of Melissa is expected to move near or over Jamaica during the weekend and early next week, and it could be near or over eastern Cuba by the middle of next week,” says a National Hurricane Center bulletin.

“Melissa’s slow movement will bring a multi-day period of damaging winds and heavy rainfall beginning tonight, likely causing catastrophic flash flooding and numerous landslides. There is risk of life-threatening storm surge early next week. All preparations should be completed today.”

“Fur Commission USA confirms that one or more attackers illegally entered a mink farm near Woodbine, Iowa, between 9 pm and 8 am last night. The intruder cut through fencing, destroyed animal housing, and released more than 1,000 mink. About half of the animals were recovered within hours by the farmer, his son, and his grandson, who operate the multi-generation family farm. Local law enforcement and the FBI are investigating the attack,” says Fur Commission USA in a statement.

“‘This was not activism – it was terrorism,’ said Challis Hobbs, Executive Director of Fur Commission USA. ‘Breaking into a lawful business, destroying property, and releasing animals to suffer and die is a violent crime. These extremist attacks put families, animals, and rural communities in danger.'”

“Under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, any person who interferes with or damages an animal enterprise is considered a terrorist under federal law. Such actions are criminal and carry severe penalties. The release of mink causes immense suffering. Farm-raised mink lack survival skills and quickly die from starvation, exposure, predators, or being struck by vehicles. These actions also devastate farm families who depend on their work for their livelihoods. Fur Commission USA thanks law enforcement for their quick response and will continue to support farmers under threat from these ongoing acts of rural terrorism,” the trade group’s outraged Facebook post continued.

Laying it on a little thick, right? Like sure, a large percentage of the mink who escaped will indeed die in the wild but that’s short of the 100 percent of the high-quality ones who will end up in some pinky-ring wearing Russian scumbag’s wife’s walk-in closet and then the slightly lower-quality ones that will end up in his mistress’s walk-in closet. Mustelids are smart and adaptable, they can figure out how to eat bugs and evade raptors. Maybe the commission should look into press releases about cattle rustling, learn how to focus on the product value instead of this lame virtue signaling.

Convicted felon President Trump’s regime are shocked and furious to learn that a bunch of the ghoulish Silicon Valley plutocrats they consider to be close allies are involved in politics to further their own interests, NBC News reports in an article that opens with “The White House is threatening some of Silicon Valley’s richest and most powerful players over their efforts to spearhead a $100 million midterm strategy to back candidates of both parties who support a national framework for artificial intelligence regulations” and naming MAGA tech bros like Andreesseen-Horowitz cofounder Marc Andreesseen, OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman, and Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale as potential traitors to the America First cause through their unsanctioned political operation.

“Especially frustrating to White House officials is that it plans to back AI-friendly candidates from both political parties – which could potentially help Democrats win back control of Congress – and one of the leaders of the new super PAC is a former top staffer to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer,” the article continues, its text copied here verbatim because it doesn’t actually matter what the policy framework they want to build or the lobbying objective of the effort is.

Like they’re “frustrated” that ruthless nihilistic capitalists who went MAGA to gain political clout are going “bipartisan” to maintain their political clout? Christ, what a bunch of mental children.

Any group run by Schumer acolytes will not have the blessing of the president or his team,” a White House official told NBC News, as if these guys didn’t know that. “Any donors or supporters of this group should think twice about getting on the wrong side of Trump world. We are carefully monitoring who is involved,” the official added. OOOOOOOOOHHHH CLOSELY MONITORING!!!!

Canada says it will pull ad using Reagan speech on tariffs to restore trade negotiations with US https://t.co/L9F9Y5SMm1

— John Solomon (@jsolomonReports) October 24, 2025

A now-former employee of the Avis Budget rental car company’s Syracuse Hancock International Airport lot in upstate New York is being sought on grand larceny and scheme to defraud charges after he somehow stole no fewer than 47 vehicles from the lot last summer, the AP reports.

The 31 year-old male was not named in the article but that gap is kind of smaller than the details about just how the fuck this dude stole 47 cars. There’s some vague and confusing mention of how the scheme “involved renting out the purloined vehicles at other locations around Onondaga County,” then the AP says that cops “declined to release details of how the vehicles were stolen.”

Maybe the cops don’t really know either. They did however say that 42 of the vehicles had been recovered and returned to Avis but then again who knows if that inventory is accurate if the company let 47 cars get fucking stolen off of their lot over two months without knowing.

Just in case you’re considering a visit to the remote Sistan and Baluchestan province in southeast Iran near the border with Afghanistan, wait. ABC News reports researchers have determined that an eruption at the Taftan Volcano, dormant for at least the last 700,000 years, may be reawakening.

Startling, right? From a white paper by Mohammadhossein Mohammadnia, Man Wai Yip, A Alexander G Webb, and Pablo J Gonzalez: “We unambiguously document unrest at Taftan volcano. Summit uplift was detected using Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar time series and its timing tightly constrained applying a new common mode filtering method. Uplift started and ended gradually lasting 10 months (July 2023 to May 2024). Uplift peaked at 11 cm/year rates, and during slowing-down several gas emission events occurred. Unrest was triggerless, uncorrelated with rainfall or seismic events. We favor internal driving processes with two possible scenarios: (a) dynamic hydrothermal alteration leading to permeability changes, shallow gas storage and pressurization, followed by opening of degassing pathways; or (b) a minor, undetected deep magmatic intrusion causing volatile exsolution and pore pressure increases within the hydrothermal system.”

“Lack of post-unrest subsidence suggests persistence of hydrothermal high-pressure conditions at the summit and associated hazards. Our study shows how satellite imagery reveals hidden volcanic hazards at Taftan, and the need to implement a holistic volcano risk reduction strategy.”

That wasn’t even that dense, but in even plainer English: This fucker means business and soon.

Democrats created Obamacare and the enhanced subsidies that they themselves set to expire. 
 
Not a single Republican voted for it.
 
We’re more than happy to address why Obamacare is failing, but Democrats must first vote to reopen the government.

— Senate Republicans (@SenateGOP) October 24, 2025

The Douglas County, Colorado coroner this week confirmed that a 74 year-old horse paste superfan died of “ivermectin toxicity” from ingesting too much of the miracle drug, CBS Colorado reports

The inquest into the August 2 death of Mary Doran concluded that “The decedent and her husband were reportedly taking ivermectin intermittently over the past year which was being taken 2 times a day over the past 6 days… Ivermectin was present at the decedent’s home,” in containers that say outright “for oral use in horses only.” As in not human beings, no matter what Q told you to do.

Horse paste abuse has taken the lives of at least seven patriots in the United States since 2021.