As if they didn’t have enough shit to put up with after as many as 1,050 people still missing may have been completely incinerated when a firestorm destroyed the historic town of Lahaina this month, officials on Maui are now worried that Tropical Storm Fernanda could bring rain, KHON reports.

“Part of my concern, and they said it was a legitimate concern, and I think they are forming plans was for the runoff from what they say it’s that toxic ash, you know, if it gets into the water system and into the ocean that’s a nightmare,” said Maui County Councilmember Tamara Paltin.

“I want to talk about Trump’s alleged crimes for a second. He has not been indicted with incitement, we know that, right? So it’s not a crime to tell lies. Being a narcissist isn’t a crime. Hatching schemes to stay in office is not a crime. Claiming you won an election you know you lost is not a crime,” said Fox News host Julie Banderas two weeks ago, just days after disgraced former President Trump was indicted at the federal level for his post-2020 election coup attempt and before he was charged along with 18 of his minions in Georgia as the leader of a RICO conspiracy for the same. As such it’s a little stale of a clip but it sticks out as a solid example of the “defense” MAGA Republicans are putting up for their Orange God Emperor these days in their media hits and stupid Twitter posts.

It’s one we anticipated in June 2022 when we put up a lengthy examination of what the case against Trump for his post-2020 defeat coup might look like in terms of his knowledge or belief of whether the election was indeed “stolen” from him. Sure enough, Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of the fat bastard for his schemes directly addresses this, stating “the purpose of the conspiracy was to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by using knowingly false claims of election fraud to obstruct the federal government function by which those results are collected, counted, and certified.” As in Jack Smith doesn’t care if Trump actually believed or still does believe he truly won, he can prove that the means he used to try to overturn the election were corrupt and violations of federal statutes. It’s something quite a few TV legal pundits have posed as scenario along the lines of “If you think the bank took $5,000 from your account improperly and you go stick up a branch for the same amount you’re going to be arrested and charged with armed robbery whether you’re right or wrong about the $5,000 missing.”

Meaning a defense based on whether Trump really believed it is not going to fly in court. Especially not in DC where we would be surprised if Judge Tanya Chutkan would even allow it to be argued in front of the jury in the first place. So it’s really a political argument meant to reassure MAGA voters that it’s all just a witch hunt and these charges are political blah blah blah.

A preliminary 5.1 magnitude earthquake struck 4.5 miles southeast of Ojai, California at 1:41 PM PDT on Sunday, just as the region was getting hit with the outer bands of Tropical Storm Hilary. Since the quake occurred less than 30 minutes ago we have no reporting on damages, however the hypocenter was 9 miles deep and the area is pretty used to moderate shaking. Most homes and businesses are seismically reinforced so it’s unlikely anything serious happened.

As far as a connection goes yeah it’s certainly possible. Anyone who’s going to be like “LOL of course they would happen at once” isn’t entirely crazy. Heavy rainfall and low barometric pressure maybe could’ve triggered the quake, just as the downpours are causing mudslides on the surface. That will however probably take a while for seismologists to sort out and find a link.

At the end of a Truth Social post heralding his 62 percent support over the rest of the Republican primary field in the latest CBS News/YouGov poll, disgraced former President Trump on Sunday wrote that due to his prohibitive lead he “WILL THEREFORE NOT BE DOING THE DEBATES!” which, while he’s full of shit and walks things back all the time, seems pretty definitive.

So for now, officially, he’s not going to show up to this week’s debate on Fox News, the second debate at the Reagan Library next month, the rumored third debate in Alabama in October, or any of the other ones that’ll be scheduled prior to the Iowa caucus. Sucks for Ronna Not-Romney, and potentially for Trump too because he might be giving Biden an excuse to skip their showdowns.

The Marshall Islands-flagged Suez Rajan, carrying as much as one million barrels of sanctioned Iranian oil, is starting to unload its cargo to a transport tanker off the coast of Galveston, the Associated Press reports.

The action ends months of saga over the oil:  after setting sail from a Persian Gulf port in February 2022, the Biden Administration confiscated the tanker’s suspected cargo, Iranian oil under sanction, via a court order that was believed to have been issued as the tanker sat for months in the South China Sea off Singapore as the source of the oil was determined.

Iranian officials continue to try to distribute its oil by hiding points of origin on transit documents. Iran, however, does not recognize the authority of the sanctions, put in place to punish Iran for continuing its nuclear research program, and it claims ownership of the cargo.  Iran’s Revolutionary Guard issued a threat against the facilities and companies unloading and selling the oil, saying they “should expect to be struck back.”

Possibly because he doesn’t want to be berated on the world stage or maybe because he fears he’s losing strength at home, but Russian President Vladimir Putin will skip the BRICS conference of economic leaders, CNN reports.

The leaders of the four other member nations–Brazil’s Luiz Lula da Silva and India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa–are all expected at the Johannesburg summit.  While China has supported Russia since its invasion of Ukraine, the other nations have spoken out against the Kremlin’s aggression.

A 66-year-old southern California boutique owner is dead after a man walking by her shop in Lake Arrowhead, California took offense to a rainbow flag she had in a display on her storefront and shot her Friday, killing her, KABC in Los Angeles reports.

Laura Ann Carleton, a wife and mother of nine children, was shot by a man who stopped at her store, Mag.Pi, and “made several disparaging remarks about a rainbow flag that stood outside the store before shooting Carleton,” according to the sheriff’s department.

Police arrived to find Carleton with at least one gunshot wound; she was pronounced dead at the scene.  Police were able to track the unnamed shooter and confronted him, where he was shot and killed after threatening responding officers.

Starting in the weeks after he took office as Florida governor in 2019, Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis undertook a fundraising plan that allowed donors and lobbyists to pay tens of thousands of dollars to his fundraising operations to spend hours with the public official on golf courses and at sporting events in a literal “pay to play” operation, the Washington Post reports.

“I could sell golf for $50k this morning,” DeSantis’s primary fundraiser in the 2018 campaign, Heather Barker, wrote weeks after DeSantis was inaugurated as the team circulated a list of nine high-dollar prospects and their clients.  The list included the sources for the fund that the targets could approach, from influential Florida residents to business owners to major corporations.  One of the targets on the list was Disney, which DeSantis has targeted for state government retribution for opposing his “Don’t Say Gay” dictum.

“METHODS FOR FIRMS TO DELIVER SUPPORT: Golf, lunch, meetings, dinner, tours, events, etc. — Each have a threshold (ex. Golf $25k per person, which is a deal),” the document outlined, noting the ways wealthy donors could get in personal discussions with DeSantis to influence his policies.

Louisiana Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, one of the seven Republican Senators who voted to impeach Donald Trump after the January 6th Republican-led domestic terrorist attack on Congress, says the charges brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith are “almost a slam dunk.”  Cassidy goes on to say, “If that is proven, then we’ll have a candidate for president who was convicted of a crime.  I think Joe Biden needs to be replaced, but I don’t think Americans will vote for someone who’s been convicted.”

A new survey by CBS News/YouGov finds disgraced former President Trump leading heels-wearing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis by a massive 62 to 16 percent for the 2024 GOP primary among Republican respondents, with amoral fascist yuppie Vivek Ramaswamy in third at 7 percent, former Veep Mike Pence at 5 percent, and the rest of them at whatever who cares because it’s low.

It’s Trump’s largest lead yet. Another hilarious finding in the survey is that 56 percent of Trump 2020 voters expect there to be a recession next year versus 32 percent overall, like the assholes actually want there to be a slowdown so their Orange God Emperor has a better chance of winning vs Biden.

Even better is how 71 percent of Republican respondents said it feels like evrything Trump says is true, versus 63 percent saying “Friends and Family,” 56 percent “Conservative Media Figures,” and only 42 percent “Religious Leaders,” which is just what the fuck is wrong with these people.

Disgraced former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows told investigators with Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s team that the twice-impeached loser ex-President had not once ever declassified any of the documents he had stolen after leaving office, ABC News reports.

Meadows is now co-defendant with Donald in the Georgia coup RICO case, but so far has escaped any sort of federal prosecution for his involvement in the Orange Tyrant’s presidential crime spree.

Whilst begging fat former President Trump to show up for the first primary debate in Milwaukee, titular Republican Party leader Ronna Not-Romney McDaniel last month warned the disgraced loser that he might end up giving President Joe Biden an excuse to skip the 2024 general election debates in the very likely event that they’ll end up facing each other, the New York Times reports.

The warning, which has pretty much gone unheeded since it’s all but certain now that Donald will in fact skip the debate, underscored another divide between Trump – whose minions see the general debates vs Biden as an absolute must-have – and Ronna – who has worked hard to try to undercut the Commission on Presidential Debates and force an outside alternative. The best part is the whole reason why she did it was because Trump melted down on stage so badly at his first debate against Biden and then did poorly in the second and final debate. Now Biden has all the leverage and can goad Trump into an official sanctioned debate with “unfair” moderators like Chris Wallace again.

Already some Dems are playing into the leverage. “I think the fact that Trump is utterly irresponsible and turns every event into a circus and a platform for disseminating disinformation is the basis for saying: This isn’t worthwhile,” former Obama Administration and campaign political strategist David Axelrod told the Times. Axelrod said it was also “valid” to question whether Biden could or should ultimately deny voters another showdown with Trump however, saying “whether you feel in a close race you could get away with that – and whether the public would accept it – is another question.”

Russian space agency Roscosmos on Sunday said its Luna-25 probe completed a near-perfect landing on the surface of the Earth’s barren satellite world, the AP reports citing official statements.

“The apparatus moved into an unpredictable orbit and ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the surface of the moon,” said Roscosmos, being kind of glass half empty about it since they did make it to the moon. “During the operation, an abnormal situation occurred on board the automatic station, which did not allow the maneuver to be performed with the specified parameters,” the agency wrote in a Telegram post, really being too hard on themselves for a little mess-up.

It’s not clear yet if the Roscosmos personnel responsible for the failure ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the surface of the pavement outside of a tall government building.

In a court filing, Mark Meadows claims that he should not be charged in Fulton County, Georgia claiming things like executive privilege, asserting that he was serving the Office of the President and therefore is immune from charges:

As a federal official at the time of the charged conduct, he is immune from state prosecution under the Supremacy Clause of the Federal Constitution. The State’s prosecution of Mr. Meadows threatens the important federal interest in providing the President of the United States with close, confidential advice and assistance, firmly entrenched in federal law for nearly 100 years, and gives rise to precisely the sort of state interference in federal affairs the Supremacy Clause prohibits.

Indicted felon Donald Trump’s attempt to upstage the “establishment” Republican debate to be aired on the Offical Network of the RNC™, the Fox cable propaganda network on Wednesday night will consist of a pre-taped interview with disgraced former Fox host Tucker Carlson.   No one’s sure where it will appear:  on Trump’s failing social media platform or on Carlson’s stream on the more widely used trans social media platform now known as “X.”

Per the Washington Post, the interview is already “in the can,” as the Hollywood kids say, having been recorded last week while Trump continued his “will he or won’t he” pantomime regarding showing up at the debate.  With all the confusion on Wednesday, it might be a great time to sneak into the Fulton County jail to be processed… if only you didn’t insist on flying around in a jet with your name emblazoned on the side.

In what is likely to be one of many “basketful of deplorables” moments in his campaign, Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis called the remaining supporters of Donald Trump’s reelection attempt “listless vessels,” the Orlando Sentinel reports.

“If all we are is listless vessels that are just supposed to follow, you know, whatever happens to come down the pike on Truth Social every morning, that’s not going to be a durable movement,” DeSantis said in a taped interview with the conservative website The Florida Standard.  “Ultimately, a movement can’t be about the personality of one individual.  The movement has got to be about what are you trying to achieve on behalf of the American people.”

“Section three of the Fourteenth Amendment means exactly what it plainly and clearly says, specifically as you just read.  Any person who previously has taken the oath of office to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, and to then engages in insurrection or rebellion against the United States and the Constitution of the United States shall not thereafter hold, in this instance, the office of the Presidency of the United States.  That language in the Constitution, Jim, simply could not be any clearer,” conservative retired federal judge Michael Luttig, a short-lister for the Supreme Court when George W. Bush was in office and one of people who prepped Clarence Thomas for his Senate confirmation hearings, says about Donald Trump’s availability to hold office if convicted in the DC January 6th case.

As it was preparing to enter into an orbit for its planned lunar landing, the Russian unmanned Luna 25 lander experienced an “emergency situation on board” and its control crew is reviewing the situation to see if the lander can make another attempt, CNN reports.

“During the operation, an emergency situation occurred on board the automatic station, which did not allow the maneuver to be performed with the specified parameters,” Roscosmos said in a Telegram post.  “The management team is currently analyzing the situation.”

The mission would have been the first Russian craft successfully landing on the Moon since 1976, and it was thought to be a needed publicity boost for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who experienced a faltering invasion in Ukraine and a military coup attempt.