Orange County Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Ferguson texted his staff on August 3rd telling his staff that he would miss the next day of work because he had just shot his wife, USA Today reports.  “I just lost it. I just shot my wife. I won’t be in tomorrow. I will be in custody. I’m so sorry,” Ferguson texted his staff, according to documents presented in his arraignment Friday.

Freed on $1 million bail, court officers are looking for additional public safety guarantees after officers found 47 firearms and more than 20,000 rounds of ammunition in his Anaheim home.  All the guns were properly registered–including the gun that Ferguson used to shoot his wife in a drunken rage–but one gun registered to Ferguson was missing.

Ferguson shot his wife after he pantimimed shooting her using his fingers and she reported said something like, “Why don’t you point a real gun at me?” to her drunken husband.  He pulled a gun from an ankle holster and shot her, killing her.

The Arkansas Department of Education on Friday sent notice to the public school districts in the state that are offering AP African American Studies courses that the state will no longer pay for students to take the course, former Chicago Tribune editor Mark Jacob reports, adding that the state will continue to fund the European History course (because Europeans are white, duh).

A Florida Democrat who lost his House seat after a Republican-gerrymandered map erased his Congressional district could return to Washington under an agreement between a voting rights group led by former Attorney General Eric Holder and the state, Politico reports.

The gerrymandered map led to the GOP picking up four House seats, but it was widely viewed as being unconstitutional due to the way it intentionally reduced the political power of specific groups like Democrats and minorities in Florida.  One of those newly-unrecognizable districts was Al Lawson’s 5th Congressional seat.

The agreement between the National Redistricting Foundation and the state of Florida acknowledges that “none of the enacted districts in North Florida are districts in which Black voters have the ability to elect their preferred candidates.”  Florida Governor Ron DeSantis justified the radical Congressional map in 2021 by claiming racism, saying the districts were previously drawn to benefit people based on their race. 

Far-right antigovernment terrorist Ammon Bundy was arrested Friday night on an outstanding warrant while he attended his son’s football fundraising banquet in Idaho, the Daily Beast reports.  The warrant was filed after Bundy ignored a number of court summons to appear as part of a defamation suit Bundy lost by default, with the jury awarding St. Luke’s Hospital in Boise more than $52 million.

Bundy was arrested by Gem County deputies for the warrant, issued by neighboring Ada and held on $10,000 bond.  While he was being processed at the Gem County jail, a group of protestors, numbering barely in the double digits, protested outside demanded he be freed.  He was, eventually, when he made bail.

Damar Hamlin, the professional football player who collapsed on the field in January after his heart stopped when he was hit in the chest during a tackle, returned to the football field wearing #3 Saturday for a preseason game pitting his Buffalo Bills against the Indianapolis Colts.  Hamlin saw the field during the match up, including making a fourth down stop in the first quarter.

I've just received a call from District Attoney Fani Willis' office. I have been asked to come to court Tuesday for testimony before the grand jury.

— George Chidi (@neonflag) August 12, 2023

A Fulton County, Georgia grand jury will begin hearing evidence next week from District Attorney Fani Willis regarding efforts led by then-President Donald Trump and others to undermine Georgia voters’ choices in the 2020 presidential election, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

Willis is expected to start presenting evidence on Monday.  Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan and independent journalist George Chidi have confirmed that they’ve been given notice to appear before the grand jury on Tuesday; Chidi entered a meeting at the Georgia capitol on December 14th, 2020 where the fake Republican electors gathered to sign their forged document.  Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told a local news outlet he had not yet heard from the Fulton County DA recently.

“So when other candidates came here, they had, like, six people,” indicted felon still in the GOP nomination race Donald Trump tells a crowd of cultists at a fair in Iowa in his typical lying dick-measuring contest.  “We have, like, thousands.  [garbled] … stopped at three different places.  We’ve, uh, never been treated so well.  You know we got Iowa–you know this–[something] from China.  Twenty-eight billion.  Nobody else got you ten cents.”

The reality of Trump’s claim is, obviously, dubious.  What he may be discussing is the agricultural aid funds his administration had to spend to bailout farmers who were adversely impacted by Trump’s own trade wars.  His first bailout was a $12 billion handout in July 2018; it was followed up with an additional $16 billion in May 2019.

Alabama’s GOP coach in the Senate Tommy Tuberville has surpassed 300 flag and senior US military officers whose promotions he’s blocking in a protest of the Pentagon policy of paying for travel expenses of members of the military and their families who need to travel to get a safe abortion.  According to the Washington Post–which created a great graphic to illustrate the backlog here–Tuberville is currently blocking promotions to fill key Pentagon positions, not including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Commandant of the Marines, and the chief of staff of the Army.

Coach Tuberville–who refuses to instruct his staff to call him by his proper title, Senator–is upset that the military policy on travel reimbursements for health care covers abortion, and he’s willing to jeopardize US military readiness and national security while he stomps his feet.  The policy Tuberville wants eliminated ensures US military receive premium healthcare when they are assigned to underdeveloped nations, religious autocracies or primitive states where regimes ban accepted medical practices because of local oppression, like the Middle East, communist countries, and Alabama.

A groomer in the Marine Corps who hid a 14-year-old runaway girl in his barracks at Camp Pendleton for more than two weeks has been charged with sexual assault of a minor and violating liberty restriction from a prior unrelated case, NBC News reports.

The unnamed Marine was arrested June 28th after the also-unnamed teenager was found in his barracks.  The girl had been reported missing by her custodial grandmother who lives in San Diego County on June 13th, four days after she reportedly ran away.

A three-year-old migrant girl who showed signs of distress during a Greg Abbott-demanded bus journey from Texas to Chicago died during a GOP-sponsored publicity stunt where the Texas Republican governor ships migrants to cities around the country to “own the libs,” the Texas Tribune reports.

The child was with family members, who advised the bus driver of the child’s difficulties.  The bus pulled over and waited for an ambulance as it neared Chicago, but the child died before the ambulance could reach a hospital.  A spokesman for the Texas Division of Emergency Management, which is producing Abbott’s political stunt, shunned all blame, saying the migrants were screened by federal immigration officials before boarding the bus–Texas officials claim voluntarily because they signed a waiver, but many migrants don’t speak or read English, so the claim that they understood where they were going is dubious–and that the bus was stocked with food and water.

Deranged substance abuser MAGA Congressman Ronny Jackson threatened to assault a state trooper as he was briefly detained during an altercation late last month outside of a rodeo show where he attempted to intervene in some sort of medical emergency, the Texas Tribune reports.

“I’m going to beat that mother fuckers’ ass!” Jackson screamed while pointing at a Texas Department of Public Safety Trooper as a Carson County Sheriff’s deputy pushed Jackson back from the crowd as a teenage girl had a seizure. Jackson was cuffed and led away from the scene, after which he demanded that Carson County Sheriff Tam Terry call him. Terry did, only to be warned that Jackson would “bury [Terry] in the next election,” if he didn’t fire the deputies involved.

“Congressman Jackson was not drinking and was prevented from giving medical care in a potentially life-threatening situation due to overly aggressive and incompetent actions by the local authorities present at the time of the incident,” said a Jackson spokeswoman in a statement, who had to start it off by emphasizing that the notoriously intemperate Republican was not drinking at the time.

Weiss appointment as Hunter Biden special counsel violates DOJ regulations, experts warn | Just The News https://t.co/YWNjr8cd2c

— John Solomon (@jsolomonReports) August 12, 2023

Continuing the MAGA media universe’s meltdown over Delaware US Attorney David Weiss being appointed special counsel to sort out the Hunter Biden shitshow, disgraced former Hill opinion columnist John Solomon’s shitty website on Saturday printed the DOJ regulations for special counsels: “An individual named as Special Counsel shall be a lawyer with a reputation for integrity and impartial decision making, and with appropriate experience to ensure both that the investigation will be conducted ably, expeditiously and thoroughly, and that investigative and prosecutorial decisions will be supported by an informed understanding of the criminal law and Department of Justice policies. The Special Counsel shall be selected from outside the United States Government.”

The last part was emphasized by Jeffrey Epstein pal Alan Dershowitz in the “expert” interview Solomon cites and he was very far from alone in bringing it up in the MAGA circlejerk. The problem – and there’s always a problem in these tantrums – is that no one on the right to our knowledge said the same about now former US Attorney for Connecticut and “Obamagate” investigator John Durham, who was appointed to special counsel for the same matter by Attorney General Bill Barr in October 2020 and continued to serve in both roles simultaneously until late February 2021. No sense in posing any obnoxious rhetorical questions asking why it’s only an issue now. We all know why.

This story from the Kansas Reflector is fucked up and complicated so we’ll try to lay it out chronologically: Reporters from the Marion County Record recently found themselves very much unceremoniously booted from an event for Republican Kansas Congressman Jake LaTurner by the owner of an unnamed restaurant where it was being held. The Record said as much in an article, naming the owner, Kari Newell, as having ordered her staff to show them the door. Shortly thereafter an anonymous source sent the Record evidence that Newell had been convicted of DWI and was still driving around without a license – something that could jeopardize her business’s liquor license.

Publisher Eric Meyer thought that it was kind of fishy given that Newell is in the midst of a contentious divorce and didn’t like the idea of being a pawn in a game between her and her soon-to-be-ex spouse, even though a search of public records indicated that the restauranteur did in fact have a DWI rap. “We thought we were being set up,” Meyer told the Reflector. They went to the police instead of reporting it and, since no good deed goes unpunished, Newell then complained to the Marion City Council, which then for some fucking reason turned into a search warrant being executed on both the Record’s office and Meyers home on Friday, with computers and phones seized in a criminal investigation of potential identity theft and unlawful use of a computer charges.

“It’s going to have a chilling effect on us even tackling issues [and] a chilling effect on people giving us information,” Meyer told the Reflector. It’s also a violation of federal law prohibiting searching and seizing materials from journalists, requiring subpoenas instead. So yeah what’s a bad day for the fourth estate is probably going to end up becoming a bad year for the piece of shit right wing judge who signed the warrant as well as the cops and sheriff’s deputies who executed it.

A new survey by Pew Research finds that 37 percent of Republican respondents say that efforts to advance racial equality for all Americans have gone “too far,” Yahoo News reports on a quantification of the endless squirming by MAGA losers over “diversity” being imposed on them by society at large.

Officials in Maui County, Hawaii updated the death toll of the devastating Thursday wildfire that destroyed the historic community of Lahaina on the island to 80, with many more still missing after the wind-driven flames consumed the former royal capital of Hawaii, the New York Times reports.

• DeSantis “resets” are becoming as frequent as Trump’s “Infrastructure Weeks” and just as meaningless.
• Everybody has the right to a fair trial, including the public.  Attempting to taint the jury pool and intimidate witnesses are serious crimes because they deny society an honest application of justice, not just the defendant and not just the victims.
• The world owes a big thank you to DJ Kool Herc.  The last half-century wouldn’t have been the same without you.
• I welcome Hunter’s Special Counsel.  Find the evidence of a crime and present it.  The Special Counsel statute requires a public report to be made at the end of it all.  This puts these sham hearings hosted by Republicans into focus:  they keep claiming they have damning evidence, and now they’ll be forced to release it or admit they have nothing.
  Read More ▶ “Random thoughts Friday, Volume CXXXIII”

A man who appeared on a 2020 episode of the game show “Family Feud”–answering the question “Name the worst mistake you made at your wedding,” with the response, “Saying I do”–was sentenced to life in prison Friday after being found guilty of murdering his wife, NBC News reports.  (His now-late wife did not appear in the episode.)

According to court documents, Timothy Bliefnick broke into the home of his estranged wife on February 23rd and shot her fourteen times, which the survey says is overkill.

Asked by human blobfish Eric Bolling if he saw signs of Joe Biden’s obvious corruption when they served together in the Senate, South Carolina’s spineless vertebrate Lindsey Graham claims he was completely gobsmacked:

To be honest with ya, he was a friend.  I traveled the world with him.  I knew him well. …didn’t know Hunter that well, knew Beau, his son who’s deceased was a fine fella.  All this stuff blows me away about what his brother did and about the Hunter Biden stuff, so no this is a side I didn’t know much about.

We don’t want to remind people about how a heartfelt Lindsey Graham fought back tears talking about what a good man Joe Biden is during the 2016 election.  (That’s the same period when Lindsey said if Republicans nominate Trump they get destroyed.)

As brushfires swept rapidly across Maui, the state emergency siren system did not blow, a failure of an alert system that left scores of people trapped as flames spread, NBC News reports.  Warnings were made via traditional radio and television alert systems as well as a text message system, although some cell phone signals may have been disrupted due to the fire damaging towers.  The sirens are the same ones used for tsunami warnings, alerting residents to check television, radio or online for emergency notifications.

Officials also announced that the official death toll has risen to 67, with authorities saying more fatalities are expected when teams can access areas cut off by the fire, which is still burning uncontrolled.