The caracal has been taken into custody, the Hoffman Estates, Illinois police department announced Tuesday via Facebook on a major relief for those living in terror of the medium-sized exotic cat.

“The Hoffman Estates Police Department was able to take the Caracal into custody. The cat was hiding under a resident’s deck and is unharmed. The Valley of the Kings Sanctuary and Retreat located in Sharon, Wisconsin is enroute to pick him up where we are sure he will have a healthy and happy life far away from Hoffman Estates. Over the past few days, the village was made aware of a large cat in the area of Della Dr and the Hilldale Golf Course. The cat has been identified as a Caracal, this cat is a native species to Asia and not common in the US,” the department wrote.

That was ice cold. One terminally mentally ill viewer was so upset he posted “Does Ian Sams, Lyin’ Kamala’s Special Advisor, own FoxNews? He is on all the time, as are so many other of her supporters. So ridiculous that Fox allows this to happen right before the Election. We will WIN without Fox. MAGA2024!” The viewer then proceeded to post screenshots of tweets from his minions praising him for his deranged meltdown he had on stage in Chicago earlier.

Wow! Talk about an impressive 30 under 30 list contender: 1010 WINS reports 29 year-old Wayne Lowe of the really MAGA part of eastern Long Island was pulled over on the Expressway for texting and not wearing a seatbelt on Tuesday. Guess those things are kind of optional when you don’t have a valid license to drive in the state of New York either. In fact, Lowe has negative 31 of them!

How a guy who’s been driving for at most 13 years has that many suspension we don’t know. “Upon further investigation, officials determined that Lowe, of Center Moriches, [New York] had 31 license suspensions over 13 dates. Lowe was issued multiple summonses and charged with one count of aggravated unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle,” 1010 WINS writes in the article.

Still no idea how that works. The suspensions were somehow accrued during another suspension or something, maybe. Lowe was booked for an overnight stay in the county lockup before arraignment.

A new Reuters/Ipsos national survey finds Vice President Kamala Harris leading convicted felon former President Trump 45 to 42 percent among likely voters nationally. Slightly more Dem respondents, 86 percent, than Republicans, 81 percent, said they were “completely certain” they would cast a ballot in the presidential election, which we guess is an “enthusiasm edge.”

Fuuuuuuu-uuuuuuuuck this is so stupid. “Now that you have read the 500th poll of the battleground states, the thousands of simulations, the scientific and pseudo-scientific calculations, the hourly assertions of how close this contest is, you might want to take a breath and contemplate the possibility that the factor that will determine the outcome may not have happened yet. At least, that’s what our recent political history says,” writes Politico contributor Jeff Greenfield before going into that history from 1980 through 2016 for a dozen or so more paragraphs.

To be completely fair to him he probably didn’t pick the headline. Some editor thought this was the clickbaitiest way possible to sell readers on a fairly well-written and sober-minded if not particularly original insight into the events that are seen as having caused late swings in close presidential races. That fucking headline though. How hard was it to write “History Suggests ‘October Surprises’ Are More Likely Than Not,” or something anodyne (and more pertinent to the text) like that?

Actually that kind of sucked. Still would’ve been better than what Politico’s editorial team puked up.

More than 204,000 Georgia voters cast ballots on during the first day of in-person early voting, shattering the state’s record, elections officials tell the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Greg Bluestein.

North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper on Monday told reporters that officials have tallied 92 people still missing and unaccounted for in the western part of the state nearly three weeks after the apocalyptic flooding wrought by Hurricane Helene, this grim toll on top of the 95 confirmed dead in the Asheville area among 230 total killed by the storm across the South, ABC News reports.

Of course no press conference on Hurricane Helene would be complete without Cooper having to waste time addressing the demented MAGA conspiracy bullshit about FEMA. “When people assert that help is not coming to western North Carolina – which is completely untrue, which is a lie – the people who are actually on the ground helping feel demoralized. If you’re participating in spreading this stuff, stop it. Whatever your aim is, the people you are really hurting are those in western North Carolina who need help. The safety of our government and volunteer response workers, including FEMA, remains a top priority,” Cooper said, rightfully frustrated with the lies.

Several divorce attorneys tell Fox News that they’re seeing an “uptick” in politically-motivated divorces these days, the propaganda network reports and prepare to be not shocked over what specific issues they do not name as factors. Hint: Not QAnon, racism, or Fox News itself.

“In a Monday interview with Fox News Digital, [DC-based family lawyer Yonatan] Levoritz noted a surge in separations rooted in political discord over the past three election cycles. He observed that as political ideologies grow further ingrained in societal values, polarizing issues such as abortion, drugs and sexuality are breaking down families,” Fox News writes. For all we know Levoritz did in fact offer them several examples of spouses who got sucked into Fox News, QAnon, the Church of the Iron Rod, or other cultish right wing belief systems but they chose not to print those quotes.

Or maybe Levoritz is on Team MAGA himself. “A lot of the divorces are being caused by hot-button issues like abortion. I’ve heard that one at least four or five times in the past two or three months,” Levoritz said, telling Fox about on a case involving a man who sought to divorce his wife “after she had two abortions without his permission,” per Fox. That’s fucking twisted. Again, we don’t know if that guy was Levoritz’s client or he was representing the wife as a defendant.

“Consider a conservative father and a liberal mother, divided on whether to allow their transgender child to openly express their espoused gender identity or, perhaps, a conservative mother and a liberal father disagreeing on the prospect of their sixteen-year-old daughter terminating an unplanned pregnancy,” Fox News writes about other examples of “political differences.”

“Watch live views from various locations in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. New England leaf-watching season is in full swing, as people from as far as Florida and Berlin flock to the region for scenic drives, train rides and bus tours to soak in the splendid hues of red, orange and bronze,” the Associated Press writes of their innovative Autumn-azing fall foliage display!

“The Justice Department announced today that it will monitor compliance with federal voting rights laws in Portage County, Ohio, during the early voting period and on Election Day. The Justice Department enforces the federal voting rights laws that protect the rights of all citizens to access the ballot. The department regularly deploys its staff to monitor for compliance with federal civil rights laws in elections in communities all across the country. In addition, the department also deploys federal observers from the Office of Personnel Management, where authorized by federal court order. Voters in Portage County have raised concerns about intimidation resulting from the surveillance and the collection of personal information regarding voters, as well as threats concerning the electoral process,” says a DOJ press release very obviously in response to that shitbag sheriff telling his fans to record the addresses of homes with Kamala Harris signs.

One of the big reasons the whole “Stop the Steal” shitshow was able to build momentum in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election was that, because the three “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin did not allow for the “pre-processing” of mail-in ballots prior to the morning of election day, the media’s decision desks were unable to call the states. This gave demented tyrant former President Trump room to claim that “big, massive dumps” of late-night ballots had falsely erased his leads in those states – the “Red Mirage” in which Trump-heavy day-of votes were reported before Biden-heavy mail-in votes, leading inexorably to the Capitol riot.

Later that month, Tim Alberta, now of the Atlantic but with Politico at the time wrote that, in Michigan at least, it was because Republicans wanted “to avoid the perception of aiding a system the president was attacking as illegitimate and not only were they skeptical of the Democrats’ concerns of a drawn-out count. But many Republicans didn’t believe the election would be terribly close to begin with. A summer’s worth of polling, conducted for them privately at the local and statewide level, indicated that Trump stood little chance of carrying Michigan a second time,” which, no knock on Alberta writing in the immediate aftermath, was complete horseshit. They had almost certainly did it on purpose with the express intent of giving Trump the room to create doubt.

And for them to start a riot at the TCF Center in Detroit that night, which NBC News on Tuesday concluded was most likely the work of indicted Trump co-conspirator shitbag Mike Roman.

Teacher who left claw marks on a teen’s back after sex as other students were ‘lookouts’ gets sweetheart sentence https://t.co/ylX3c2TlRR pic.twitter.com/uCMB5g8sDd

— New York Post (@nypost) October 15, 2024

Huh. Usually you expect a right wing outlet to be like “THIS IS JUST ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF CHILD SEX CRIMES BEING OUT OF CONTROL IN JOE BIDEN’S KAMALA HARRIS’S AMERICA,” and yet all they can muster is some bitching about how it’s a “sweetheart” deal. Weird, right?

Archaeologists with France’s National Center for Scientific Research say a lidar survey has mapped the foundational remains of a vast complex spanning 116 square miles and comprised of at least 6,000 stone structures in Ecuador’s Upano Valley sitting underneath the thick jungle, NBC News reports.

Little otherwise is known about the Upano civilization in terms of size and scope other than that they probably inhabited the area from around 500 BC to between 300 AD and 600 AD. It’s also probably safe to say they didn’t have any contact with ancient aliens. Or at least any friendly contact. Maybe it was the aliens that wiped them out for insufficient sacrifices to their glory.

“I had a Town Hall in Pennsylvania last night. It was amazing! The Q and A was almost finished when people began fainting from the excitement and heat. We started playing music while we waited, and just kept it going. So different, but it ended up being a GREAT EVENING!” posted convicted felon former President Trump on Tuesday, evidently feeling like he had to address why the fuck he stood on stage and played music for 39 minutes instead of taking questions from the audience after his bizarre behavior seems to kind of be breaking through in the mainstream media.

There’s only so much the “straight news” reporter could do here… Generous as Media Matters’ Lis Power was to grab this clip, we wish she had gotten more of Kilmeade’s spin.

In what’s probably some kind of internal hit job being leaked, the Daily Beast reports that convicted felon former President Trump’s co-campaign chair Chris LaCivita is making a shit ton of money working the fat bastard’s campaign – at about $75,000 a month – a lot of that by double dipping through giving his consulting firms a cut of the money spend on ads produced.

The likely source, newly re-exiled scumbag Corey Lewandowski, had conducted an “audit” during the power struggle that he lost with LaCivita and the (unpaid) other co-chair, Susie Wiles.

Fulton County, Georgia Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney on Tuesday preemptively ordered all county election boards in the state to certify the count and that no fucking around will be tolerated, the ruling coming at the end of a case brought by Fulton County election board member Julie Adams, who voted against certifying in the primaries, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

“If election superintendents were, as plaintiff urges, free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge and so – because of a unilateral determination of error or fraud – refuse to certify election results, Georgia voters would be silenced. Our Constitution and our election code do not allow for that to happen,” McBurney wrote in the ruling putting MAGA scumbags on notice.

Conserva-nerd magazine National Review Senior Editor Charles CW Cooke on Tuesday issued a chilling warning to his fans that “the ‘vibe shift’ against Harris and the evidence to support that ‘vibe shift’ are out of sync. I’m as suspicious of this supposed ‘collapse’ as I was of her initial hype. I agree that many Democrats seem to believe they’re losing; that doesn’t mean they are.”

The foreboding came a day after his dude Noah Rothman fretted similarly that the “panic” could actually end up redounding to the opposite effect, bedwetting that there may not be enough libs bedwetting, writing “The Democratic panic isn’t irrational or unfounded. Given the environmental advantages the GOP enjoys this year, a tie will go to the Republican challenger. But Democratic voters can take some heart in the fact that their party is reacting to a tied race as though it’s on the cusp of an epochal humiliation. If complacency is the enemy of winning campaigns, you at least cannot say the Democratic candidate or her supporters are content to rest on their laurels.”

That is all it is… BS

— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) October 15, 2024

“In September, the US Geological Survey Cascades Volcano Observatory (CVO) and Pacific Northwest Seismic Network (PNSN) located six earthquakes at Mount Adams, ranging from magnitudes 0.9 to 2.0. Typically, earthquakes at this volcano are located at a rate of about 1 earthquake every 2-3 years. With just one seismic station near the volcano, monitoring capabilities are currently limited. CVO and PNSN plan to install temporary seismic stations in the Mount Adams area, which will allow detection of smaller earthquakes and better estimates of size, location, and depth, information necessary to assess the significance of the activity. Currently, there is no indication that the level of earthquake activity is cause for concern, and the alert level and color code for Mount Adams remain at GREEN / NORMAL. CVO and the PNSN will continue to monitor earthquake activity and release further updates as the situation warrants.”

“Six locatable earthquakes (magnitude 0.9–2.0) were detected in September on seismic station ASR2, a PNSN-operated station located about 7 miles (11 km) southwest of the summit of Mount Adams, as well as other stations much farther away from the volcano. This represents the most earthquakes located at Mount Adams in a month since monitoring began in 1982. No earthquakes were felt at the surface. The locations and depths are not well constrained due to the sparse Mount Adams seismic network, and smaller earthquakes have occurred that seismologists have been unable to locate. Satellite imagery does not show any detectable ground deformation at the volcano. Mount Adams does not have a dedicated volcanic gas sampling program,” says a USGS update.