New Jersey Senator Gold Bars Bob Menendez will resign his seat following his conviction on a shit ton of felonies related to his bribery scams, NBC News reports. The timing is unclear.

Trump campaign dipshit Brian Hughes on Wednesday pumped the brakes on Vice President Kamala Harris’s acceptance of a debate against eyeliner-wearing Senator JD Vance, saying “We don’t know who the Democrat nominee for Vice President is going to be, so we can’t lock in a date before their convention. To do so would be unfair to Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker, Gretchen Whitmer, or whoever Kamala Harris picks as her running mate,” in a statement making it obvious they aren’t committing.

So yeah, we kind of fucked up in our earlier article where we said it was “officially set.”

“JUST IN: Former Thomas Crooks classmate says Crooks was a known Trump hater and was a ‘know it all.’ The FBI still doesn’t know what Crooks’ motive could have been. Hispanic classmate Vincent Taormina recalled a political disagreement he had with Crooks after he told him that he was a Trump supporter. ‘He did not like any [politician],'” writes TrendingPolitics.com publisher Colin Rugg, co-founder of a really dogshit MAGA clickbait site, after three days of multiple other witnesses telling legitimate news outlets that the would-be Trump assassin was a conservative if not a Trump fanboy.

We’re still keeping an eye out for actual reliable updates on any indicators of Crooks’s politics and motivation, not some shit a MAGA propagandist paid another kid to say on camera.

Can’t believe how badly the RNC is doing in the ratings. They played right into the hands of the Radical Left Democrats, and now are floating in limboland. Really Sad! Axios reports it’s down 21 percent compared to the 2016 RNC. Lots of people are saying the show sucks! No wonder it’s a ratings and beyond disaster! CANCEL and air Reruns of The Apprentice instead! More would watch!

For a party that bitches constantly about the use of non-gender-specific pronouns, Republicans sure like throwing “they” around a lot to as placeholder for vaguely nefarious malefactors.

Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith on Wednesday formally appealed MAGA Judge Aileen Cannon’s dismissal of the case against convicted felon former President Trump for stealing classified documents and hoarding them at Mar-a-Lago, Politico’s Josh Gerstein reports.

In an interview set to air Wednesday, President Biden told BET’s Ed Gordon he would consider dropping out of the 2024 race if he had “some medical condition that emerged, if somebody, if doctors came to me and said, you got this problem and that problem,” the New York Times reports.

It’s not clear if this is anything like “opening the door” to stepping aside, but the Times notes that the answer “is the latest in a series of shifting explanations by the president about what might cause him to reconsider. In an interview with ABC News this month, Biden said he would drop out only if the ‘Lord almighty’ told him to. At a news conference in Washington several days later, he said he would stay in the race unless aides came to him with proof that he could never win.”

Georgia MAGA Congressman Rich McCormick responded to a Newsmax host’s suggestion that Democrats were somehow “trying to get their stories straight” on the failed assassination attempt of convicted felon former President Trump – like it was a plot – with just general MAGA bullshit. Th answer was as if McCormick didn’t listen to the question at all. He clearly did, based on the content because the canned lines about Marxism and the judiciary and what not was to paper over his unwillingness to directly engage with the right wing propagandist’s conspiracy theories.

A source tells NBC News that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer pushed for the DNC’s sudden reversal on the plan to begin the virtual roll-call nomination of President Biden this week.

In related news, California’s presumptive next Senator, Congressman Adam Schiff went public with his call for President Biden to step aside following private comments from last weekend that leaked.

Vice President Kamala Harris and eyeliner-wearing Senator JD Vance will face off in a debate on CBS on Monday, August 12th, Wall Street Journal’s Ken Thomas reports. No flies allowed on the set.

Former Las Vegas city councilwoman, 2022 Republican gubernatorial primary candidate, and current Nye County justice of the peace Michele Fiore was indicted by a federal grand jury on Tuesday for “her alleged scheme to defraud donors to a charity to memorialize police officers who lost their lives in the line of duty,” according to a Justice Department press release coming just over three years to the day after the reports of a federal investigation into a campaign finance scam first surfaced.

“According to the indictment, Fiore, 53, solicited donations to build a statue honoring Las Vegas police officers who were killed in the line of duty. Fiore allegedly promised donors that ‘100 percent of the contributions’ would be used towards the creation of this statue. As alleged, Fiore did not use any of the tens of thousands of dollars in charitable donations for the statue of the fallen officer and instead converted the money to her personal use. The donations were used to pay her political fundraising bills and rent and were transferred to family members, including to pay for her daughter’s wedding. Fiore is charged with four counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. If convicted, she faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison on each count.”

Fiore doesn’t have a JD – actually not even a bachelors – but since December 2022 is serving as a justice of the peace in the very MAGA county after the commission appointed her for God knows what reason. She was appointed after losing her 2022 bid for state treasurer, running for that office after her gubernatorial primary campaign’s running ads in Mar-a-Lago’s media market – about 2,000 miles from Nevada – failed to land her an endorsement from the Orange God Emperor.

Now at first you might be like “Okay, Spartan, they’re both pairs of sneakers, so duh!” Totally understandable. But aside from the differences, like that the sneakers on the left are $299 and the ones on the right are $55 – well actually that’s a fucking ripoff for Paw Patrol sneakers.

What the hell, lol. Those should be like $20 tops. Anyway the point is that despite the differences like color and imagery and what not they’re actually really similar when you think about it, as both are designed for people with the fashion sense and emotional intelligence of a five year-old boy who loves cartoon superheroes. And yes this take is pretty goddamned painfully obvious but we had to write something underneath the pics and headline that already got the job done.

Oh and one more difference: The sneakers on the right side were definitely licensed to use the image of the characters they depict. Not 100 percent sure we can say the same about the other pair.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average crossed the 41,000 mark on Wednesday, the first time in the long history of the index, cruising on a rally that began BEFORE the RNC opened Monday.

A new AP-NORC survey finds 65 percent of Dem voters and 70 percent of overall respondents saying President Biden should drop out of the 2024 race. Convicted felon former President Trump didn’t actually score that much better though, as 57 percent overall – including 26 percent of GOP voters – said he should drop out too. In favorability ratings Biden and Trump are pretty much tied at 38 and 37 percent, respectively but Vice President Kamala Harris is ahead of both at 43 percent.

The fat orange fuck commented on the (maybe, possibly) renewed momentum among Dems to replace Biden as the nominee, posting “From a political standpoint, an unprecedented event is happening – The Dems are trying, again, to get Biden off the ballot!!!” as if it wasn’t unprecedented politically that a convicted felon such as Donald himself would be running for president.

Trump ballsucker David Bossie on Tuesday told Semafor “I want that hole in the Titanic as soon as possible,” when he learned of the now-scrapped plan to hold the nomination next week.

I just saw this.

Tubby did not need to “physically held back” he pulled a “Hold me back bro” move to look like a tough guy because he is in fact, is a little bitch. https://t.co/zpfz6HJDGg

— Derrick Van Orden (@derrickvanorden) July 17, 2024

The Democratic National Committee’s rules committee chair Minnesota Gov Tim Walz and Dem official Leah Daughtry on Wednesday informed delegates that the virtual roll-call to formally nominate President Biden will begin no earlier than August 7th, CBS News reports.

“None of this will be rushed. Unlike our nation’s other major political party, our rules are set in public meetings, anchored in the Party’s charter and its traditions. That will continue in the 2024 cycle, as it must with so much at stake,” Walz and Daughtry wrote to the rules committee’s 186 members.

The updated timeframe follows Tuesday’s effort by Congressional Dems to urge the party to slow all of this down and give the “replace Biden” crowd time to maneuver. Complicating matters is that, although Ohio Republicans caved and rewrote the ballot access deadline rules, Dems don’t trust them not to fuck around and tie up Biden’s eligibility in the courts with Sherrod Brown running.

A North Korean official visiting Moscow as part of Pyongyang’s new enhanced security agreement with Russia drowned while swimming in a pond outside the capital last week, Reuters reports.

The whole situation’s as murky as the no doubt fetid puddle the guy was swimming in, but Reuters cites two independent sources as having confirmed the death of a man said to be Kim Geum Chol, leading the NKs’ delegation to the Kremlin and currently the president of the Kim Il Sung Military University, Kim Jong Un’s alma mater (that definitely accepted him on merit). Even if and when they confirm it was Kim Geum Chol there’s still the question of whether Putin’s goons somehow mistook him for a journalist or human rights lawyer and forcibly shoved the wrong guy’s head into the water.

A new Fox 5 Atlanta/InsiderAdvantage survey of “800 registered likely voters in Georgia” finds convicted felon former President Trump leading President Joe Biden 47 to 44 percent and Vice President Kamala Harris by 47 to 37 percent in the state… And they sampled 17 Black voters.

In a state that’s 32.3 percent Black and 10.5 percent Hispanic/Latino their sample was 2.1 percent Black and 6.1 percent Latino. Meaning the sample was more representative of South Dakota than Georgia. “InsiderAdvantage is ranked among the most accurate pollsters in the nation for the aggregate of the last four election cycles by RealClearPolitics and was ranked the most accurate for the last presidential cycle,” Fox 5 claims in the conclusion to their write-up of the poll.

Not much we can really add to that here. Polling is fucked this year. This kind of bullshit is exactly why. No need to go into the weeds of “response bias” couple with MAGA “enthusiasm” probably doing a lot to inflate Trump’s numbers when we have shitty data right in front of us.

Why mail theft is on the rise: https://t.co/KZ0Ojbhg7I

— TIME (@TIME) July 17, 2024

Implicit in TIME’s chilling headline about the rise of mail theft nationwide is their own fears that severals, maybe even tens, of their subscribers’ print copies could be getting stolen on a weekly basis, intercepted by corrupt postal workers or greedy criminals perusing mailboxes before they’re checked by the elderly residents or the staffs of the proctology clinics that leave them and sister publications like Golf magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Fortune, and InStyle out for patients.

Colombia’s government on Tuesday announced they had reached a resumefire deal with the remaining holdouts of the FARC leftist insurgency that had plagued the country for decades until 2016, deciding to set aside diplomacy and agree on a framework for further violence, the AP reports.

Terms of the landmark resumefire deal were not disclosed but observers believe the government and its military had agreed to rapidly supply tons of pre-fired ammunition and explosives to the rebel faction on an ad-hoc basis wherever they presented themselves to government forces.