A new Pew Research survey on Americans’ feelings toward the Electoral College finds a nearly two thirds of overall respondents, 65 percent, in favor of ditching the antiquated and flawed system of electing the president, while only 33 percent want to hang on to it. Even 47 percent of self-identified Republican respondents said they want to switch to a national popular vote system.

The part that you will not at all be surprised to learn is the Republican respondents describing themselves as “highly politically engaged” were the group most in favor of keeping the GOP’s presidential head start program in place, at 72 percent support. Which might just kind of indicate a whole lot of Republican voters don’t really know shit and what sounds good and fair to them on paper would actually be game over for their chances of ever winning the White House again.

Pew’s 2023 finding on the question is consistent with last year’s 63 percent against the Electoral College versus 35 percent in favor. Funny enough the last time a pollster saw support for switching to the popular vote at near parity with keeping the unpopular vote was in December 2016, when Gallup found 47 percent favoring the Electoral College and 49 percent against, a switch from their June 2013 finding of 63 percent against and 29 percent for, very consistent with Pew in 2023.

Weird how that was the month so many Americans suddenly remembered how awesome the Electoral College is and then that awareness ebbed over the next half-decade-plus, right?

“Here’s what I predict, and this is something I said last week on my podcast, Verdict with Ted Cruz,” shameless self-promoting podcaster Ted Cruz says, using his characteristic weasel words on the GOP cable propaganda network.  “I think the odds are very significant that next summer at the Democrat National Convention that the Democrat Party will jetison Joe Biden, they will throw him off the ticket and they will parachute in instead Michelle Obama to be their candidate.  I think they’re gonna look to Michelle Obama a-a-as the savior to come in a-and I think if that happens that would be very, very dangerous.”

First, any Obama, even Sunny, would be a better candidate than Trump.  But more realistically, Michelle Obama has stated repeatedly she will not pursue a political career and that she has no interest in entering the political arena.  And in reality, Ted is just jealous Marge is getting all the “craziest member of Congress” airtime.

At a time of the year when the ice should be at its thickest, the Antarctic sea ice levels are at record lows, possibly signalling an irrevocable point in the fight against climate change, the Washington Post reports.  Sea ice levels in the Antarctic hit their lowest point in February and their highest in September; this month, it hit its peak on September 10th, nearly two weeks earlier than normal.

At that point, there were 6.55 million square miles of ice, and it has been receding since thanks to warmer ocean temperatures.  Worse yet:  the amount of ice is nearly 400,000 square miles less than the previously recorded low in 1986.

“There is some concern that this may be the beginning of a long-term trend of decline for Antarctic sea ice, since oceans are warming globally, and warm water mixing in the Southern Ocean polar layer could continue,” read the National Snow and Ice Data Center, a service from the Univeristy of Colorado, said in an announcement released Monday.

So, I was just swatted during my podcast.

The caller pretended to be me and told the cops – "I've stabbed someone, had a gun, and was going to kill myself."

This is the result of being doxxed over and over by leftist outlets. You can imagine how dangerous this is.

I'm okay,…

— Catturd ™ (@catturd2) September 25, 2023

Widely non-respected and regularly ridiculed dipshit “legal expert” Jonathan Turley is listed as House Oversight Chairbilly James Comer’s star witness at the first hearing of this stupid Biden Impeachment “inquiry” coming up on Thursday, lol. Seriously, it’s in Comer’s announcement.

“This hearing will establish the basis for the impeachment inquiry and present the evidence House Republicans have uncovered to date regarding President Joe Biden’s knowledge of and role in his family’s domestic and international business practices,” meaning Turley’s going to tell them how to write the articles of impeachment or something who the fuck knows. The other witnesses are listed as “Bruce Dubinsky, Founder, Dubinsky Consulting,” who – Surprise! – is a longtime Fox News contributor and supposedly an accountant, and “Eileen O’Connor, Former Assistant Attorney General, Department of Justice Tax Division,” a Federalist Society member and a George W Bush appointee who hasn’t served in the public sector since 2007 aside from a brief stint on “then-President-elect Trump’s Treasury Department Transition Team” per her Federalist bio.

This is going to be such a complete shitshow. Cannot wait to carry it here live on National Zero.

Trump spokesman Steven Cheung, whose head could seriously win a watermelon contest at a county fair, on Monday tweeted and then hours later deleted a video of his boss “buying” a Glock pistol from a gun store in South Carolina before his rally after quite a few folks pointed out that it’s a federal crime to purchase a firearm while being under felony indictment, Meidas Touch reports.

It’d been possible, maybe even likely, that Trump was bullshitting to the store owner when presented with the pistol. We actually would’ve been quicker to believe that than if someone had told us he had handed them his American Express and paid for it on the spot, given his history of over-promising and under-purchasing for his fans. But now that Bucephalus deleted the tweet and went into damage control mode we’re not so sure. Someone’s going to have to go full Zapruder film here and also check to see if there’s any ambiguity to the statues against purchase and possession and what would constitute a clear violation. Like would it necessarily matter if the Trump campaign paid for it rather than he himself personally? How hard would it be to definitively establish whom the purchaser is if not? A lot could hinge on these questions if this incredibly stupid fuckup starts snowballing.

Far right local radio host Steve Gill confirmed to the Tennessee Holler on Monday that a European watchdog’s report naming him as one of “34 non-Russian foreign persons involved in the ‘international observation’ of Russian ‘elections’ in occupied Ukrainian territories” to help falsely legitimize this month’s phony contests was indeed accurate and he was detailed by his handlers to the Donetsk region to “observe” the polling. “I was there,” Gill wrote in an email to the Holler.

Even better was Gill’s confirmation that a lawyer tied to Tennessee Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn’s campaigns was present with him in the Donetsk region. “Unlike here in the states, the votes are transported somewhere else for the count, which would, as we see here, allow for all sorts of mischief. I watched and thought through how I might cheat if I was there, and I could not find a way,” Gill wrote in a follow-up, clearly trying to say elections in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine in the middle of a bloody war are legitimate while the ones conducted in the United States aren’t.

Yeah, he went there. Again. A little more definitively this time, without the insincere qualifiers. Same solipsism as always, like nobody else got sick or lost their job because of the pandemic – or died.

Other lowlights from this cult fest include Trump asking fans not to boo Lindsey Graham because he “helps him on the left,” which really sounded like he meant “with the gays,” “joking” that he wanted to give himself the Congressional Medal of Honor after he was brave enough to fly into Iraq, then blaming President Jeb [sic] Bush for invading the country, and he’s still talking so there will probably be a few more. Oh, and during the pre-show RSBN coverage white nationalist Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene interfered in the GOP primary by calling on all the other candidates to drop out immediately and apologize to Trump. They also visited a gun store together and Trump refused to answer the owner’s question on whether he would unban pistol braces before buying a Glock with an image of his face etched on the handle …which might have kind of been a federal crime considering he’s currently under felony indictment if he really did buy it (he probably didn’t).

Really hard to decide what’s more pathetic about this public demonstration of her obedience training after Trump called out the RNC – and Ronna by name – in Truth Social post a ordering them to “start suing now” and “get the right lawyers this time” to find some way to halt Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s plan to institute automatic voter registration at all state DMVs.

We have deep concerns about how this could affect the security of the ballot. The @GOP has a long history of fighting, and winning, in PA courts for election integrity.

Stay tuned. (2/2)

— Ronna McDaniel (@RonnaMcDaniel) September 25, 2023

It could be just the emptily “demanding answers” over their “deep concerns” coming obviously very short of filing a lawsuit as she plainly hopes that the fat bastard will just forget it and find something else to complain about. Or the “@GOP has a long history of fighting, and winning, in PA courts for election integrity,” which lol no they don’t. They’ve gotten their asses kicked in every major case of the last few years. Maybe they did better before that and it’s like if she said former Fox News chief Roger Ailes had a long history of sexually harassing and abusing women until he stopped in 2017.

Could be that this is very incongruous with – if not in letter, then the spirit of – Ronna’s lame new “Bank Your Vote” campaign, which seemed to signal that national Republicans were going to try stop constantly bitching and crying about early voting and try to get their base to embrace it after beginning so many election days already in the hole against Dems, which was especially painful from them in Pennsylvania last year. Getting people to vote, be it early or same-day, requires getting them to register. What better than the state doing that job for you? Which is probably why she stayed quiet on Shapiro’s plan until Trump found out and threw a tantrum. Or that she knew this isn’t going to be a winnable fight so why bother. “Stay tuned” for a whole lot of nothing either way.

Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman’s office tells the Messenger he’s going to return the $5,000 his scumbag DINO colleague Bob Menendez donated to Fetterman’s successful 2022 campaign.

“We are in process of returning the money in envelopes stuffed with $100 bills,” said Fetterman spokesman Joe Calvello of the unsubtle dig at the evidence of bribery in Menendez’s indictment. Our guess is they briefly considered gold bars but that might not have been a lawful reimbursement.

“President Biden swore an oath to uphold our Constitution and protect American Democracy. Freedom of the press is a fundamental Constitutional right. To abuse presidential power and violate the Constitutional rights of reporters would be an outrageous attack on our democracy and the rule of law. Presidents must always defend Americans’ freedoms – never trample on them for selfish, small, and dangerous political purposes,” says the White House in a statement responding directly to disgraced former President Trump’s insane vow to punish NBC for their coverage.

More of this please. Trump’s hateful bullshit need not be amplified nor does he need to even be named in a simple restatement of principle to point out how fundamentally bent and debased he is.

Far right Montana Congressman Matt Rosendale kind of lost control for just a little bit while speaking with some Newsmax host on Monday, getting plainly annoyed over being asked why he’s going to let the government shut down if his plan to leave 30 percent of it unfunded doesn’t pass. Rosendale was also keen to insist most Americans won’t actually notice it if the federal government shuts down, raising the question of why everyone else in politics thinks it’s important to prevent from happening since this Freedom Caucasian and a few of his buddies say it’s no big deal.

Complete tool MAGA lawyer Stefan Passantino, credibly accused in the courts of public opinion and of the DC Bar Association (but not yet criminally) of tampering with former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s damning testimony to the House January 6th Select Committee, last week sued former Mueller Investigation prosecutor Andrew Weissman for defamation, seeking $75,000 in damages for reputational harm caused by Weissman’s September 15th tweet in which Weismann wrote that Passantino had coached Hutchinson to lie. Passantino’s complaint on the first page cites Hutchinson telling investigators “I want to make this clear to you: Stefan [Passantino] never told me to lie… He told me not to lie” but not the part where she quoted Passantino as having told her “No, no, no. We don’t want to go there. We don’t want to talk about” the legendary “Steering Wheel grab” incident when Trump allegedly assaulted at least one Secret Service agent on January 6th.

So while maybe in a narrow technical sense saying that Passantino had “coached [Hutchinson] to lie” isn’t the most accurate description, the “coached” part – with the heavy implication of getting her to omit certain parts that were unambiguously embarrassing to the ketchup-flinging maniac – definitely is. A defamation claim needs to meet a burden of proof that we’re not quite sure is within reach here, especially considering the Bar complaint and that the dipshit appeared to have been pushed out of his law firm the day after the transcript of Hutchinson’s testimony to the committee dropped. It might also have helped if the former Trump White House “ethics” lawyer’s suit against Weissman had landed before a politically sympathetic judge, maybe one his former boss appointed.

It didn’t. Politico’s Kyle Cheney reports that Passantino’s case has been assigned to none other than DC Circuit Court Judge Tanya Chutkan. We’re not attorneys and don’t have any specific take on the merits, it’s just something tells us that if Passantino doesn’t already regret filing it then he will when the jurist, so deeply feared and loathed in MAGA circles, starts banging her gavel.

Ukraine’s Special Forces on Monday claimed that Admiral Viktor Sokolov, commander of the Russian Navy’s Black Sea Fleet, was among the dozens of officers canceled in the Friday missile strike on the fleet’s headquarters in the Crimean port city of Sevastopol, the Kyiv Post reports.

“Updated information on the losses of the enemy as a result of the SSO special operation to destroy the large landing ship, Minsk, and the HQ of the Black Sea Fleet of the Russian Federation. After the defeat of the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet of the Russian Federation, 34 officers, including the commander of the Black Sea Fleet of the Russian Federation, died. The headquarters building cannot be restored,” Ukrainian Special Operations wrote in the Telegram post, which probably could’ve been translated better, but who are we to complain about good news being written badly?

A two-page “prospectus” headlined “Kyrsten’s Path to Victory” distributed to donors and obtained by NBC News reveals that mostly useless “independent” Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema is considering running for reelection, claiming that if “parties nominate extremists, as expected, Kyrsten will win a majority of IND, at least a third of REP and a percentage of DEM voters – making her the first Independent to win a three-way statewide race in American history.”

Yeah. If she wants to run again maybe she should just go ahead and do it instead of dicking around with a “prospectus” which is just… How the hell does she think she’s going to peel off a third of Republican voters and “10 to 20 percent of Democrats” if it’s not at all an “extremist” Ruben Gallego and actual fucking “extremist” Kari Lake, “as expected”? There’s no scenario in which Sinema wins a second term to the US Senate. That ship has sailed on the winds of her perfidy. If Sinema wants to be useful for once in her self-ruined career she should run again and spend every single moment attacking Kari Lake whilst praising Gallego as a respectable and worthy public servant.

We should preface this with a little background info: Former Trump 2016 campaign manager Corey Lewandowski has a very well-earned reputation as a complete piece of shit, even above and beyond what the title of “Trump 2016 campaign manager” would imply on its own. He’s been very credibly alleged to have affairs with longtime Trump aide Hope Hicks and South Dakota Gov Kristi Noem, was arrested in 2016 for manhandling a female Breitbart reporter, got fired three months later, and in 2018 nearly got into a fistfight with then-White House Chief of Staff John Kelly in the West Wing.

Then in 2021 Trump fired Lewandowski again from his job running a Trump PAC after a woman named Trashelle Odom filed a criminal complaint with the Las Vegas Metro Police over an incident at a fundraiser for Noem. Per Trashelle’s statement, Lewandowski bragged about stabbing two people to death, the first one was when he was 10 years old, that his “dick is four inches bigger than a normal dick,” and had groped her repeatedly. Lewandowski ended up taking a non-plea deal on a sexual harassment count in 2022, by which time he’d already been re-hired again by Fat Donald.

Recently Lewandoski was detailed to hardcore Trump fanboy and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry’s gubernatorial campaign ahead of this November’s election, much to the displeasure of Trashelle’s husband, big-time Republican donor John Odom. Politico reports that not only is John demanding Landry’s campaign “immediately” return the more than $100,000 he donated, he’s also “urging the voters of Louisiana to reject Landry at the polls,” and that hiring the notorious scumbag Lewandowski makes it “obvious that [Landry] is not the kind of leader that Louisiana needs.”

A bull notched a major win against his human opponents during in a run in the town of Pobla de Farnals in Valencia, Spain on Saturday, scoring one dead and another severely wounded during the annual Sant Francesc Festival weekend’s humans vs steer face-off, Global247News.com reports.

The bull, named Cocinero and representing the Luis Algarra ranch, had cornered the two hapless Spaniards outside of a barricaded alcove where other “rodinero” enthusiasts had safely escaped to during the deliberately incited ritual bovine rampage. Both were severely gored, with the deceased man taking the horns in the torso and the survivor sustaining the blows to his legs.

“Pennsylvania is at it again! The Radical Left Governor, Josh Shapiro, has just announced a switch to Automatic Voter Registration, a disaster for the Election of Republicans, including your favorite President, ME! This is a totally Unconstitutional Act, and must be met harshly by Republican Leadership in Washington and Pennsylvania. Likewise, the RNC, and Ronna McDaniel, must spend their time working on this, instead of meaningless Debates where I am up by more than 50 points.”

“Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, and others, are far more important than ‘Aida,’ Sloppy Chris, Lyin’ Mike Pence, Nikki ‘Birdbrain’ Haley, Ron (‘Dead Campaign’) DeSanctimonious, and the others. Start suing now, & get the right lawyers this time! The Pennsylvania Republican Party must likewise not let this happen. It will be a disaster for our Nation, which is being destroyed by these Lunatics, Marxists, & Fascists, whose only real ability is to CHEAT on Elections,” writes twice-impeached and four-times indicted former President Trump in a 12:16 AM Truth Social post.

Way to Streisand Effect this. It’s already a thing in 24 states (plus Washington, DC), including Georgia, Michigan, and Nevada which just might kind of indicate it’s not “totally unconstitutional” at all and there’s no point in trying to block it in court. Unless he wants the GOP to draw more attention to his fear of more people getting registered to vote. Then by all means they should go ahead.

Some anti-communist maniac threw at least two Molotov cocktails at the Cuban embassy in DC late Sunday night, the Cuban Minister of Foreign Affairs said in a statement to ABC News. “The Cuban Embassy staff have not been injured,” the statement said of the second attack since 2020, when shots were fired at the building. “The anti-Cuban groups resort to terrorism when feeling they enjoy impunity, something that Cuba has repeatedly warned the US authorities about.”

The Writers Guild of America has reached a very favorable tentative deal with the studios, essentially ending a strike that began about five months ago.  According to the New York Times, the Guild told members that they would vote on the deal this week and all picketing should stop.  The deal does not mean that productions in Hollywood and elsewhere will restart because the Screen Actors Guild is still on strike.