A fundraising email from Speaker of the House Mike Johnson says, literally, in bold print, “I refuse to put people over politics,” as part of his message for Conservative governance or whatever the hell he’s trying to get donors on board with, Politico’s Nicholas Wu reports.

A DC federal judge on Friday sentenced former Trump Administration State Department appointee Federico Klein to 70 months in the slammer for his crimes committed during the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection, including assaulting at least six police officers, ABC News reports.

It’s actually even dumber than what we described in the headline: Jason Smith is wondering out loud why Joe Biden isn’t reporting on his taxes the interest on money he lent to his brother. Not sure if it’s even worth mentioning how common the practice of charging interest on personal loans to family members is among most people, especially Northeastern Irish Catholics from a certain generation.

Which is to say it isn’t, at all. Worse yet for Smith is proof of such interest would give some extremely minuscule “evidence” that Joe had at least indirectly profited from his brother’s stupid scams. This should tell you all you need to know about where the House GOP is at right now.

The present state of Republican politics in Texas is such a clusterfuck it’s not much of an exaggeration to say it makes the United States House of Representatives’ GOP majority look like a picture of comity. Unfortunately with so much else going on nationally and globally we’ve been unable to cover it as regularly as we might have. Getting up to speed is even harder.

The broadest contour is this: State House Speaker Dade Phelan and Lt Governor Dan Patrick (in his capacity as president of the State Senate) are locked in a full blown civil war. A lot, but not all of it, has to do with Phelan’s caucus joining Dems to impeach Patrick’s ally, the deeply corrupt and Picasso-faced Attorney General Ken Paxton. So overwhelming was the vote that even if all 60 Dems hadn’t shown up it still wouldn’t have been close as Republicans voted 60 to 23 to impeach. Then the state Senate acquitted Pax with only two Republicans joining Dems voting to convict.

Then there’s this other shitshow with the chief of a major PAC linked to Patrick, Paxton, and other big time Republicans hosting Neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes at his company offices last month, something even fucking Kyle Rittenhouse didn’t want anything to do with. Plus there’s this school vouchers mess where Phelan is dragging his ass on getting Governor Low Energy Greg Abbott and Patrick’s plan passed in his chamber, no doubt chock full of batshit home schooling extremism.

Patrick and Paxton were already firing up the engines on a hardcore MAGA retribution machine to recruit primary challengers to the state House Republicans who voted to impeach the credibly accused white collar crime lord, and the Fuentes-PAC and school vouchers clusterfucks have only accelerated the engine. Among the villains stepping up is former Harris County Republican Party Chairman Jared Woodfill, a character you would say was too over-the-top if this story were fictional.

Hunter Biden’s attorney Abbe Lowell last month wrote a letter to the FBI asking the bureau to open a criminal investigation into his dipshit former business partner and “whistleblower” Tony Bobulinski, the assclown who bombed during a press conference about the Laptop-gate something somthing prior to the final debate of the 2020 presidential election, NBC News reports.

“Specifically, we recently received information demonstrating that numerous statements made by Mr Bobulinski in Washington, DC during an interview with the FBI on October 23, 2020, concerning our client, Hunter Biden, are false,” Lowell wrote. “The materials reveal the extraordinary lengths Mr Bobulinski and other individuals were willing to go to implicate Mr Biden or members of his family in some false and meritless allegations of wrongdoing. Even in an era in which people peddle knowing lies with the goal of their falsehoods being repeated and disseminated for their political advantage, these statements by Mr Bobulinski cannot and must not go unchecked.”

Fox News propagandist Tucker Carlson on Thursday was skeptical that federal prosecutors would open a criminal case against cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried because of his political donations to Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections. “Biden’s Justice Department seems not very interested in a man called Sam Bankman-Fried. Why is that? Well, maybe because [SBF] was the Democratic Party’s second biggest donor… no warrant has been issued. Why? Well, because he’s a political ally.” New Twitter owner Elon Musk similarly ballyhooed any possibility SBF would be hauled into court, tweeting “SBF was a major Dem donor, so no investigation.”

Editor’s note: This story is 358 days late. Sorry for failing to report this in a timely manner.

US payrolls increased by 150,000 in October, falling a little short of the expected 170,000 new jobs and the unemployment rate ticked up slightly from 3.8 to 3.9 percent, CNBC reports while noting the minor slowdown in growth could prompt the Federal Reserve to finally ease interest rates.

The Brookfield Zoo outside of Chicago this week announced the have been blessed with a holy arrival: the miraculous virgin birth of a baby Epaulette shark in late August, USA Today reports.

The female savior of Shark-kind and her mother, who may or may not be named Mary, are said to be doing well. “We are happy to report that our epaulette pup has been eating well on her diet of finely chopped capelin, minced squid tentacles, and other finely chopped seafood,” said Brookfield specialist Mike Masellis of his offerings to the incarnate of a nightmarish antediluvian shark god.

Far right fake news website the Gateway Pundit on Thursday sort of half-assed their portrayal of New York City Mayor Eric Adams as a victim of “lawfare” at the hands of the “Biden Regime” and the “Department of Injustice” after FBI agents raided the home of Adams’s top campaign fundraiser in connection with an investigation into whether he accepted laundered contributions from the Turkish government, with Gateway just kind of implying that Adams might’ve been subject to “retribution” over his criticism of the Biden Administration’s immigration policies and the city’s migrant “crisis.”

FBI Launches Investigation into Alleged Corruption in Mayor Eric Adams’s 2021 Election Campaign Over Illegal Donations From Turkey via @gatewaypundit https://t.co/S1ENld5RN3

— The Gateway Pundit (@gatewaypundit) November 3, 2023

“On Wednesday, Eric Adams, along with far-left mayors of Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, and Houston, banded together in a plea for a staggering $5 billion in federal aid from the Biden regime. This request comes as these self-declared ‘sanctuary cities’ grapple with the burgeoning costs of their own immigration policies,” Jim Hoft wrote toward the end of the article, like he wanted to say outright that the FBI is Biden’s “personal gestapo” or some shit like he usually does, but his heart wasn’t quite in it this time around so he just went for a soft “sanctuary city” jab.

It’s really the only paragraph that comes anywhere close to invoking any MAGA political angle, with the rest of it being written in a mostly neutral tone atypical of an “editor” who just two days ago compared the Trump family’s current legal issues to the Romanovs being executed in a muddy basement by Russian Bolsheviks in 1918. Which seems to indicate that Hoft wanted to say Adams is getting “persecuted” with a “fraudulent” investigation – he sure as shit did not go off on a “corrupt Democrat lording over an urban shithole being exposed” like you might’ve expected – though he probably estimated that his readers may not’ve shared his apparent sympathy for a Black Dem.

The United Autoworkers union, fresh off scoring major concessions including 30 percent pay raises for members employed by GM, Ford, and Stellantis Chrysler in the Rust Belt, is now eyeing a southward expansion into non-union plants owned by Toyota, Tesla, Nissan, Volkswagen, Honda, Hyundai, and Kia in redder territory long hostile to organized labor, Axios reports.

Red State right-to-work laws banning unions from charging dues to members make it a tall order but there’s one ally in the UAW’s corner: The Big Three, who actually want the union to start shaking down Toyota, BMW, and the rest of them in order to narrow the labor cost gap with their competitors. Whether this actually means in practice that the Michigan companies will help front the no doubt massive costs associated with what will no doubt be a long and grinding fight against the likes of Elon Musk, the Korean shitbox manufacturers, Honda etc, remains to be seen.

Another factor in the UAW’s favor are the federal electric vehicle manufacturing incentives requiring operations to remain domestic, which removes a crucial escape hatch the non-union automakers might’ve otherwise had with threatening to move jobs overseas. “They can still move, but in order to qualify for most of these incentives, you have to be domestic. That’s a big deal. It gives unions and workers more leverage,” Blue-Green Alliance executive director Jason Walsh tells Axios.

A New York appeals court on Thursday unsurprisingly rejected Ivanka Trump’s bid to pause the ongoing trial in New York Attorney General Letitia James’s $250 million lawsuit against her obese orange father’s deeply corrupt business empire because her upcoming testimony is scheduled “in the middle of a school week” which would cause “undue hardship,” the Messenger reports.

“Biden primary challenger” Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips’s first town hall meeting in New Hampshire was, to put it gently, a fucking disaster, with voters screaming at him when he failed to answer a simple question about an Israel-Gaza ceasefire and being accused of “gaslighting” the lone Black woman at the sparsely attended event, the Washington Post reports. The best part is how Phillips claims he’s going to do 119 town halls in the Granite State before the primary. Only 118 to go.

We’ve got a new book about Donald Trump out, this one by Jonathan Karl, and it’s certainly got some juicy bits to it.  In a summary in The Atlantic, Karl writes about a conversation he had with former Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon when Trump’s 2024 announcement site of Waco, Texas was announced.

Waco, of course, was the site of the April 19, 1993 fire at a cult compound which anti-government forces blame on federal agents attempting to serve warrants on David Koresh and other cult leaders.  Two years later, Timothy McVeigh chose the same date to bomb the federal building in Oklahoma City.  In far-right anti-government circles, Waco means something.

And it’s something Steve Bannon understood.  “We’re the Trump Davidians,” Bannon told Karl with a chuckle when Karl inquired about the choice of site for the 2024 campaign introduction.  Trump’s 2020 campaign kick-off speech was on June 19th–Juneteenth–in Tulsa, the site of the worst massacre of Black citizens in US history.  Trump’s campaign kickoff sites have special meaning.

Republican Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita was reprimanded by the state’s Supreme Court for his remarks about an abortion doctor who performed an abortion on a 10-year-old rape victim who had to flee Ohio to get treatment, Reuters reports.

The court ruled that Rokita made a comment in a July 2022 Fox cable propaganda network that Dr. Caitlin Bernard was “an abortion activist acting as a doctor” after it was revealed that she performed the abortion on the girl, who had to seek an abortion in another state after doctors in Ohio were too afraid of legal repercussions after Republicans in the state passed an oppressive abortion ban.

Curiously, all five justices on the court wanted to punish Rokita, but the three-judge majority opted for a formal reprimand.  The other two would have opted for a more severe punishment.  Rokita released a statement claiming victory, saying the case was brought by “liberal activists” who “hate the fact that I stand up for liberty.”

A night after Republican colleagues orated a lengthy rebuke of Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville for wholesale blocking the promotion of executive and flag officers because of a Pentagon medical travel policy, the Senate took the hours needed to approve the promotions of three officers, including the heads of two branches of the Pentagon. According to the Washington Post, Admiral Lisa Franchetti will become the first woman to lead the Navy and join the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General David W. Allvin will take command of the Air Force.

But the one that should cost Tuberville his seat:  Lt. General Christopher J. Mahoney was promoted to four-star general and assigned to be the Vice-Commandant of the Marine Corps, the Corps’ No. 2 officer who will have to step in to the leadership role while Commandant Eric Smith recovers from a health issue likely brought on executing the two roles Mahoney will now be doing.

Thanks to “internet hooligan” Acyn, we have this wonderful edit of the shitshow happening on the House floor–not the Speaker shit show; that was last week–with monumental failure Marjorie Taylor Greene introducing a bill that would require the Department of Interior to preserve all statues and monuments on their grounds–Marge’s attempt to protect Confederate statutes honoring secessionist slaveholders.  Former flag-flying Trump-era Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke read a version of MTG’s bill that would only cover monuments to “the Founders,” but a Democrat noted the version of the bill being considered would cover “all monuments,” including those to secessionists.  (Did Marge intentionally circulate an old version?  Sounds like something she would do.). Marge herself finally makes an appearance, praising Col. Robert E. Lee.  And yes, he is Col. Lee, as was his final rank in the US Army, which is the only rank that should be honored on the floor of the Capitol.

“No court in American history has imposed a gag order on a criminal defendant who is actively campaigning for public office – let alone the leading candidate for President of the United States. That centuries-long practice was broken on October 17, 2023, when the district court entered its Opinion and Order, A1 (the ‘Gag Order’), muzzling President Trump’s core political speech during an historic Presidential campaign. Given the Gag Order’s extraordinary nature, one would expect an extraordinary justification for it. Yet none exists. President Trump has made months of public statements about this case, but the Department of Justice (‘the prosecution’) submitted no evidence of any actual or imminent threat to the administration of justice.”

“Instead, when asked about the supposed threat to the case, the prosecution admitted, ‘of course this prejudice is speculative.’ Based this speculation, the district court entered a sweeping, viewpoint-based prior restraint on the core political speech of a major Presidential candidate, based solely on an unconstitutional ‘heckler’s veto.’ The Gag Order violates the First Amendment rights of President Trump and over 100 million Americans who listen to him,” write disgraced former President Trump’s lawyers in their “emergency” appeal to the DC Circuit to lift the gag order.

Love the violating “the First Amendment rights of” the “over 100 million Americans who listen to him,” part, which neatly puts that “They’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you. I’m just standing in the way” line of Nazi bullshit neatly fit into what’s supposed to be a federal appeal.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the head of the FTX crypto-currency exchange, was convicted of all seven fraud and conspiracy charges related to his failed crypto exchange, the New York Times reports.  He now faces up to 110 years in prison, if sentenced to the max on all counts,

Federal prosecutors are investigating if New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s 2021 campaign took illegal contributions from the Turkish government for who the hell knows what reason, the New York Times reports following a Thursday FBI raid on Adams’s top fundraiser Brianna Suggs.

The judge in the disbarment hearing for John Eastman, one of Donald Trump’s lawyers and a co-conspirator in the Fulton County racketeering case, has made a “preliminary finding of culpability” for eleven separate charges relating to his effort to have then-Vice President Mike Pence throw out slates of electors on January 6th to re-install Donald Trump illegally into the Oval Office, Politico’s Kyle Cheney reports.  Yvette Roland, a judge in California State Bar Court, will now hear “aggravation” testimony to determine the suitable punishment.