With legal cases flying around the Trumps like a blender set on “Cocaine,” another case that’s been flying under the radar is the latest lawsuit E. Jean Carroll filed seeking additional damages against Donald Trump.  In an otherwise routine filing announcing that the jury in the case (as well as the pool of potential jurors) will have their identities protected–a filing so routine even Trump’s lawyers didn’t file a single motion regarding it–Judge Lewis Kaplan again noted something other judges apparently fail to acknowledge:  when Donald Trump attacks people with words, his followers will attack them physically:

For the reasons stated in the Court’s decision ordering the use of an anonymous jury in the trial of a closely related second case, Carroll v. Trump, the Court finds that “[i]f jurors’ identities [in the trial of this case] were disclosed, there would be a strong likelihood of unwanted media attention to the jurors, influence attempts, and/or harassment or worse by supporters of Mr. Trump and/or by Mr. Trump himself.  Indeed, in the very recent past, Mr. Trump has been fined twice for violating a gag order issued by a New York judge in response to comments made by Mr. Trump in relation to the judge’s clerk.  In view of Mr. Trump’s repeated public statements with respect to the plaintiff and court in this case as well as in other cases against him, and the extensive media coverage that this case already has received and that is likely to increase once the trial is imminent or underway, the Court finds that there is strong reason to believe the jury requires the protections prescribed below.

“On October 23, 2023, the defendant filed a 31-page motion to dismiss on constitutional grounds, ECF No. 113, and a 34-page motion to dismiss on statutory grounds, ECF No. 114. To avoid the repetition and cross-referencing that pervades the defendant’s separate motions,… the Government intends to file one omnibus opposition brief,” the Special Counsel’s office filed Friday evening relating to Trump’s DC federal case.  “Given the need to respond to 65 pages of motions, the Government’s filing will exceed the typical 45-page limit for a single brief but will come in well under the 90 pages to which the Government would be entitled if it filed separate opposition briefs. …The Government therefore seeks leave to file an oversized brief. The defendant, through counsel, opposes this motion.”

A Florida physics teacher was fired after using the trans-friendly non-binary courtesy title “Mx.” in their name in class materials distributed to students, the Orlando Sentinel reports, a violation of Republican presidential candidate and the best Florida had to offer (really?) Ron DeSantis’s anti-LGBTQ law denying the existence of non-straight people.

AV Vary, a teacher at Florida Virtual School who started identifying as non-binary earlier this year, was told they would have to choose a gender-specific pronoun and title set instead of using “Mx.”  They refused to do so, insisting on using the title “Mx.,” so they were fired October 24.

“Obviously, I’m not OK with that,” Vary said. “I think it’s a direct result of my gender identity.”  They have contacted lawyers and plan on launching an Equal Employment Opportunity complaint and will explore a lawsuit challenging the law on Constitutional grounds.

Fat former President Trump is free to intimidate witnesses and talk shit about Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith again for at least the next 17 days as a three judge panel – all Obama or Biden appointees – at the DC Court of Appeals on Friday took up the fat fuck’s “emergency appeal” of the gag order imposed by Circuit Judge Tanya Chutkan in the DC coup attempt case, setting a hearing for oral arguments for November 20th, Politico’s Kyle Cheney reports.

Disgraced former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’s book publisher All Seasons Press on Friday filed a lawsuit seeking $1 million in damages plus his royalties for breach of contract over Meadows reportedly having admitted to prosecutors he lied about the 2020 election being stolen in his lame ghostwritten memoir “The Chief’s Chief,” Meidas Touch reports.

Jonathan Dunn, a pilot recently fired from Delta Airlines after pulling a gun midair on the flight’s chief pilot who had ordered the plane diverted to treat a passenger in medical distress in August 2022, isn’t new to legal issues:  as a member of the US Air Force Reserve, he was also the chief plaintiff in a lawsuit against the Pentagon for mandating Covid vaccines, Military.com reports.

Authorized to carry a weapon on board thanks to post-9/11 regulations, Dunn threatened to pull the gun and shoot the pilot multiple times after the pilot decided to divert the flight to help the passenger.  He is currently facing charges for interfering with the crew of a commercial airline and for using a dangerous weapon to assault and intimidate in a federal court in Utah.

Apparently still a Lt. Colonel in the Air Force Reserves even after the gun-pulling incident, Dunn lost his April 2022 case before the Supreme Court challenging the Pentagon’s authority to punish him for refusing to get the Covid vaccine, claiming that he refused it on religious grounds because, he claimed, the vaccine was being treated with a “sacramental quality;” both the Air Force and the Supreme Court ruled against him, and he was ultimately stripped of his squadron command.

Manhattan Judge Arthur Engoron on Friday expanded the gag order he imposed on disgraced former President Trump last month prohibiting him from saying anything about his staff during the trial over New York Attorney General Letitia James’s $250 million lawsuit against his corrupt business empire to now apply to the fat fuck’s stupid lawyers too, CNN reports.

Engoron stuck it to Team Orange after defense counsel Chris Kise made a complete asshole out of himself by moving for a mistrial based on some stupid Breitbart article about political donations made by Engoron’s clerk, prompting the entire courtroom to laugh at him mockingly.

Whoa! Did you hear that a Dem candidate for a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates posted a video of herself peeing online, which makes it a “real” version of the legendary “pee tape” that libs mocked Trump and his fans over for years? Come on bro, it’s all over the hottest right wing media sites and it’s shaking up the tight race for control of the Virginia legislature, majorities in both chambers of which are up for grabs next week AND it’s completely separate from the “controversy” surrounding an entirely different Dem female candidate who has an OnlyFans page.

And yeah, it’s really goddamned stupid. We’re not embedding it, but it’s not anywhere close to what a tweet by “RRH Elections” implies with “Virginia #HD71 candidate Jessica Anderson (D) made a video of herself urinating in public in Freedom Park and posted it on the internet,” with “public” doing a lot of heavy lifting there. It’s seven seconds of her face while she’s squatting down on the side of a running trail in the middle of nowhere, saying “Yeah, I’m peeing… Avoid yellow snow.” But hey, at least the Post Millennial, Libs of TikTok, and all the other assholes got a “pee tape” headline out of it.

A few years before John F Kennedy Jr tragically and kind of stupidly plowed his plane into the waters off of Martha’s Vineyard, he had launched George magazine, a glossy Vanity Fair-ish monthly trying to make politics as glamorous as high fashion and entertainment and what not. George was already in deep financial trouble due to a lack of circulation and advertising sales by the time he died in July 1999 but his death accelerated its demise and it folded in 2001 under its new publishers.

For nearly two decades George was forgotten about, just another Generation X relic like those “No Fear” stickers and the Spin Doctors. Then for some fucking reason that remains opaque to us, JFK Jr became the elusive messiah of a large swath of the QAnon movement. Not for lack of trying, they were unable to will John Jr back into existence, so one of them, former Trump 2016 Campaign photographer and QAnon fan Gene Ho, did the next best thing by acquiring the name and logo of George last year, resurrecting the brand as a web-only publication instead. It’s not clear if Ho even needed to acquire it, for all we know it may have been simply abandoned by its old owners.

So what’s Robert F Kennedy Jr to do when the new George reaches out for an interview? Does he say “No! Get away from me you fucking freaks! My cousin was a sweet, charming kid and I still miss him every day! You sick assholes dishonor his memory with your deranged worship of him”?

No, lol. Bobby Jr sits down for an interview and, per Media Matters, wishes the magazine “the best of luck” and says that his late cousin would “really like this,” after preaching to the choir about intel agencies “manipulating the American press for many, many years” and all sorts of other shit. But yeah, RFK Jr is a real threat to Biden’s reelection chances. Democrat voters love him.

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.