Far right fascist with shitty hair and Trump admirer Javier Milei on Sunday scored the highest share of votes in Argentina’s presidential primary election, a “political earthquake” all but certainly dooming the hyperinflation-wracked and deeply dysfunctional country to being led by a Bolsonaro-endorsed psychopath who openly supports selling children and organs, the BBC reports.

“We are the true opposition, we are the only ones who want a real change, because remember, a different Argentina is impossible with the same old people, with the same old people who have always failed, with the same old people who have been failing for 100 years,” said Milei, a former TV host campaigning on a promise to abolish the Ministry of Women and the Argentine peso.

Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s regime on Monday reached an important symbolic milestone in the quest to destroy their economy as the ruble is now worth less than one American penny, and trading at 101 to $1 on the foreign exchange markets, Financial Times reports, while spelling it “rouble.”

Marion County Record publisher Eric Meyer tells Axios that the police raid on the office of his paper and his home – the stress of which literally killed his 98 year-old mother – is headed to a federal judge soon as it was a clear violation of laws prohibiting search warrants on journalists.

“I believe when the rest of the story is available to the public, the judicial system that is being questioned will be vindicated,” said Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody, who sounds kind of scared.

Staying true to their brand of never letting a tragedy go to waste, the sick fucks of MAGA Nation over the past few days have begun “baking” a sinister agenda behind the horrific firestorm that killed at least 96 people and incinerated the historic town of Lahaina, Hawaii last week.

Their new fantasy? A mashup remix of the Jewish space lasers wiped out Paradise, California this time starring perennial QAnon villain Oprah Winfrey. “⚠️ Oprah Winfrey Has Been Buying Up Land in Maui Like Crazy ⚠️ 🚨 520-acre plot for $3.89 million (2023) 🚨 330 acres for $2.47 million (2023) 🚨 Two 10-acre swaths of land for $100,000 each (2022) IN THE LAST FEW YEARS SHE HAS GONE FROM ABOUT 100 ACRES OF LAND IN MAUI TO OVER 1000 ACRES! Then All of A Sudden Out of Nowhere A Fire Comes And Destroys Many Homes Near Her But Her Land Remains Untouched! SOUND FAMILIAR?!?!?!” tweeted conspiracy dickhead @MattWallace888 on Sunday.

“Let’s see if we can’t get ‘Directed Energy Weapon’ to TREND!!!” wrote @TPV_John with a meme of Oprah holding a laser gun and beams of fiery energy coming down from the sky on the scene of the fire saying “DON’T WANT TO SELL YOUR BEACHFRONT PROPERTY TO BLACKROCK? EVERYBODY GETS A DIRECT ENERGY WEAPON BLAST!” These people are fucking assholes.

Fat former President Trump went off Monday on DC federal Judge Tanya Chutkan, trying to portray her as “biased” by, in his words, posting her words as she was “angrily sentencing a J-6er in October of 2022. She obviously wants me behind bars. VERY BIASED & UNFAIR!”

The disgraced loser also shrieked about special counsel Jack Smith, writing “How dare lowlife prosecutor, Deranged Jack Smith, break into my former Twitter account without informing me and, indeed, trying to completely hide this atrocity from me. What could he possibly find out that is not already known. Just like the early morning raid of Mar-a-Lago! Why isn’t the DOJ raiding Crooked Joe Biden, the most CORRUPT (and Incompetent!) President in the history of the United States?”

Officials now say 93 people have been confirmed killed in the wildfire on Maui, making it the deadliest wildfire in the United States since 1918, CNN reports.  As of Sunday m0rning, only two of the victims who have been found in the wake of the fire spreading through the western side of the island have been identified, with officials saying identifications will take time, while also stressing more fatalities are expected.

Locals who have lost housing in the fire are pushing hotels across the island close to full occupancy as people scatter for shelter.  More than 2,200 structures were destroyed in the fire, with 80% of them estimated to be residential units.  Nearly 1,500 people are staying in public shelters.

Speaking at the Iowa State Fair on Sunday, Democratic presidential nomination longshot Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said he would support a federal ban on abortion after the 15th week of pregnancy, Politico reports.  “I believe a decision to abort a child should be up to the women during the first three months of life,” but also said: “Once a child is viable, outside the womb, I think then the state has an interest in protecting the child.”

Trump advisor Peter Navarro, a possible “Co-conspirator 6” in Donald Trump’s federal indictment in DC–doesn’t it suck for you when people have to specify which active indictment of yours they’re discussing?–will have his trial on two contempt of Congress charges start September 5th, the day after Labor Day, Judge Amit Mehta ruled.

“I think we can all agree Elon isn’t serious and it’s time to move on. I offered a real date. Dana White offered to make this a legit competition for charity,” the less obnoxious, more humanoid social media tech billionaire Mark Zuckerberg posted on Threads.  “Elon won’t confirm a date, then says he needs surgery, and now asks to do a practice round in my backyard instead. If Elon ever gets serious about a real date and official event, he knows how to reach me.  Otherwise, time to move on. I’m going to focus on competing with people who take the sport seriously.”

An app launched in July called Text with Jesus lets the user have text conversations with biblical figures including The Son of the Big Man–and I don’t mean Don Jr.–Himself, but the underlying power responding is far more earthly.

Per the Washington Post, Los Angeles-based Catloaf Software uses ChatGPT as the AI behind Jesus and other biblical figures, allowing people who proclaim their faith in Christ have their faith moved by a manmade for-profit scheme.

Company CEO Stéphane Peter, who developed the app himself, described how he manipulates the software to play God, saying the AI was told to study the Bible and other literature, plus text messaging styles and culture.  “We stir the AI and tell it: You are Jesus, or you are Moses, or whoever, and knowing what you already have in your database, you respond to the questions based on their characters.”

Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis paid near $50 per head to an influential Iowa Christian leader to organize a recent forum for GOP candidates in the state that attracted 2,000 voters, an usually large sum to pay to sponsor a forum in the key campaign state, Reuters reports.

Bob Vander Plaats, the leader of the Family Leader Foundation, not only defended the $95,000 collected by DeSantis and his PAC, he lamented that he wasn’t making enough off the forum, held July 14th. The cost to the campaign was “not even close to exorbitant [to the campaign]. … My only regret is that we probably should have charged more,” he said.

Iowa’s position as an important early Republican showcase gives so-called evangelicals an opportunity to bilk voters to spend money.  While the Family Leader Foundation extort money from campaigns, another group, Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition, makes money coming and going:  not only do they charge sponsors like candidates PACs up to $5,000 for favorable promotion, they also charge voters $75 per ticket to hear the candidates speak.

Maryland Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin notes that Democrats will soon release a report on the entire extent of the foreign money that went into the pockets of Trump family and/or administration officials during Trump’s term in the White House and in the ensuing years. Rasking says he’s been pushing Comer to stop with the partisan grandstanding regarding Hunter Biden and to broaden the scope of the issue, given that Trump has received an undisclosed amount directly from the Saudis for hosting gold tournaments at his sub-par clubs; Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner got $2 billion from the Saudi royal family months after leaving office; his wife, Ivanka, received dozens of Chinese trademarks while working in the office; and the Trump family netted tens of millions from property deals and hotel fees from foreign entities that were never disclosed (though Trump promised he would give all foreign-generated proceeds to the Treasury Department).

On a side note, it’s nice to see Raskin recovering from his fight against cancer.  Under his bandana, you can see the re-emergence of hair, an indicator his well on his way to coming back from the chemo and/or radiation he received.

Asked by Fox Corp’s gullible, deluded and dishonest host Maria Bartiromo about his thoughts on David Weiss, the newly-named Special Counsel in the Hunter Biden investigation whom Cruz voted to confirm in 2018, Texas Republican Senator–and the man who personified the adage “When the going gets tough, the tough get going” as he fled to Cancun while other did the hard work of fixing a powerless Texas–Ted Cruz responds:

CNN reports Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s office has obtained verified texts and emails from members of Donald Trump’s legal team linking them to a 2021 breach of voting machines in Coffee County, Georgia, an indication that the effort to overturn the 2020 election results reached beyond local efforts and possible proof that the fake electors scheme was directed from Trump and/or the close circle of advisers that surrounded him, supporting his effort to undermine the Constitution.

The report indicates the attempted breach was before an effort led by Sidney “The Kraken” Powell to alter voting results in the days after the January 6th Republican-led domestic terrorist attack on Congress, including a plan that led to Cathy Latham, then-chair of the Coffee County Republican Party, seen on security camera footage escorting Trump-allied “investigators” into county offices to examine the machines without supervision.

Derek Lyons, a White House aide during the Trump administration, testified before the House January 6th Committee that Trump’s transition disruption team met at the White House weeks before January 6th and discussed how to get their hands on Georgia voting machines.  While some people claimed Trump had the authority as president to seize the machines–he did not–Rudy Giuliani said the campaign would gain access to the information through different means; Lyons did not specify the means, but the committee later aired security cam footage of Latham greeting Trump-supporting election deniers into Coffee County offices.

“[The special counsel appointment] is just another reflection of the true independence of this Department of Justice.  A Trump-appointed US Attorney is investigating the President’s son,” New York Democrat Dan Goldman declares.  “That is pretty remarkable, and you don’t hear from the other side a respect for the fact that Joe Biden has stayed out of this investigation, and so I defer to Merrick Garland and David Weiss. If Hunter Biden has committed crimes, he should be charged with them.  I’m a Democrat saying that.  You don’t hear any currently elected Republicans saying that if Donald Trump committed crimes, he should be charged with them and held accountable.  And that’s a critical distinction that the public needs to understand.”

Goldman’s point is key to the current political situation:  No Democrat has protested either the investigation or the appointment of a special counsel to look into allegations of misdeeds by Hunter Biden.  There has been no Democratic politicians claiming “witch hunt” or persecution.  As the true Party of “law and order,” Democrats are allowing the Constitutional system of justice to play out, not demanding a termination of the investigation for fear of what it will find.

A long New York Times piece on the changes to the Republican presidential primary polling, fundraising, and right wing media landscapes while disgraced former President Trump was charged with a total of 78 felonies includes this gem of a quote from Florida MAGA cultist Mallory Butler:

“Any time you have a pack of dogs chasing you down and you’re willing to stand firm and fight, you’re going to get my vote. DeSantis doesn’t have a pack of dogs hunting him down, and that tells me that somebody’s probably backing him, or he’s in somebody’s pocket at this point. And Trump doesn’t have that,” said the woman who, again we must emphasize, lives in Florida and almost certainly voted for Ron DeSantis at least once, probably twice, and now thinks her state’s governor is “in somebody’s pocket” simply because he doesn’t face any criminal charges (at this point).

Another Trump fan told the Times something almost as stupid: “The indictments are honestly making my support even stronger. They’ve weaponized our entire government against people like us. Every time he gets indicted, it’s driving tens of thousands more of us to the polls,” said Kentuckian Sheri Hardy Candeni, offering no evidence of “tens of thousands” of new Trump voters being driven “to the polls” that haven’t even happened yet because the first primary election isn’t until early next year. Does she mean more of them are answering calls from pollsters or something? What the fuck?

A third, self-described “reluctant” Trump voter said he’s going out of his way to avoid the details of the charges. “The indictments have no impact on my support for Trump,” said Washington stater Sean Roh. “In the past I’d followed them in the news, but now I don’t care to read the details.”

Capitol insurrectionists in the justice system are excited that the guy who had two weeks to pardon them but didn’t is facing similar charges they do for attempting to overthrow American democracy on January 6, 2021, the Washington Post reports. “We’re like, if Trump comes in here, we’re gonna put him in 45 cell,” said rioter Shane Jenkins, convicted in March of Corruptly Obstructing an Official Proceeding of Congress – one of the same charges Donald faces – and still awaiting sentencing in the MAGA block of the DC Correctional Facility. “We definitely talk about Donald Trump. I don’t think they’ll ever put him in jail, per se. And if they do, I hope they would bring him here.”

“We would have a good time, and it would be awesome to get to meet Donald Trump,” Jenkins continued and Jesus freaking Christ lol this asshole really fucking thinks Trump would be happy to be incarcerated with the losers whose lives he destroyed by inciting them to attack the Capitol.

At least 93 people have been confirmed dead in the horrific inferno that struck the historic town of Lahaina, Hawaii last week, making it the deadliest wildfire in the US in more than a century, surpassing the 2018 Paradise, California blaze that killed 85, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reports.

As many as 1,500 people remain unaccounted for, but God willing the “missing” are simply scattered in shelters and what not rather than having been burned up in the conflagration.

Merrick Garland appointed David Weiss as special counsel because he knows Weiss will protect Hunter.

— Sen. Marsha Blackburn (@MarshaBlackburn) August 12, 2023