In yet another lengthy, brutal memo outlining House Oversight Chairbilly James Comer’s “transparent effort to boost Donald Trump’s campaign by establishing a false moral equivalency between Trump – the four time – indicted former president now facing 91 federal and state criminal charges, based on a mountain of damning evidence for a shocking range of felonies, including lying to the FBI, endangering national security by illegally keeping classified documents, and conspiring to subvert the US Constitution – and President Biden, against whom there is precisely zero evidence of any wrongdoing whatsoever” and Comer’s failures to even really make that happen, ranking member Congressman Jamie Raskin uses the MAGA media and the Congressional GOP’s skepticism and complaints to pour extra pain onto his feckless counterpart. From the lowlight reel:

• “Breitbart editor Emma Jo-Morris criticized Chairman Comer for promoting bribery allegations
against President Biden even though he has ‘not shown [proof] to the public,’ while Steve
Bannon also lambasted Chairman Comer for failing to provide evidence to support his bribery
allegations, saying of Chairman Comer, ‘You’re not serious. It’s all performative.'”

• “Former Trump official Sebastian Gorka tweeted that, ‘Comer is failing in his efforts to investigate’ President Biden, called Chairman Comer’s supposed findings, ‘crap – he’s reporting stuff that we knew 2 years ago,’ and said that Chairman Comer’s Biden probe is ‘pathetic.'”

• “Kris Kolesnik, former senior counselor and director of investigations for Senator Grassley, wrote that Chairman Comer and Chairman Jim Jordan ‘struggle mightily with the concept of credibility.'”

Raskin just keeps going and going with this. It’s utterly savage. Give his memo a full read.

A new Axios/Morning Consult survey finds 47 percent of self-identified Trump fans saying artificial intelligence makes them less likely to trust the 2024 election results compared to only 27 percent of Biden supporters. Axios’s article doesn’t really get into the specifics of how the question was worded, but it’s not really that hard to imagine where the respective apprehensions lie.

With libs you would expect them to be wary of deepfakes and other sorts of disinformation targeted at swing voters ahead of election day, take your pick of what kind of shit could be fabricated at the last minute to dupe them into voting for the Orange God Emperor or not showing up to vote.

With Trump fanboys it’ll be full blown “The Venezuelan-Iranian AI supercomputer hacked into the tabulators and changed votes from Trump to Biden and we have the EXPLOSIVE evidence right here right after this message from Patriot Gold Bullion Financial” before not showing any evidence.

“Kilauea volcano is erupting. Eruptive activity is currently confined to Halemaʻumaʻu crater and the downdropped block to the east of the crater, within Kīlauea’s summit caldera. No unusual activity has been noted along Kilauea’s East Rift Zone or Southwest Rift Zone. Kīlauea volcano began erupting at approximately 3:15 pm HST this afternoon, September 10. As of 7 pm HST, multiple minor fountains remain active in the eastern portion of Halema‘uma‘u crater floor and on the downdropped block within Kilauea’s summit caldera,” says the USGS Hawaii Volcano Observatory in a bulletin.

“The line of fissures stretches approximately 0.8 miles, from the eastern part of Halema‘uma‘u crater floor extending into the east wall of the downdropped block. Lava fountain heights have decreased since the eruption onset, but remain up to about 20-25 meters (65-82 feet) high. Lava erupted from fissures on the downdropped block is flowing in a westward direction towards Halema‘uma‘u crater, the eastern portion of which is covered with actively flowing lava. The laser rangefinder is aimed at a western portion of Halema‘uma‘u crater, not near the new eruptive activity, and recorded less than 1 m (3 feet) of new lava added to that portion of the crater floor. An estimate of effusion rate will be provided after an overflight of the new eruption site tomorrow morning,” USGS continued.

Hurricane Lee, which jumped to a Category 5 storm earlier this week before calming down to a Cat 3, will bounce out to the north Atlantic without making landfall in the United States, CNN reports.

Communities along the Southeast US on the Atlantic coast can expect rough surf and strong tides. As the storm traveled to its north, Puerto Rico saw waves up to 20 feet high, with authorities ordering people out of the surf due to the waves and the riptides.

Disgraced former President Trump on Sunday really lost his shit over the most recent Wall Street Journal poll asking respondents about his mental capacity, writing on his stupid Twitter clone:

“In a phony and probably rigged Wall Street Journal poll, coming out of nowhere to softened the mental incompetence blow that is so obvious with Crooked Joe Biden, they ask about my age and mentality. Where did that come from? A few years ago I was the only one to agree to a mental acuity test, & ACED IT. Now that the Globalists at Fox & the WSJ have failed to push their 3rd tier candidate to success, they do this…” and continuing with “Well, I hereby challenge Rupert Murdoch & Sons, Biden, WSJ heads, to acuity tests! I will name the place and the test, and it will be a tough one.

“Nobody will come even close to me! We can also throw some physical activity into it. I just won the Senior Club Championship at a big golf club, with many very good players. To do so you need strength, accuracy, touch and, above all, mental toughness. Ask Bret Baier (Fox), a very good golfer. The Wall Street Journal & Fox are damaged goods after their failed DeSanctimonious push & stupid $780,000,000 ‘settlement.’ MORONS!!!” he seriously fucking wrote to prove his “sanity.”

MAGA-skeptical Freedom Caucasian Congressman Ken Buck mocked fellow House Republican Marjorie “Sporkfoot” Taylor Greene as “the expert on impeachment” now that she’s filed so many pointless articles against President Joe Biden, starting from before she was even sworn in to office.

Economic eggheads in the ChiCom regime are worried that dictator Xi Jinping’s “Fuck you, I know what I’m doing here” philosophy of governing makes him increasingly ill-equipped to deal with a metastasizing crisis in the country’s financial system, with bureaucrats who can do something about it paralyzed by the big Pooh Bear’s fecklessness and indecision, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Worse, the middle management of the ChiCom party have a pretty good idea of who’s going to end up taking the blame when shit gets extra real. “The centralization of China’s political system has weakened the credibility of anyone not named Xi Jinping in delivering confidence-building messages that the leadership intends to change course,” says DC thank tank egghead Logan Wright.

A series of meetings in June of the top policy poindexters in the housing and finance sectors ended on a glum note, with a source telling the Journal they could “feel the anxiety in the room. The consensus among the experts invited was that the government must act forcefully to stimulate growth,” and then like that nothing happened, because Xi is so much smarter and handsomer than the so-called “experts” who think they know more about economy stuff than him.

At least 2,000 people are dead in Morocco after a 6.8 magnitude earthquake – the largest to strike the North African country in over 120 years – struck late Friday, devastating the historic town of Marrakech and many others across the Atlas Mountains region, the Associated Press reports.

Despite sitting right along the boundary of the African and Eurasian tectonic plates that runs through the Strait of Gibraltar, earthquakes are fairly rare in Morocco. As such there’s no real system of seismic-resistant safety codes for new construction or retrofitting existing buildings. That coupled with the relatively shallow depth of the quake’s hypocenter and its occurrence at 11:11 PM local time make the situation worse than the not-extremely-high magnitude might imply.

One of the many lingering questions about John F. Kennedy’s assassination was how a single bullet could travel through the President, then hit at least three different points in Texas Governor John Connally.  Known as the “Magic Bullet,” the slug was later found on a hospital stretcher that had carried Connally, with investigators concluding that it had fallen out of Connally while he was being treated.

A new claim by one of the Secret Service agents who was riding on the running boards of the limo carrying Kennedy and Connally at the time of the assassination, however, throws all that into doubt and raises some additional questions.  According to the New York Times, Paul Landis said he placed the bullet on Kennedy’s gurney after finding the round lodged in the back seat of the limo, in the back cushion of the seat Kennedy was riding in.

Speaking publicly for the first time since the assassination, Landis said he spotted the bullet in the seat during the chaos as the limo arrived at the hospital.  Out of instinct, he grabbed it understanding it was a piece of evidence and wanting to keep it from ghoulish souvenir hunters.  He dropped it on Kennedy’s stretcher, Landis admits, while he was in shock thinking that it could somehow help doctors figure out what happened to Kennedy.

“It’s totally unprecedented,” Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall says about Alabama Republican football coach (who doesn’t want to be called “Senator” Tommy Tuberville’s ongoing block of promotions for flag officers because of his ignorance of military policy regarding medical care reimbursements.  “The Senate routinely confirms general officers and lower-ranking officers by general consent, but the way the process works, as we’re seeing here, a single Senator can stop that.  It’s never been done before.  Senator Tuberville has no experience in the military.  This is his first time, I think, in public service, and I don’t think he appreciates how much of an impact this is having and how negative an impact it is for the military.”

“God has used imperfect people all through history. King David wasn’t perfect. Saul wasn’t perfect. Solomon wasn’t perfect, and I actually gave the president a little one-pager on those Old Testament kings about a month ago and I shared it with him. I said, ‘Mr President, I know there are people that say, You know, you said you were the chosen one, and I said you were. I said if you’re a believing Christian you understand God’s plan for the people who rule and judge over us on this planet in our government,’” then-Trump Administration Energy Secretary Rick Perry said on Fox News in November 2019, telling Evangelicals how they should be able to sleep at night when supporting a pornstar-fucking, racist hate-mongering, criminal degenerate for the presidency.

This was after Perry announced he was stepping down because House Democrats started asking why he was pursuing corrupt energy deals in Ukraine while Trump was about to be impeached for trying to torpedo Joe Biden’s candidacy by coercing President Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing a fake investigation into Hunter Biden pursuing corrupt energy deals in Ukraine.

Rick Perry isn’t in the picture above. This isn’t about him. He is useful however to introduce that collage of Donald Trump, Vince McMahon on top, and – from left to right – of former WWE wrestler Steven Richards, Brent Bozell IV, and Brent Bozell III after a verdict was read in a DC court on Friday.

Speaking to a gathering of his cult in South Dakota on Friday, disgraced former President Trump briefly invoked the infamous “sky screamer,” a liberal protestor standing near his 2017 inauguration whose loud, public anguish over Donald being sworn into the nation’s highest office caught on video became a cherished meme among his fans who so delighted in seeing a leftist in pain.

• No. No, you weren’t “disenfranchised.”  You lost.  Your vote counted, but your team got fewer votes than the other team.  So… you lost.  Losing is not disenfranchisement.  Get over yourself.
• Fulton County special grand jury report shows one thing:  on charges against the top-line defendants, Trump and Giuliani, there was one “no” vote on all charges.  One “no” vote in a grand jury is no big deal.  In a criminal trial, though…
• Biden in Florida:  Presidential.  Trump in Florida:  Disaster.    DeSantis in Florida:  Stranded.
• Enrique Tarrio is a self-important sociopathic twerp who plays with guns.  And now he’s going to jail for a very long time.  
  Read More ▶ “Random thoughts Friday, Volume CXXXVII”

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis took down Mark Meadows’s attempt to have his racketeering case removed to federal court, and now she’s going after Jeff Clark, the one-time Justice Department environmental lawyer who claimed Trump named him acting attorney general, who is also attempting to have his trial in a federal court.  Clark’s argument–that he was acting “under color” of his official government position–is fundamentally flawed, per Willis.  The emphasis is Fani’s.

In short, the defendant sought to peddle a lie and place the imprimatur of the Department of Justice upon that lie. He was told by the chief officers of the DOJ that his claim was a lie, that he did not have authority to make the claim at all, and that it was not the DOJ’s role to make such a claim, but he persisted in attempting to send the letter containing his claim anyway. Although the defendant exceeded the scope of his own authority and the authority of the entire Department of Justice, he argues to this Court that he was somehow acting under color of office and taking actions that were necessary and proper to his duties. The defendant’s claims, like the one central to his letter, are baseless, and the State of Georgia respectfully requests that this Court refuse to authorize the removal of this case.

The official number of people missing after wildfires swept across Maui is 66, dropping by hundreds in the past few days as people check in with loved ones searching for them, the New York Times reports.  Previously, the number of unaccounted-for was 385.  The death toll stands at 115 confirmed killed, with search operations halted at then end of August, as Democratic Hawaii Governor Josh Green and other officials acknowledging that because of the fire devastation of some buildings, remains may never be found.

Tennessee’s Eric Gavelek Munchel, the January 6th domestic terrorist known as Zip Tie Guy, best remembered for climbing over handrails while holding a number of restraints, received a 57-month sentence for his part in the Republican-led attack on Congress.  His mother, Lisa Eisenhart, seen in the photo above with her son, got a 30-month sentence.  At one point in his prosecution, Munchel blamed his mother for his involvement in the attack, saying she went into the Capitol and he followed to make sure nothing happened to her.  Oh, and the zip ties?  He claimed he found them along the way and just picked them up.

As the nation approached the 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, which–some people say–was the most diabolical government plot since Hunter Biden got that Ukrainian fired, the New York caretakers for the remains of the unknown dead from Ground Zero announced they’ve been able to conclusively identify two more sets of remains, ABC News reports.

The people, who were not publicly named at the request of the families, were the 1,648th and 1,649th identified of the 2,753 people confirmed to have been killed at the World Trade Center in New York.

Writers at low production value and pretty tinfoil-y right wing website Wisconsin Right Now have cranked out a fairly panicked play-by-play of Thursday’s Wisconsin Elections Commission meeting, their apprehension in the headline “GOP Commissioners Say 3 Democrats on WEC Could Block Trump Ballot Access” seemingly backed up by actual quotes from the minutes of the meeting.

The WEC is, as many of you are aware, a deeply dysfunctional panel made up of three Democrats and three Republicans held together by legal duct tape, slapped together by Republicans in 2015 to replace another board that was also slapped together by Republicans in the late 1990s after they stripped the Secretary of State’s office of all election administration duties in the 1970s. And yes, Republicans now want to disband the WEC and slap something else together. Anyway there’s a whole other shitshow going on right now with the WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe who the GOP claims is no longer legally serving in the office and fuck how much more background do this need?

Donald Trump’s White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’s effort to move his Fulton County, Georgia racketeering case to the federal court has been denied by the federal court in Northern Georgia, Kyle Cheney of Politico reports.  This does not bode well for other defendants’ attempts to do the same in the RICO case.

In his ruling, Judge Steven C. Jones, an Obama appointee, found Meadows’s claims that he was acting in his official capacity as Chief of Staff did not hold up under scrutiny, and therefore he was not acting under the color of his official duties.

“Instead, the evidence before the Court overwhelmingly suggests that Meadows was not acting in his scope of executive branch duties during most of the Overt Acts alleged,” the opinion reads.  “Even if Meadows took on tasks that mirror the duties that he carried out when acting in his official role as White House Chief of Staff (such as attending meetings, scheduling phone calls, and managing the President’s time) he has failed to demonstrate how the election-related activities that serve as the basis for the charges in the Indictment are related to any of his official acts.  As the substance of the overt acts constituted a significant part of Meadows’s testimony and proof of his acting within the scope of his federal office, the Court concludes that based on the factual evidence, Meadows was not acting in the scope of his office for purposes of federal officer removal.”