Saying at the end of his term in office, “I was given the option.  I could’ve done a pardon of myself.  You know what I said?  I have no interest in even thinkin’ about it,” indicted felon Donald Trump went on to say that if re-installed into the Oval Office, he’s “very unlikely” to give himself a pardon.

“Well, I think it’s very unlikely.  What did I do wrong?  I didn’t do anything wrong,” Trump told NBC News.  But he set up his rationale for issuing himself a pardon by claiming the “Biden charges” are all politically motivated.  Of course, a presidential pardon only covers federal criminal charges he’s facing, not the slew of state and local indictments and lawsuits.

It’s time billionaires paid at least a 25% minimum tax.

— President Biden (@POTUS) September 14, 2023

Donald Trump paid an effective tax rate of 0% in 2020; he paid no taxes after claiming nearly $5 million in losses.  In 2019, with declared income of $4.4 million, the Trumps paid just $134,000 in their joint tax filing, or 3%.  In 2018, with $24.3 million in income, he paid a 4% effective rate.  The average effective federal tax rate in the United States for people of all income levels was 13% in 2022.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will visit Washington DC next week, his second since that start of the Russian invasion in February 2022, Punchbowl’s Andrew Desiderio reports.

“Former NBA participant Brandon Hunter, who beforehand performed for the Boston Celtics and Orlando Magic, has handed away on the age of 42, as introduced by Ohio males’s basketball coach Jeff Boals on Tuesday. Hunter, initially a extremely regarded highschool basketball participant in Cincinnati, achieved vital success as a ahead for the Bobcats. He earned three first-team All-MAC convention alternatives and led the NCAA in rebounding throughout his senior season.”

“Hunter’s expertise led to his choice because the 56th general decide within the 2003 NBA Draft.
Throughout his NBA profession, he performed in 67 video games over two seasons and achieved a career-high of 17 factors in a recreation in opposition to the Milwaukee Bucks in 2004,” reports an apparent AI in an article that was yanked from MSN.com’s “community channel” called “Race Track.”

Like with Yahoo News, MSN is kind of a relic from the pre-social media age, an aggregator that reprints stories from other outlets – for example the home page’s top story is Bloomberg’s “Supreme Court Pauses Curbs on Biden Social Media Contacts” and there’s a Wall Street Journal article about Hunter Biden and so on and so forth. It’s not clear what the criteria qualifies a site as an MSN news “partner” but obviously it’s not too high since they carry The Hill, Mediaite, and RawStory articles.

And this “Race Track” AI nonsense. Now the channel’s page has a Portuguese URL that doesn’t lead to any site at all, which maybe kind of raises the possibility this was just a bad translation job. Really fucking bad, considerably worse and more awkward than Google Translate was 10 years ago. In what overly literal translation from a foreign language to English could “dead” become “useless”?

Disgraced former President Trump on Thursday filed a lawsuit against – yeah, the headline is correct, this is real – New York state Superior Court Judge Arthur Engoron, the jurist overseeing state Attorney General Leticia James’s $250 million suit against the Donald’s corrupt business empire that threatens to destroy his company, the Daily Beast reports on a very novel complaint.

Or suicidal if it doesn’t work. Trump is trying to force an “Article 78” proceeding against Engoron, claiming the judge “has yet to perform his lawful duty, Justice Engoron plans to proceed with the trial of the Attorney General’s claims on October 2, 2023 – just nineteen days from the date of this petition,” citing an appellate order for Engoron to exclude some older transactions from the scope of James’s case before the trial starts. Engoron has told Donald’s lawyers he’s working on it and will finish soon, but Team Orange doesn’t want to wait, especially after the judge recently tersely rejected their request to delay the trial by three weeks. It’s not clear how much merit there is to this complaint or if Trump is now even more fucked after it gets tossed and he’s still stuck with Engoron.

The Brazilian Supreme Court on Thursday sentenced a fan of disgraced former President Jair Bolsonaro to 17 years in prison for being part of the crowd who stormed the South American country’s Capitol back in January to protest the corrupt far right autocrat’s defeat against leftist then-former President Luiz Lula in the 2022 presidential election, the Associated Press reports.

Aécio Lúcio Costa Pereira, 51, who cops arrested on the day of the January 8th insurrection, is the first of several rioters facing time before the court to be sentenced. Pereira, charged with criminal association, staging a coup, violent attack on the rule of law, qualified damage, and destruction of public assets, was convicted on an 8-3 decision after being caught on tape waving a shirt and calling for a military coup in the middle of the Senate chamber while the place was sacked.

For those keeping score at home, Periera is only the first of an unknown number of Brazilian rioters to get tossed in the clink for their riot, but already his 17 year bid would rank third longest on the list of those who have been sentenced between the 2021 Washington, DC and 2023 Brasilia insurrections. Only Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio’s 22 years and Oath Keepers founder Stewie Rhodes’s 18 years are longer. In Brasilia there was no disruption to an ongoing transition as Lula had been sworn in a week earlier, no elected officials fled for their lives because it was on a Sunday so the Capitol was empty, and no cops or rioters were seriously hurt, let alone killed. Still, the very first Bolsonaro fan going down gets 17 years in what is surely a violent and squalid penal system.

Again, this is a lie. The “Blue Slip” is just a norm, not even an official statute, giving senators a veto over certain appointees serving in their state. The president still has to nominate them, and Trump did just that on November 17, 2017, announcing Weiss as among a slate of US Attorney and Marshal picks sharing “the President’s vision for ‘Making America Safe Again.’ Accordingly, the President today announced his intent to nominate these individuals to serve their respective jurisdictions.”

Of course if he didn’t try to lie about this to his fans, who don’t really understand how the federal government works, and bizarrely pretend that two Democratic Senators, then in the minority in the Senate, somehow unilaterally appointed and confirmed Weiss, then Trumpsters might be concerned their Messiah was indirectly responsible for Hunter Biden only facing 10 years in prison.

Next Trump wrote “This, the gun charge, is the only crime that Hunter Biden committed that does not implicate Crooked Joe Biden. One down, Eleven to go! The Democrats, with all of their horrible, very unfair, and mostly illegal Witch Hunts, have started a process that is very dangerous for our Country. They have opened the proverbial Pandora’s Box, and it is possible that the USA will never be the same again. SO SAD!!!” before screaming “THE DEMOCRATS MUST STOP INTERFERING WITH OUR UPCOMING 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION” in the next post on his lame Twitter clone.

A Delaware gun owner and Navy veteran was hit with two charges from a fascist Biden Regime prosecutor on Thursday for allegedly lying on his gun application about some drugs he did before he decided to turn his life around and sober up, CNN reports on another case of law enforcement being weaponized against patriots who simply want to exercise their God-given Second Amendment right.

“Today, Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom filed for a petition initiative to put the right to reproductive freedom on the ballot for Nevadans in 2024. The effort seeks to give Nevada voters an opportunity to codify their fundamental right to reproductive freedom in the state constitution after the loss of federal abortion protections in the summer of 2022. Advocates of the effort must collect 103,000 signatures by June 2024 in order to qualify for the ballot in November 2024. If passed next year by voters, the measure would automatically appear again on the 2026 general election ballot for final passage,” says a Thursday press release from Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom.

Expect a possible effort by Trump and Trump-aligned groups to try to oppose it. Not because of the politics of the measure – if anything they’re probably going to stay as far away from abortion as possible – but because having it on the same ballot is a serious threat to Donald’s path back to the White House. Nevada will be extremely tight in 2024 and anything that turns out pro-choice voters is a minus for MAGA. It might be marginally less of a motivator given Nevada isn’t anything like Texas or Arkansas in that there’s no current restrictions on abortion in the Silver State, per NARAL’s map.

The same can’t be said about neighboring Arizona, where a 15-week ban is now in effect and last month a coalition won approval to begin collecting the 383,923 signatures needed by July 3, 2024 to get a proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot. Trump reportedly freaked out ahead of the 2020 election over a legal weed measure in Arizona, fearing the effect on turnout. The measure passed by a far wider margin (655,018 votes) than Trump’s loss to Biden (10,457).

Last year’s abortion ballot measure in Michigan, which Republicans tried and failed to stop, was credited for helping Dems Gretchen Whitmer, Jocelyn Benson, and Dana Nessel run up the score over their MAGA opponents in the gubernatorial, Secretary of State, and Attorney General elections.

The Russian-backed Libyan warlord whose militia controls the region surrounding the now-ruined city of Derna, where as many as 20,000 people were killed in a massive dam burst during a torrential downpour on Monday, had overruled the mayor’s orders for citizens to evacuate the town, telling people to remain in their homes just hours before the deluge, the Wall Street Journal reports.

On Sunday Derna Mayor Abdul Moneem Al-Ghaithi posted an evacuation order on his Facebook page and directed excavators to start pushing boulders up to the shoreline to create a levee, as he mistakenly believed the flooding would have come from the sea as “Storm Daniel” approached the Mediterranean coastline. Haftar had other ideas, convening his cabinet for a meeting where they decided instead to order a curfew and a two-day holiday while the storm swamped the town. A text alert reading simply “Stay at home” then went out to locals, a message that was largely heeded.

Hours later the dams in a canyon upstream from Derna burst, sending an apocalyptic deluge into the city, killing thousands immediately. An NGO had warned on Saturday that the dams were in at serious risk of failure given the saturation of the soil holding them up. Though it does not appear either Al-Ghaithi or Haftar were aware of that danger specifically, Al-Ghaithi, the guy at least nominally responsible to voters tried to get people out of harm’s way. Then the asshole who took power by force and is responsible really only to the Russians decided he knew better.

Alcoholic white nationalist Steve Bannon on Thursday was, to put it gently, less than pleased with weak House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his “mouth breathing” minions Jim Jordan and James Comer, mostly ranting about the budget situation, but saving some hangover rage for the fecklessness with with they’ve run their Biden investigations. It’s a really entertaining meltdown.

Choice is back in Wisconsin as Planned Parenthood responded Thursday to a county judge’s ruling in an ongoing case challenging the 1849 prohibition that they’ll be offering the procedure again in anticipation that the new 4-3 liberal majority state Supreme Court will eventually concur with the ruling and abolish the antiquated law once and for all, the Associated Press reports.

Transcripts from a top FBI official’s testimony to the House Judiciary Committee in June but just this week obtained by NBC News reveal the bureau had to assign 10 agents to work full time on tracking down threats from MAGA terrorists against prosecutors and FBI personnel accused of rigging and covering up what’s an already pretty botched criminal investigations into Hunter Biden.

“We have stood up an entire threat unit to address threats that the FBI employees’ facilities are receiving. It is unprecedented. It’s a number we’ve never had before,” FBI Security Division Assistant Director Jennifer L Moore told the committee. “It is unprecedented. It’s a number we’ve never had before.” One specific target of the MAGA threats cited is Delaware Assistant US Attorney Lesley Wolf, accused by those two IRS assclowns of interfering in the investigation and the subject of a June Fox News report claiming she blocked an FBI raid on Hunter’s home in October 2020 as to not interfere in the presidential election, like the Justice Department is supposed to avoid doing.

Wolf was far from alone however. FBI Laura Dehmlow, Section Chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, accused by Republicans of falsely deeming the Hunter laptop as Russian disinformation in October 2020, was the target of multiple threats after the committee singled her out.

On Thursday the NASA Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Independent Study team released their final report “containing a series of recommendations for how the agency could help to move our understanding of UAP forward.” We skimmed it and it does not appear to cover any new images of potential extraordinary objects in the skies, but we’ll carry the briefing on the off chance they show something interesting – and more credible than the dead bodies Mexican congress saw this week.

“After invoking the statutory right to a speedy trial, Defendants Chesebro and Powell filed motions asking that their cases be severed from each other and the additional 17 defendants. The Court held a hearing to consider their arguments on September 6, 2023, after which the State submitted supplemental briefing on September 12, 2023. Considering the record, law, and arguments of counsel, the Court finds that to the extent Defendants Chesebro and Powell request severance from each other, the motions are DENIED. However, after considering the parties’ filings and without the need for a hearing, the Court further finds that severing the remaining 17 co-defendants is simply a procedural and logistical inevitability, and thus the motions to sever from Defendants Chesebro and Powell are GRANTED IN PART. Finally, the motions to stay the proceedings of this Court pending appellate resolution of any federal removal actions are DENIED,” says a Thursday order from Fulton County, Georgia Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, severing the two MAGA lawyers from the other 17 co-defendants but denying their motions to separate their trials from each other.

Further down the ruling is the date: “To eliminate any doubts that the statutory speedy trial deadline has been met, the Court will endeavor to have a jury selected and sworn by November 3, 2023,” just a little later than the October 23 start originally targeted by Fulton County prosecutors.

I am pleased to continue USA Memorabilia’s tradition of celebrating the season with A Red, White and Blue Christmas. This year, I found myself looking to my love for our great nation for inspiration. May everyone experience an abundance of peace & love during the holiday season.… pic.twitter.com/DZN42LJdLv

— MELANIA TRUMP (@MELANIATRUMP) September 14, 2023

A new Monmouth University/Washington Post survey of South Carolina GOP primary voters finds fat former President Trump leading former South Carolina Governor Nimrata “Nikki” Haley 46 to 18 percent, with Senator Tim Scott in third at 10 percent and Ron DeSantis at an abysmal 9 percent.

The Biden Administration had been prepared for House MAGA Republicans to come up with a bullshit impeachment inquiry for more than a year, with only really the timing taking them slightly by surprise on Tuesday – two days earlier than they had expected – sources tell Politico Playbook of a White House otherwise fully armed and operational to take on a disorganized, half-assed effort.

Biden’s campaign is readying a PR offensive a source says is centered on “hammering Republicans for… trying to use this impeachment as a way to to help Donald Trump’s political prospects. And telling the American people, ‘This is an effort to damage President Biden. It is all about getting revenge and vengeance,'” for the two times Trump was impeached for trying to derail Biden.

Meanwhile, Colorado Freedom Caucasian Ken Buck still does not appear anywhere near on-board with the effort, telling the Daily Beast it’s a major “self-inflicted wound” for low-testosterone House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. “He’s the one that raised the issue of impeachment. Everybody on the outside wants to talk about it, let them talk about it – we have an institution and we have to keep it moving. How do you go to Democrats and say, ‘I need your vote on the [continuing government funding resolution],’ right after I’ve said, ‘I’m going to beat your president?’ It’s crazy,” Buck added.

Two other House Republicans went on record with Beast to express similar wariness of McCarthy’s feckless, ill-advised move. “I wouldn’t be pre-committed to a course of action,” said North Carolinian Dan Bishop. “If there’s no there there, then there’s no there there. Then we say ‘Hey, you were right, we were wrong, let’s move on down the road,’” Oklahoman Kevin Hern said. Of course they are Republicans and this could all very easily change. After all it took McCarthy just 11 days to change his mind about whether an impeachment inquiry required a full floor vote from the House.

Go from the face of the fool; you get no knowledge from such lips.

Proverbs 14:7

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) September 14, 2023

This is what to expect when conservative leaders eliminate reproductive health care and education:  Texas saw a 22% jump in the number of syphilis cases from 2020 to nearly 26,000 cases in 2022, more than double the number of cases seen in 2017, the Texas Tribune reports.

In 2022, the number includes 950 cases of newborns with syphilis via infections passed along in pregnancy by an infected patient; that accounted for one-third of the 2,850 cases of congenital syphilis recorded in the US that year.