Officials at the Lake Meredith National Recreation on Sunday posted on Facebook they had acquired a South American freshwater fish called a pacu – a vegetarian relative of the piranhas said to have human-like teeth – an 8.8 lbs specimen caught in the lake earlier in the day.

The post said it was clear to them that the Pacu had been a pet that was dumped after growing too large for its owner’s fishbowl… but they didn’t say what made them so sure about that. How the hell do they know the lake isn’t infested with invasive pacu preying on native plants?

Convicted felon former President Trump’s top lampreys have come to the conclusion that, according to the Guardian’s Trump beat guy Hugo Lowell, they need “to pray that the former US president ​has a good night at the presidential debate next month,” and that all hopes of regaining momentum hinge on it, “a stunning approach that shows the serious predicament for Trump and his campaign as he struggles to land effective attacks against the vice-president just months before the election.”

Why? “What has happened internally in the Trump campaign in recent weeks is the realization that nothing they do in the period up to the debate is likely to cut through in a significant way that blunts Harris’s gains that have her level in key swing state polls,” Lowell writes, citing sources. “​And because they don’t think the messaging will cut through, senior advisers are left hoping that Trump can energize voters with his performance on stage, the people said,” he continues.

“Trump’s advisers have also been buoyed by the likelihood that microphones will be muted when it is not a candidate’s turn to speak, believing it defangs Harris in being able to fact-check him in real time and in her ability to make quips of her own.” Lowell’s always been good, but this…

This is freaking gold, even without any anonymous quotes in the piece. They’re “buoyed” on the likelihood that mics will be muted this round? Holy fucking shit that is just beautiful.

🇺🇸🫡🇺🇸 Thank you Mr. President https://t.co/kWCEaUGcT7

— WLFI (@worldlibertyfi) August 29, 2024

“This is not normal” has been done to death, but the sheer level of not normal – of a presidential candidate tweeting a commercial for God knows what kind of fucking scam this is -does merit attention. “World Liberty Fi” doesn’t even have a website. Their Twitter page just lists a Telegram account URL. One of the posts, credited to Don Jr, says “Folks, we all know how crooked banks and financial institutions rig the system against everyday Americans. They shut people out, deny them loans, drown them in paperwork and kill them with legal and processing fees. Our entire family, has experienced this firsthand… we’ve been de-banked, de-platformed and had every political game imaginable played on us. These banks and the elites who run them want absolute control but that ends now. We’re making finance great again by putting the power back in YOUR hands.”

“This new DeFi platform will cut out the corrupt, expensive and inefficient middlemen. No more bureaucrats deciding your fate,” the post continued. Sounds very paradigm shifting to the next level.

“Real gross domestic product (GDP) increased at an annual rate of 3.0 percent in the second quarter of 2024, according to the ‘second’ estimate released by the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the first quarter, real GDP increased 1.4 percent. The GDP estimate released today is based on more complete source data than were available for the “advance” estimate issued last month. In the advance estimate, the increase in real GDP was 2.8 percent. The update primarily reflected an upward revision to consumer spending,” says a new US Bureau of Economic Analysis report.

A former top official with Russia’s Ministry of Defense was arrested Thursday on charges of engaging in corruption without the express permission of dictator Vladimir Putin, the AP reports.

Or it might have been that former Deputy Defense Minister Pavel Popov did have permission but it was rescinded without him being notified. Popov faces up to a decade in prison for some scam related to “Patriot Park,” an exposition center the AP says is known as Russia’s “military Disneyland,” and a pet project of former Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to showcase USSR and Russian Federation history and weaponry. Popov is accused of embezzling rubles to fund renovations at his properties in the Moscow area. It’s not clear what “Patriot Park” charges for vodka relative to local stores, but if it’s really Russia’s Disneyland then it’s gotta be at least a 300 percent markup.

‘I Did Fries’: Kamala Harris Claims She Worked at McDonald's, but She Never Mentioned It Until She Ran for President. Did She Really Toil Beneath the Golden Arches? https://t.co/EmeLJzXv9B

— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) August 29, 2024

A new USA Today/Suffolk University national survey of likely voters finds Vice President Kamala Harris leading convicted felon former President Trump 48 to 43 percent, an eight point net swing against the fat fuck as in June the same pollster found him leading Joe Biden by 3 percent.

“The vice president’s small lead was fueled by big shifts among some key demographic groups traditionally crucial for Democrats, including Hispanic and Black voters and young people. Among those with annual incomes of less than $20,000, in the biggest change, a 3-point Trump edge over Biden in June has become a 23-point Harris advantage over Trump in August,” USA Today writes.

Convicted felon former President Trump’s campaign tell Axios they’re “weighing options” on releasing their footage of the altercation with an employee at Arlington National Cemetery, as if the fact that they haven’t released it by this point doesn’t already say everything you need to know.

People are right to be skeptical about the impact on voters considering all the shit Trump’s gotten away with over the years that would have ended other campaigns. It was a month ago that the fat bastard embarrassed himself at the National Association of Black Journalists conference basically denying the existence of mixed-race Americans and that had basically no downside impact on his favorability numbers in polling. No reason to expect otherwise in this. And yet there’s this feeling that the Arlington shitshow less a self-punch to the face and more a metastasizing cancer feeding off what were already diseased nodes in the system: Trump’s disdain for “losers and suckers,” claiming the “Presidential Medal of Freedom” is better than the Congressional Medal of Honor, the overall cuntishness of filming a campaign ad at a memorial he didn’t attend the previous two years, a horrible tragedy that he blamed on Joe Biden but isn’t even running against Biden anymore.

The carefully considered damage control when he’s supposed to be “winning the news cycle” against Kamala Harris for doing a joint interview with Tim Walz makes it seem this is spiraling.

“New Emerson College Polling/The Hill swing state surveys find a tight race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump. Harris has a slight edge over Trump in Michigan (50 percent to 47 percent), Georgia (49 percent to 48 percent), and Nevada (49 percent to 48 percent). The candidates are tied in Pennsylvania (48 percent to 48 percent). In Wisconsin and North Carolina, Trump has a one-point edge over Harris (49 percent to 48 percent), and Trump leads by three in Arizona (50 percent to 47 percent),” reports Emerson College in a write up of their swing state polling commissioned by the global leader in shitty political news, emphasis ours.

Is it bitchy to point out the homerism? Probably. Does that make us wrong overall to be documenting the homerism of two organizations that seem to constantly go out of their way to give the “slight edge” to MAGA whenever and wherever they can? Fuck no. Someone’s gotta collect the receipts of their miserable cocksuckery and we don’t see any other sites else really stepping up here.

CNN's Dana Bash snags Harris-Walz interview, has history of ripping Trump https://t.co/EPSwZbNwSr

— Fox News (@FoxNews) August 29, 2024

Suspecting a vast criminal conspiracy to rig, police in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on Wednesday executed 16 search warrants of claw machine games to determine why the hell it’s been so hard for even skilled players to win a stuffed animal in recent years, the Associated Press reports .

Police in Nassau County on New York’s Long Island said they arrested a man for carrying a 14-inch knife after they stopped and searched him because he was violating the county’s new anti-mask law, the Washington Post reports.

Wearing a balaclava-type head covering, eighteen-year-old Wesslin Omar Ramirez Castillo was arrested for criminal possession of a weapon and he was also charged with a misdemeanor for violating the county’s Mask Transparency Act.  The law specifically allows people to wear masks for medical or religious purposes, but bans other efforts to hide one’s identity.

The employee of Arlington National Cemetery who was shoved and abused by convicted felon former President Trump’s staff for attempting to enforce the rules about not turning the place into a campaign stop has declined to press charges against the Trump minions out of fear of violent retaliation from MAGA terrorists, of course, the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman reports.

In related news, couchfucker JD Vance continued defending the incident, saying the media and Democrats were “acting like Donald Trump filmed a TV commercial at a gravesite,” which was incorrect because it was a TikTok commercial. Also the family of a a Green Beret who died by suicide after serving roughly a dozen combat tours and is buried near the site of the altercation issued a statement to the Times ripping into Team Orange for putting his gravestone in their demented propaganda video, saying “We hope that those visiting this sacred site understand that these were real people who sacrificed for our freedom and that they are honored and respected accordingly.”

The depressed angry white Republican with a gun saw Donald Trump’s political rally as a “target of opportunity” that would provide him a worldwide stage, said the FBI agent investigating the July assassination attempt against one of the presidential candidates, the Associated Press reports.

Kevin Rojek, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Pittsburgh field office, said investigators have conducted more than one thousand interviews and reviewed electronic devices used by the shooter.  Rojek says the shooter researched how to construct explosives over a five-year period, and he tracked Trump, President Joe Biden in a “sustained, detailed effort to plan an attack on some event, meaning he looked at any number of events or targets.”

When Trump announced the July 13th event at the nearby farm show grounds, Rojek said the shooter became hyperfocused on the event and the location, doing extensive research including finding out how the fairgrounds would be laid out and where the stage would be located.

Two European men, one in Serbia and one in Romania, have been indicted on 34 counts each for a series of swatting calls–fake emergency calls to local police hoping to elicit an armed response and violent outcome at the target’s home–that took place in December 2023 and into 2024, Newsweek reports.

Thomas Szabo and Nemanja Radovanovic face 34 counts each of making threats and conspiracy.  Szabo is also charged relating to making a call to a crisis hotline on January 17, 2021 threatening to detonate bombs and kill Joe Biden.

The swatting calls targeted Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, Florida Senator Rick Scott, Georgia Equiness Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Judge Tanya Chutkan.  Others targeted included journalists and local government leaders.  Officials say there appears to be no political agenda behind the calls other than to target people who were in the news.

Yelp filed an antitrust lawsuit against internet monolith Google on Wednesday saying the company used its position as the dominant search engine to boost its own review services while suppressing traffic to competitive review sites like Yelp, CNN reports.

“Yelp has long fought to make Google’s local search experience more helpful for consumers and create a level playing field for competing vertical search services,” the company said in an online statement.  “With our action, we aim to safeguard competition, protect consumer choice, recover damages, and prevent Google from engaging in anticompetitive practices so that innovation may flourish.”

Yelp says its customer draws are reduced by Google providing similar service and highlighting its options first, and its lawsuit comes weeks after a judge in DC federal court found Google was unfairly operating an illegal monopoly on internet searches.

In a somewhat expected twist, an appeals court granted former Republican Alaska governor and one-time VP nominee Sarah Palin’s motion to allow her to refile her defamation lawsuit against the New York Times and one of its editors for a briefly posted piece that linked Palin to the mass shooting that killed six and wounded 13, including Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, the Washington Post reports.

The original case was decided in 2022, with the judge and the jury both deciding that Palin’s claims for damages were meritless.  The Times had removed the piece which had linked a Palin PAC promotional piece that used gunsight targets on Congressional districts to the shooter hours after it was posted and the outlet issued a correction.  Palin, however, claims the damage was incurred before the correction was issued.

The ability to refile, however, wasn’t based on the facts of the case but rather on the fact that the judge announced to the court on the record–while the jury was sequestered in deliberations–that he would have ruled for the Times and against Palin.  Some jurors later said they news alerts reporting the judge’s statement; the defense says this swayed the jury.  And now they get to argue the case all over again.

A new set of swing state surveys by Fox News finds Vice President Kamala Harris narrowly leading convicted felon former President Trump 50 to 49 percent in Arizona and 50 to 48 percent in both Georgia and Nevada, while Donald leads Kamala in North Carolina 50 to 49 percent.

The downballot races are considerably uglier for MAGA: In the Arizona Senate race, Dem Congressman Ruben Gallego leads dipshit Kari Lake 56 to 41 percent. In Nevada, incumbent Dem Senator Jackie Rosen is up 55 to 41 over Trump-endorsed GOP challenger Sam Brown. In North Carolina, Dem Attorney General Josh Stein is ahead of fat antisemitic psychopath Lt Gov Mark Robinson 54 to 43 percent in the race to replace term-limited Democratic Governor Roy Cooper.

The article about poll was up at 6:00 PM EDT on Wednesday. It took no longer than 26 minutes for the Trump campaign’s polling guy Tony Fabrizio to put out yet another unskewing memo. “It’s that time of year again. Fox is releasing atrocious polling. A look at polling from this same time period in 2020 shows that Fox was off in North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada from either 5.3 percent to 9.7 percent. [Fox’s only Georgia poll in 2020 was released in June and that one overstated Joe Biden’s support by 1.7 percent.] President Trump continues to outperform past cycles. President Trump is 10 points ahead of where he was in Arizona at this point in 2020, according to Fox. Likewise, he is running 8 points ahead of his 2020 polling in Nevada and 5 points ahead of his 2020 polling in North Carolina. We see the same trend nationwide” and blah blah blah blah blah, Fabrizio wrote.

We believe Tony Fabs about Trump outperforming his past cycles in polling. We’re just not sure that’s actually on him and maybe not the pollsters who we would expect are recalibrating their weighting methodologies so they don’t miss “the hidden Trump vote.” Which doesn’t mean they’re going to get it right this year. They can and certainly will fuck something up. It’s just what the hell makes Tony Fabs so confident that, whatever the error is, it will be all upside Trump?

In a Politico preview of convicted felon former President Trump’s new special picture book, “Save America,” the fat bastard’s page with a photo of him with Facebook Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan is captioned with a rant describing how Zuck “would come to the Oval Office to see me. He would bring his very nice wife to dinners, be as nice as anyone could be, while always plotting to install shameful Lock Boxes in a true PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT… He told me there was nobody like Trump on Facebook. But at the same time, and for whatever reason, steered it against me. We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison – as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election.”

Trump definitely wrote that. Say what you will about him having outsourced his “business” books to ghostwriters. He definitely “penned” that because it’s the same stupid shit he screams about Zuckerberg in Truth Social posts. And the random capitalizations. We’ll give him credit for this. But we still don’t know what the fuck “Lock Boxes” means specifically and probably never will.

For at least the second time this month and the fifth this year, a package containing a large quantity of cocaine was handed over to law enforcement after being found on a beach in Florida, CBS News reports, raising the question of how many hundreds or even thousands of times this year were packages containing large quantities of cocaine not handed over to law enforcement after being found on a beach in Florida but instead cut up and sold or consumed in multi-day binges.