Perhaps confirming the notion that his fans are illiterate dupes, freelance hate-monger Tucker Carlson’s highly-hyped biography “Tucker” by conservative writer Chadwick Moore has sold just 3,227 copies in its first week of sales, the Guardian reports.

After being fired by Fox Corporation following a $787.5 million settlement in the Dominion Voting Machine defamation case when his sexist and bigoted communications were disclosed, Carlson has been trying to rebuild his brand by partnering with aspirational oligarch Elon Musk’s Twitter X platform, which has its own self-created image issues.  It’s been less-than-successful:  after racking up tens of millions of views for his initial online offerings, his recent long-form posts have been struggling to regain his audience, with recent posts getting less than 10% of the initial audience on Twitter.

The average water temperature in the Gulf of Mexico reached 88ºF, the highest recorded, creating an ecosystem that has resulted in record-high temperatures throughout Gulf coast states, the Washington Post reports.  Gulf waters hit an average temperature of 88ºF, a degree higher than previously calculated and more than 2.5 degrees higher than its typical average.

Besides hitting daily high temperature records, temperatures on land have being skyrocketing:  several Louisiana cities including Alexandria, New Iberia, and Natchitoches reached all-time high temperatures in the past week.  Heat indexes are expected to reach 110º to 120º in Louisiana this week.

In the environmental and cultural hellhole of Texas, temperatures in Houston and College Station reached all-time highs for average weekly temperature last week.  And in backwoods Florida, temperatures at the National Weather Service office recorded a 100ºF level for the first time since 1976, when the data start.

The mother of the 6-year-old Virginia boy who shot his teacher at a Newport News elementary school with a gun he brought from home has pleaded guilty to state charges of felony child neglect charges, CNN reports.

Deja Taylor’s lawyers claim that she had the gun, fixed with a trigger lock, stored on the top shelf of a bedroom closet.  As part of the plea agreement, Taylor will also plead guilty to federal gun charges.  She faces up to five years in prison when she is scheduled to be sentenced in late October.

Donald Trump’s spokeslawyer Alina Habba downplays the reaction cited by Fox’s Steve Doocy that the Fulton County indictment is Trump’s “most perilous threat,” claiming they have “inside information”

We do not agree that it is a perilous threat because we actually have inside information so– I love when people–  Well, the inside information, Steve… well, you know, you used to love Trump [uncomfortable laughter] I gotta tell you, I mean– this is something, I’m not gonna breach.  I have confidentiality and I have ethics and I’m gonna continue.  I think you need to understand something.  When somebody is given a report, and he has reports, that showed that there was interference, and you can be advised by one lawyer that says, ‘oh, I don’t think so,’ and you could have another lawyer that says, ‘no, I do think so,’ and here’s some reports and we know that there are issues in Fulton County, right?  We know!  It’s not a question.  There was election issues and the integrity of our election is in question at this very moment. Um, and when he says, ‘I wanna look into it. I don’t trust it. We need to look into it.’ That’s his obligation as a president.”

No, there is no question about the integrity of the election.  All 50 states certified their results.  It’s over, Alina.  It’s been over for nearly three years.  And Trump’s obligation as a President was to honor the electors as certified by the various states, not try to extort and threaten Georgia election officials, nor try to undermine the integrity of the Constitution by submitting fake electors to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power after an election he lost.

Any DA in Texas!
Any state AG and DA in the whole country for that matter!!!

DO IT!!! https://t.co/LrOKw2IR4M

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) August 15, 2023

Less than a day after the titular head of the Republican Party was criminally indicted in a fourth case, Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene are urging the complete weaponization of local prosecutors offices to protect Republican political power.  Marge herself is likely on the targeting grid of Special Counsel Jack Smith for her December 2020 meeting at the White House where, in her own words, she helped plan Trump’s “January 6th objection” to his election loss which, we see now, included illegal activities.

Marge, Stephen Miller and various GOP officials, both elected and out of office, are calling for Republican prosecutors to weaponize their offices to politically target President Joe Biden and others in pure retribution for the legit indictment, post-investigation, of Trump for documented actions.

Christopher Clark, Hunter Biden’s longtime attorney who handled the various investigations into the President’s son, will withdraw from the case because he is a potential witness in an investigation into the drafting of Biden’s plea agreement, CNN reports.

“Based on recent developments, it appears that the negotiation and drafting of the plea agreement and diversion agreement will be contested, and Mr. Clark is a percipient witness to those issues,” Biden’s legal team wrote in the filing.

Biden withdrew from the plea deal after prosecution lawyers clarified that the deal would not shield Biden from future prosecution regarding the issues already under investigation, a term of the agreement sought to prevent a potential future GOP president from targeting him, as Donald Trump has promised.

Florida Republican Governor and campaign trainwreck Ron DeSantis signaled Monday that his culture war battle with Disney, the largest private employer in the state, is over and everyone should just forget about it because it was really nothing and Disney was going to lose the First Amendment lawsuit that they filed so they should just drop it before it goes further and besides DeSantis just wants Disney, the company that pioneered destination package vacations in his state, to be treated like the other companies in the same industry like SeaWorld. As school districts start to understand the harm DeSantis did to them, and as Florida residents realize the horrific financial and cultural shape the state is in, DeSantis is trying to patch up his mistakes before rebooting his national campaign, again.

“A Large, Complex, Detailed but Irrefutable REPORT on the Presidential Election Fraud which took place in Georgia is almost complete & will be presented by me at a major News Conference at 11:00 AM on Monday of next week in Bedminster, New Jersey. Based on the results of this CONCLUSIVE Report, all charges should be dropped against me & others – There will be a complete EXONERATION! They never went after those that Rigged the Election. They only went after those that fought to find the RIGGERS!” says fat former President Trump. This ought to be good.

The Putin Regime on Tuesday raised interest rates from 8.5 to 12 percent in response to a massive crash in the ruble’s value, Bloomberg reports.

Nice of him to at least acknowledge that he’s not the only one who got criminally charged over this shitshow. But what happened to “Any time they file an indictment, we go way up in the polls. We need one more indictment to close out this election. One more indictment, and this election is closed out” like he said last weekend? Why isn’t he more excited about this and saying he just won big time?

George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Quincy Adams, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, James K Polk, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S Grant, Rutherford B Hayes, Chester A Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Harry S Truman, Dwight D Eisenhower, Lyndon B Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H W Bush, Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama: 0 as of August 15, 2023. Carter, Clinton, GW Bush, and Obama are the only former presidents who could (theoretically) be charged with felony crimes by dint of their status.

Donald Trump: 91 as of August 15, 2023.

Note: William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Abraham Lincoln, James A Garfield, William McKinley, Warren G Harding, Franklin D Roosevelt, and John F Kennedy were excluded from this list because they didn’t have post-presidencies thanks to various illnesses and assassins’ bullets.

A Sunday Politico piece titled “Democrats’ climate law set off a wave of energy projects in GOP districts. A backlash followed,” checks in with folks in a number of places seeing new jolts to their local economies – and the “backlash” – a year after the Inflation Reduction Act was passed.

One of them, Inola, Oklahoma diner owner and self-described Trump fan Bill McAnally, 68, was “ecstatic” when he found out that an Italian company, Enel, plans to spend $1 billion on a solar cell and panel factory in the town, which obviously would be big for him. “It’s a great deal. All it does is help my business,” said McAnally… just before a reporter informed him the company will take advantage of tax credits in the IRA to bring probably thousands of jobs to his town.

“I don’t support it now. The federal government doesn’t need to get involved. We all support bringing in green, but we don’t want to give them all this free money,” said McAnally, who evidently doesn’t want to expand his business and make more money because it’s somehow tainted by leftist Marxist something something. It’s worth asking just how much McAnally knew about the project’s funding before he changed his mind. The Politico article says he “was ecstatic when an Italian company, Enel, announced plans in May to spend more than $1 billion – the largest private investment in [Oklahoma’s] history – to build” the plant. Like was he totally in the dark that it was a government investment, or did he have some sort of vague, abstract awareness that the project had been spurred by something that he didn’t immediately make a connection to the Biden Administration’s signature economic initiative. The writing seems to maybe indicate the latter, but either way it’s a really excellent example of just how suicidally stupid and petty these people are. Who the fuck says this when the plant’s already being built and the money’s been spent no matter what? Would it be that hard to simply say “Hey, I wouldn’t have voted for it but I’ll take the extra traffic for my diner”?

Moments after 10 indictments were handed up in a Fulton County, Georgia courtroom likely including charges against Donald Trump, his 2016 Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton made a live appearance on the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC.

Well, it finally happened after much anticipation:  A Fulton County, Georgia grand jury has issued indictments with a total of 41 counts against former President and unsuccessful coup plotter Donald John Trump and 18 others for their efforts to undermine the votes of the citizens of Georgia by overturning the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election.  

Trump was charged with:

• 1 RICO charge
• 1 count of Solicitation of violation of oath by a public officer
• 1 count of Conspiracy to commit impersonating a public officer
• 1 count of Conspiracy to commit forgery in the first degree
• 1 count of Conspiracy to commit false statements and writings
• 1 count of Conspiracy to commit filing false documents
• 1 count of Conspiracy to commit forgery in the first degree
• 2 counts of Filing false documents
• 2 counts of Solicitation of violation of oath by a public officer
• 1 count of False statements and writings

If convicted of all charges and sentences run consecutively, Trump could face as much as 55 years in prison and a $1 million fine.

With the retirement of Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Mike Gilday, three branches of the US Armed Forces are operating without Senate-confirmed leaders for the first time in American history thanks to blocks put on the nominations of flag and senior officers by Republican Alabama Coach Tommy Tuberville, Reuters reports.

President Joe Biden has nominated Admiral Lisa Franchetti to take over for Gilday, but her historic elevation–she would be the first woman to lead the Navy–is one of more than 300 being blocked by Tuberville, who is holding a one-man protest of Pentagon policy to pay for the travel expenses of military members or their family members who need to travel to obtain a safe abortion.

Asked bluntly, “Would entitlement cuts be on the table?” Republican Florida bobblehead Ron DeSantis responded in a less-than-direct way.

I think what it would be is, promise made, promise kept.  I-I think looking forward in terms of future generations, people of, of our generation, you gotta sit down, you gotta work on a bipartisan way with, with the other Party.  You cannot do this with one Party.  I mean, when Reagan sat with Tip O’Neill, they were able to preserve Social Security f-for many more decades, and so you gotta be able to sit down, work across the aisle and develop the solution for the long term.

It was a yes-or-no question.  DeSantis took 88 words to not answer it.

Elizbeth B. Prelogar, the Biden Administration’s Solicitor General (whose name you’re not likely to see on National Zero again because… solicitor general), wrote Chief Justice John Roberts urging the Supreme Court to take up two cases with conflicting lower court decisions regarding the ability of social media companies to remove or limit controversial content, the Washington Post reports.

The 5th Circuit issued a decision in September 2022 overturning a lower court decision that blocked the Texas government from regulating how social media platforms moderate user content after conservatives claimed the law was needed because the little crybabies got posts containing false, defamatory and threatening removed from Facebook and they whined about political censorship.  A decision by an 11th Circuit panel of three Republican-appointed judges, however, went the other way in May 2022, striking down a Florida law that regulated social media companies, finding that the companies are covered by the First Amendment to self-determine what content the site would host.

The Solicitor General asked the Court to take up the court to clarify the matter, particularly given the upcoming campaign and election:  a swift Supreme Court decision would solidify the positions of social media companies and allow them to set policies.  The letter from Prelogar notes the Administration urges the Court to take the 11th Circuit’s position allowing social media companies to determine their own moderation policies.

Special Counsel Jack Smith filed his response to Donald Trump’s request to have a SCIF installed at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s members-only geriatric supper club and flop house.  While Smith defers to the CISO–chief information security officer–to determine what location would be best, Smith notes there are many reasons to ban Trump from putting the SCIF where he wants to:

In making this request for the creation of a secure location for his personal use, Trump continues to seek special treatment that no other criminal defendant would receive. In essence, he is asking to be the only defendant ever in a case involving classified information (at least to the Government’s knowledge) who would be able to discuss classified information in a private residence. And of course, The Mar-a-Lago Club is even less suited than most residences to host a secure location, because it is a social club. In addition to Trump’s residence and office, The Mar-a-Lago Club contains more than 25 guest rooms, two ballrooms, a spa, a gift store, exercise facilities, office space, and an outdoor pool and patio. See ECF No. 85 at 5. As of January 2021, The Mar-a-Lago Club had hundreds of members and was staffed by more than 150 full-time, part-time, and temporary employees.