After his campaign for the third choice of Republicans to be the Speaker of the House came up embarrassingly short, again, Ohio Congressman and sexual assault misprisioner Jim Jordan told Mica Soellner, a reporter for Punchbowl News, that he doesn’t expect another vote Wednesday, probably a certainty given that he lost support between the first and second votes.  Jordan also commented that he was in the race “for now.”  (I’ll note the quote comes from Soellner’s post, which she does not represent as a direct quote from Jordan, though it sure sounds like something Jordan would say.)

This whole “Democrats got us into this mess” line is getting better by the day. Doesn’t this jackass get that he’s on CNN and they’re not going to just nod their heads like the morons on Fox?

“Earlier today at the People of the State of NY vs Trump civil trial taking place at 60 Centre Street, an individual disrupted the proceedings by standing up and walking towards the front of the courtroom and yelling out to Mr Trump indicating she wanted to assist him. This individual was stopped by court officers before she got near Mr Trump or any of the attorneys or other litigants.”

“None of the parties were ever in any danger. The individual was safely escorted out of the courtroom and the courthouse by uniformed court officers and has been charged with Contempt of Court in the 2nd degree, ie disrupting a court proceeding. Upon investigation, it has been determined that this individual is a court employee. The employee has been placed on immediate administrative leave pending investigation of the incident and prohibited from entering any UCS facility until further notice. At this time we cannot offer any additional information about the employee” says a press release from the New York Court system about some MAGA douchebag.

“NBCUniversal Media, LLC, doing business as NBCUniversal News Group (‘NBCU News Group’), respectfully submits this application under Local Criminal Rule 57.6 to request that this Court allow video and audio of the March 2024 trial of former President Donald J Trump, either by a pool camera shared by NBCU News Group and other news organizations, or through the Court’s own equipment.”

“Powerful First Amendment values and the extraordinary importance of these proceedings counsel strongly for this Court to exercise its discretion to authorize the public dissemination of the audiovisual record of these proceedings either in real time or at most with the limited delay necessary for the Court to assess whether significant public interests require the extraordinary relief of withholding any portion of these proceedings from the public. NBCU News Group respectfully requests an oral hearing on this application,” write lawyers for NBC News in the motion.

It’s long and filled with a shit-ton of citations. Probably cost a lot of billable hours. We have no idea if it’s going to work or not but evidently NBC thinks it’s worth a shot.

I know this will seem unbelievable, but Donald Trump is completely wrong about ocean-based windmills are causing massive whale die-offs.  (It’s okay.  Take a deep breath.  Regain your composure.  We’ll get through learning Donald Trump was wrong about something.) And the reason for the mass losses stems from the issue the windmills are meant to address.

According to the journal Science, gray whales have had three massive die-offs in the past three decades causing losses of 15-25% of the species’ population each time. Scientists discovered the deaths were due to the whales migrating to find new food sources because of climate change:  a major source of food for the whales, an algae growing on the bottom of ice sheets, is disappearing because the ice sheets are melting.  In the latest wave since 2017, nearly 700 have washed up in North America.

National Zero’s special live coverage of the House GOP’s inability to elect a speaker continues Wednesday as spandex-wearing grapple-freak Jim Jordan faces an increasingly unlikely path to wrestling the gavel from the hands on Speaker pro-tempore Patrick McHenry. Pennsylvania Republican Mike Kelly has a privileged resolution to do just that and has been talking to the parliamentarian to make it happen, while whip Tom Emmer tells CNN’s Manu Raju it’s a “non-starter.”

Keeping one eye on her political future and the other on a yummy bowl of grits, the GOP’s poster child for nepotism Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders has given up trying to justify a $19,000 expenditure for a wooden podium she took on a brief European tour, refusing to use the piece in press conferences because, she claims, it would distract from the culture war issues she’s addressing while standing behind it.

KTHV CBS-11 in Little Rock reports that an indignant Sanders chided reporters for pursuing a news story about excessive waste in her Administration after being asked why she wasn’t using the podium during press conferences.  “While we are focused on things that actually impact our state and impact Arkansas, the media wants to spend all of their time focused on things that frankly don’t,” Sanders said.  The important issue she was addressing at that specific press briefing was Chinese ownership of land in Arkansas, a major issue for citizens of a state that ranks 43rd in education, 47th in health care and 40th in domestic violence.

While the cost of the podium–which Sanders claims was needed for a short European “trade mission” she and a number of allies took to Europe, with some watchdogs concerned the cost was cover to pay travel expenses for Sanders’ allies–was reimbursed by the state Republican Party after the excessive cost of the piece was disclosed, critics have slammed Sanders for the excessive cost for a podium which has nearly identical models on Amazon available for under $900.

“Just so there’s no surprises: Jordan will likely have FEWER votes today than yesterday – as I expected. This is the fight – which Jim Jordan represents – to end the status quo, and it ain’t easy… Stay strong and keep praying,” tweeted Freedom Caucasians leader Scott Perry on Wednesday just ahead of the second vote for the wrestling freak’s almost certainly doomed speakership.

Meanwhile Florida Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart, a Steve Scalise ally whose name we’ve definitely seen misspelled as “Diaz-Blart,” told Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman that he’s working on empowering current Speaker pro-tempore Patrick McHenry to have the full powers of the office, saying “there’s a consensus that we need to, in the meantime, have a process where we can move legislation forward to get the conservative agenda back on track that has been derailed.”

A spokesman for Gaza terrorist group Hamas on Wednesday freaked out over President Joe Biden’s assessment that the hospital blast which killed hundreds on Tuesday was the result of a misfired rocket attack by jihadists and not an Israeli bombing, calling Biden “blindly biased,” CNBC reports.

“I am deeply saddened and outraged by the explosion at the hospital in Gaza yesterday,” Biden said to reporters while sitting with Israeli dictator Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv. “Based on what I’ve seen, it appears as though it was done by the other team, not you. But there’s a lot of people out there who are not sure, so we have to overcome a lot of things,” Biden added.

The explosion prompted a wave of angry, violent protests across the Arab world and led to the cancelation of a planned summit between Biden, Jordanian leadership, and Palestinian leadership in Amman on Wednesday, a worrying sign in an already deeply tumultuous clusterfuck of a situation.

On impulse on Tuesday we had sourced from the New York Times the claim that the Israelis were responsible for the horror. Some smart people we follow on Twitter – as well as Biden himself, citing US intel – are now saying that a preponderance of evidence does indicate that a Palestinian militant group had in fact fucked up and accidentally destroyed the hospital (or maybe did on purpose to blame Israel). This does not mean that the IDF are being careful overall with their retaliatory campaign (they aren’t really) but that particular barbarity may indeed not have been their doing.

Minnesota Dem Congressman Dean Phillips, who reportedly is “mulling” a primary challenge to President Joe Biden, missed the Monday deadline to register for the Nevada primary to actually mount a challenge President Joe Biden, Fox News reports with plain unhappiness over the failure.

William Knight, one of the members of the Ohio State wrestling team impacted by the sexual abuse Jim Jordan reportedly ignored, took down Jordan’s lack of leadership:  “The funny thing is that when people always call Jim Jordan a fighter, and I always wonder who he’s fighting for because he had a real opportunity to fight to us and the people that he coached and the people he recruited at The Ohio State and he’s, all he’s done is turn his back on us, so I don’t know what the ‘fighter’ thing is. I know he used to be a fighter.  I know he used to be a good wrestler, but he’s not a good fighter for anyone else that I know of.”

The Senate voted unanimously to fill key committee seats left vacant after the death of California Democrat Dianne Feinstein at the end of September, tapping her replacement, Laphonza Butler, to take her seat on the Judiciary Committee.  Arizona’s Mark Kelly will join the Senate Intelligence Committee and his senior colleague, Kyrsten Sinema, an independent, was chosen by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer for the seat on the Appropriations Committee.

Butler’s seating on the Judiciary Committee means the 36 pending nominations will now have timely hearings to get their placements, something that couldn’t happen when the Committee was evenly divided due to Feinstein’s long absence due to illness.  Since taking office, the Biden Administration has seated 145 Article III judges, but there are currently 68 federal judicial openings remaining.  In total, there are 870 federal judges from the Supreme Court to courts of appeals, district courts, and eight Court of International Trade appointees.

Buried in a Politico story about the only man aspiring to be House Speaker who actively attempted to thwart the Constitution Jim Jordan’s pressure tactics to get 217 Republicans to vote for him is a rather mundane line:  Nebraska Republican Congressman Don Bacon “added that his wife even received multiple anonymous emails and texts saying: ‘your husband better support Jim Jordan.'”

Reporter Olivia Beavers’ Twitter post demonstrates the desperation Jordan’s supporters feel in their need to threaten the Congressman’s seat to his wife through an anonymous text messages. One rambling texter told Bacon’s wife that he better vote for Jordan because “you guys take five steps forward and then turn around take 20 steps backward no wonder our party always ends up getting screwed over[.]” Another anonymous texter told her, “Your husband will never hold any political office ever again.  What a disappointment and failure he is.”

“Now what the president should be doing is giving Israel his full support from US soil,” man who never worked in foreign diplomacy or public service Jesse Watters demands.  “But we feel Biden’s narcissism is propelling him to undertake ‘shuttle diplomacy,’ like a Secretary of State who thrives on the so-called ‘peace process.’  This is a dangerous game.”

Yes, Jesse, this is a dangerous game, one for which a former “gotcha” reporter who stalked people for Bill O’Reilly is woefully unprepared.  Of course, this is the Fox “gotcha” again:  had Biden not gone to Israel, they would have whined, “Yeah, but he went to see Zelenskyy.  The Jews shouldn’t vote for him.”  But Biden did the opposite, so Fox must reverse its planned attack.

The US Senate on Tuesday showed the amateurs in the House how it’s done, passing by unanimous consent SR 409, “a resolution authorizing the use of the atrium in the Philip A. Hart Senate Office Building for a Bipawtisan Howl-o-ween Dog Pawrade on October 31, 2023, from 4:00 to 6:00 pm.”

The House can’t even elect a Speaker and here the Senate is just blowing their doors off with bipartisan ultra-efficiency to do the work demanded by the American people who put them there.

LSD-brained billionaire edgelord Elon Musk is planning to start charging new Twitter (or “X” if you’re a douchebag) users $1 a year to tweet, retweet, or like other tweets, Fortune reports.

As far as Musk’s stupid ideas for the platform have gone this is… actually not that bad, contrary to what certain seasoned observers are saying. If you’re already a Twitter user this particular policy does by definition not apply to your account. Unless on one of Musk’s moronic whims that does change, this would take a serious bite out of the bot operations hawking crypto and all sorts of other bullshit on the site. “It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots,” Musk said as much during a livestream last month. He could do worse. He has and he will.

These Halloween costumes will help you stand out in 2023 https://t.co/ZhT5bo4kKO

— Fox News (@FoxNews) October 17, 2023

Far right Arizona Congresswoman Debbie Lesko, the sick freak who said she would shoot her own grandchildren to protect them, announced on Tuesday she won’t be running again next year.