Israeli military officials on Thursday confirmed that, Mohammed Deif, the leader Hamas’s military wing, was killed – along with 90 bystanders – in a July 13 airstrike in Gaza, the AP reports.

As an always-spinning conservative political pundit, Scott Jennings did his best to try to put to lipstick on a pig, and that pig is Donald Trump, the leader of the Republican Party.  Trump’s latest porcine act of piggery occurred at the Chicago conference of Black journalists where Trump questioned presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s heritage, and Jennings tries at first to cast Trump’s appearance as brave before admitting, “He did crap the bed today.  The only question is, is he gonna roll around in it or is he gonna get up and change the sheets.”

Asked if he could defend Donald Trump’s comments from his appearance at a conference of Black journalists–“I didn’t know [Vice President Kamala Harris] was Black ’til a number of years ago, she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black.  So I don’t know.  Is she Indian or is she Black?”–Arkansas Republican Senator and recognized cockwomble Tom Cotton would not address the issue, instead misstating Trump’s comments as remarks about her policy positions, something not mentioned in the quote cited.

Updates on two of Donald Trump’s business ventures that have not been shuttered by the courts, and they’re not good.  Trump’s Truth Social, the low-budget Twitter rip-off platform and the single product of the Trump Media & Technology Group with a mysterious $4.4 billion market cap, continues to shed users, the Guardian reports.  In June, the site reported 2.11 million users, a 38% drop from the previous year.

Another of Trump’s money laundering efforts, LIV Golf, the Saudi-financed ball-chasing tournament that pays to use Trump golf courses, continues to see its viewership drop, going from an initial audience of 430,000 on its opening weekend down to 143,000 for a June event.  While viewership for all live golf events including PGA and LPGA events has dropped, LIV ratings have been particularly hard hit.

And this comes one month after Caffeine TV, the start-up streaming service contracted to supplement the CW Network broadcast found high on your UHF dial, went belly-up suddenly, months into its initial contract for exclusive streaming rights.

Kind of surprising how quickly the fat bastard went where everyone knew he was going in a campaign against a half-Black, half-Indian woman as his opponent. Thought maybe he’d last at least another day or two before going there. Already his team have been putting up that AP headline on the screen from 2016 heralding Harris as the first Indian-American senator before he takes the stage for his cult rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania… and he’s already almost an hour late.

Longtime Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway is the source of all the leaks from the Orange God Emperor’s court about “second-guessing” the elevation of JD Vance as the favourite, other leaky sources tell the Bulwark’s political reporter Marc Caputo about the venomous whisper campaign.

In short, Trump himself remains pretty fine with Vance being his running mate – surely we’d have reporting from Maggie Haberman or Josh Dawsey or whoever by now if he wasn’t – but other denizens of “Trump World” (we still fucking hate that metonym) all the stories quoting “allies” who think he was the wrong pick are largely originated from Conway. Then there’s that there’s essentially zero chance Trump would fire him anyway because that would be admitting a mistake.

Still mildly interesting, especially how much it feels like a strange echo of the reporting coming out of the Biden campaign a month ago – insiders for whatever reason positioning themselves to be able to say they were the ones who were right all along. “Trump World insiders say this patch of turbulence feels more stressful than the GOP primary, Trump’s criminal and civil trials, and the assassination attempt,” Caputo writes. It’s not clear if he’s talking specifically about Vance or just in general the shitty new reality they face since Kamala Harris took over the other ticket. Let’s hope it gets worse.

“The Convening Authority for Military Commissions, Susan Escallier, has entered into pretrial agreements with Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin ‘Attash, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi, three of the co-accused in the 9/11 case. The specific terms and conditions of the pretrial agreements are not available to the public at this time.”

“The three accused, along with Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Ramzi Bin al Shibh, were initially charged jointly and arraigned on June 5, 2008, and then were again charged jointly and arraigned a second time on May 5, 2012, in connection with their alleged roles in the September 11, 2001, attacks against the United States,” says the Department of Defense in a statement. Kind of surprising these assholes are even still alive after 20+ years of solitary confinement at Guantanamo Bay. Sucks to be them.

Why did you close your replies, @SophiaCai99?

Is it because this is bullshit fake news and you were getting ratioed?

You *might* be even worse than the disgraced @StefWKight.

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) July 31, 2024

Rachel Scott said “I think we have to leave it there, by the Trump team,” meaning they got word to her that the interview had to be cut short. So maybe the campaign should explain that instead of losing it online at a woman from what we consider to be a Republican-friendly news site.

The fat fuck also just posted a video of Harris in a bit with actress Mindy Kaling, writing “Crazy Kamala is saying she’s Indian, not Black. This is a big deal. Stone cold phony. She uses everybody, including her racial identity!” which should tell you this is maybe kind of starting to spiral.

North Dakota Senator Kevin Cramer “defended” Trump by saying “First, she is what she was at birth, that’s what she is. Donald Trump’s use of those things to make light of her obsession with identity. It is, again, not wise, but it also shouldn’t be overly insulting. I know, everybody’s super sensitive. And they all want to turn this into him as some sort of racist.” What a ringing endorsement.

“The hostility Donald Trump showed on stage today is the same hostility he has shown throughout his life, throughout his term in office, and throughout his campaign for president as he seeks to regain power and inflict his harmful Project 2025 agenda on the American people. Trump lobbed personal attacks and insults at Black journalists the same way he did throughout his presidency while he failed Black families and left the entire country digging out of the ditch he left us in. Donald Trump has already proven he cannot unite America, so he attempts to divide us.”

“Today’s tirade is simply a taste of the chaos and division that has been a hallmark of Trump’s MAGA rallies this entire campaign. It’s also exactly what the American people will see from across the debate stage as Vice President Harris offers a vision of opportunity and freedom for all Americans.”

“All Donald Trump needs to do is stop playing games and actually show up to the debate on September 10,” says Kamala Harris’s campaign in response to the shitshow at the NABJ.

The large and powerful United Auto Workers union officially announced their endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris over convicted felon former President Trump as on Wednesday.

President Trump showed up, took questions, and spoke to the issues concerning Americans.

Kamala Harris has yet to take a SINGLE question on her policy positions. @JoeConchaTV pic.twitter.com/A6T66T6DQx

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 31, 2024

They literally fucking pulled him off the stage on minute 34 of what was to be a 60 minute panel and the best the RNC has right now is friggin Joe Concha praising how “tough” the questions were.

Trump himself weakly tried to spin that absolute train wreck in a Truth Social post with “The questions were Rude and Nasty, often in the form of a statement, but we CRUSHED IT!”

A north New Jersey elementary school named after soon-to-be-former Senator and convicted felon Robert “Gold Bars Bob” Menendez will be denamed back to its pre-2013 designator, West New York PS #3, the New Jersey Globe reports. And yeah, there’s a town called West New York in New Jersey.

It’s confusing as hell. Anyway, Menendez is not the first Garden State politician to have his name removed from public infrastructure following a federal criminal conviction, as he follows in the ignominious steps of former Senator Harrison A Williams Jr, whose eponymous Metropark train station in Iselin was denamed in the 1980s after Williams went down in the Abscam sting.

Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro on Wednesday asked the country’s Supreme Court, who we’re going to go ahead and guess are simply puppets of his regime and this is just a false play for legitimacy, to conduct an “audit” of his rigged election victory, the Associated Press reports.

Too bad the Cyber Ninjas are out of business, they know a thing or two about auditing elections. Hell even call the Kraken in to explain to voters that Hugo Chavez’s ghost helped reelect Maduro.

Convicted felon former President Trump will sit for a Q&A at the National Association of Black Journalists conference in Chicago on Wednesday moderated by loyalist Fox anchor Harris Faulkner and actual journalists Kadia Goba of Semafor and Rachel Scott of ABC News. Could get ugly.

Several sources with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 initiative to end American democracy tell Rolling Stone that convicted felon former President Trump’s efforts to disown them are making things worse have been “Streisand Effect”-ing the agenda by drawing more attention and none of it good to their plans to turn the nation into a fascist, autocratic police state.

Team Orange sees it differently, with one campaign source calling the justifiably negative publicity a “pain in the ass” and the fat bastard himself raging over the “lunatics” behind it – many of whom also worked in his first administration – making it harder for him to pretend to moderate, especially on abortion. Rolling Stone writes that even before Joe Biden had dropped out Trump had privately told his minions that insane shit proposed by the Heritage freaks, like forced monitoring of women’s pregnancies and bans on birth control pills, could cost him the election.

Turning Point USA propagandist Savannah Hernandez has the eagle eye – both for people getting up and exiting an arena during a political speech and for how to edit it into a 15-second montage of footage she captured at Tuesday night’s raucous Kamala Harris rally at the GSU Center in Atlanta.

She spoke for maybe 30 minutes so it was a pretty short speech. I was honestly surprised to see people leaving so quickly and started filming after seeing continuous streams of people leaving fairly quickly after seeing her

— Savanah Hernandez (@sav_says_) July 30, 2024

Whoa, right? That’s like 15 Megan Thee Stallion fans who came for a free performance and then left while the actual headliner was still speaking. Which was more than enough for convicted felon former President Trump – who has the very same venue booked for his act on Saturday – to post that Harris “needed a concert to bring people into the Atlanta arena, and they started leaving 5 minutes into her speech,” later echoed Wednesday morning by the couch crew on Fox and Friends.

Sorry about the headline. Really. Look we’ve all done things we regret in life, the important thing is knowing how to move on – but only after you’ve made amends with the people you’ve hurt.

Anyway, CNN reports that Vice President Harris’s high dollar fundraiser set for Wednesday night in Houston, Texas (which is in Harris County, duh) has already raked in more than $2.5 million in campaign donations – the goal was $1 million. Congressman Al Green, Congresswoman Lizzie Fletcher, and Harris County Judge (county executive) Lina Hidalgo are expected to attend.

Convicted felon former President Trump meanwhile ragged on Harris for being unable to show up for the National Association of Black Journalists conference in Chicago this afternoon, posting “Crazy Kamala disrespectfully refused to attend the National Association of Black Journalists Conference, but I am on my way to meet with them now in Chicago. Because of which, she’ll probably end up doing, she has no choice, but remember – it is only for that reason!” as if this is going to go well for him. Then he posted an ad for a new $499 “SUPER LIMITED EDITION” Bitcoin-themed version of his stupid chintzy Trump sneakers, with pairs available in either black or, lol, orange.

Alcoholic shitbrain Rudy Giuliani has reached an agreement with defamation plaintiffs and former Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shae Moss to sell off his Manhattan apartment and/or Florida condo to pay off what he can out of the $148 million judgment against him for slandering the mother-daughter duo in the aftermath the 2020 election, JustSecurity’s Adam Klasfeld reports.

An excerpt obtained by the New Republic reveals Eyeliner-wearing Mike Pence replacement JD Vance’s foreword to Dawn’s Early Light by Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts gets a little violent and extreme at a time when that whole “We have to tone down the rhetoric” shit is already over and, more importantly when Jaydee’s boss, convicted felon former President Trump and his minions are desperately trying to disown the radical fascist plan to permanently end American democracy.

“As Kevin Roberts writes, ‘It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine. But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets,'” Vance writes, echoing the “Today is 1776” rhetoric that got people killed at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”

In related news, a new Economist/YouGov national survey finds 11 percent of respondents saying they intended to vote for Trump in November saying Vance was a bad pick for running mate.

Evidently seeing that making people feel insecure about foreigners works to incite nationalism in the US and Western Europe, Chinese communist dictator Xi Jingping last week told his minions the regime will turn its focus to fortifying its border with India, Bloomberg reports.

“China faces new opportunities and challenges in border, coastal and air defense” as a result of changes in the global landscape, said Xi during a study session of the ChiCom Politburo, mentioning a 2020 firefight between Indian and Chinese troops that left 20 of fellow dictator Narendra Modi’s stormtroopers and four of the ChiComs dead. Xi did not explain why it’s so important in practical terms to secure a disputed frontier stretching thousands of miles across desolate and treacherous Himalayan wilderness so it’s safe to assume this is simply his dick-measuring contest with Modi.