Orcas attack boat off the coast of Portugal for 30 minutes, sailor sets off emergency alert https://t.co/CxRRKcggjF

— Fox News (@FoxNews) August 10, 2023

Remember the good ol’ days when Hunter Biden had a plea agreement with the US Attorney in Delaware where he was going to plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors, pay all past due monies and then join a diversion program to wipe a gun charge off his record?  Y’know, before all that went into the shitter?  Well, turns out that last part of the plea deal might not be needed at all because the conservative Fifth Circuit voided 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3), the law that bans anyone in possession of, addicted to or using a federally controlled substance from possessing a gun, the Washington Examiner reports.

Turns out, the famously conservative judges in the Texas-dominated circuit want Hunter Biden to be a free man, because they decided the law Hunter would’ve pleaded to violated the Second Amendment because–to summarize–it’s illegal to bar a sober person from possessing a gun, regardless of their past (or future) substance use/abuse.  You can argue the constitutionality of the law and the Fifth’s decision, but you can’t argue with the Judicial Branch now joining the Soros-funded plot to ensure Hunter Biden not only skates on the charges, but ultimately becomes the host of a re-booted Celebrity Apprentice.

“And the whole think, I think, was a laugh and a wink and a, trying to make a mockery of the fact that– remember Dan Goldman said that the only thing that Joe Biden talked about with Hunter Biden and all his business partners was the weather and so I think this is a secret signal to all of the business partners that we’re gonna stick with the story about the weather and if you get asked anything about it, if you get hauled before a committee in Congress, just say we talked about the weather.”

Charlie Hurt, a poor man’s Bradley Whitford, isn’t just spreading new conspiracies about how Joe Biden secretly communicates with his gang; he’s also denigrating the Weather Channel, a competitor to the new venture of his parent propaganda network, Fox Weather, which minimizes climate change in its reporting. … ’cause, y’know, when you want to learn about the weather, you don’t want to hear about climate change, lib.

Asked at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire if he would retain decorum when dealing with Donald Trump’s rudeness, former GOP New Jersey governor and man who used traffic as torture Chris Christie quickly. responded, “No,” going on to explain Republicans tried that tactic once and it didn’t work.

“Let me tell you why. Because we tried that with him in 2016, all of us ignored his insults,” Christie continued, USA Today reports. “We said, ‘We’re not gonna respond to that, we’re gonna go high and talk about other things and just let him do what he’s gonna do.’”  Christie added the candidates will “have to fight him on the truth. … When he lies, we need to fight him. Because to ignore him is to assent to his lies.”

A candidate running on an anti-corruption platform in the Ecuadorian presidential election was assassinated when a gunman reportedly approached the vehicle Fernando Villavicencio had just entered after a campaign event and opened fire, CNN reports.

Villavicencio had campaigned against the “political mafia” and said Ecuador had become a “narco state.”  President Guillermo Lasso has called an emergency Cabinet meeting to decide how to proceed with the election, the first round of voting for which is scheduled for August 20th, ten days away.

Trump’s Wednesday interview with Fox reject Eric Bolling was more of the same: whining, lies, more whining, more lies. And with a sprinkle of defamation against the prosecutors pursuing justice relating to Trump’s efforts to subvert democracy.

Ron DeSantis’s hand-picked choice to poorly educate the children of Florida, the state’s Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr., has pulled out of a public appearance in a predominantly Black community in Miami-Dade County where he was going to expound on the state’s newly rewritten history of African-Americans, who now learn that their ancestors benefited from generations of slavery to primarily white masters.

According to the Miami Herald, more than 1,000 people has signed up to attend the town hall with Diaz in Miami Gardens on Thursday.  Now, nope:  on Wednesday, Diaz announced he would not participate. “The governor and commissioner are bold enough to put forth these policies but not bold enough to face these people,” Democratic State Sen. Shevrin Jones, a co-organizer of the event, said.

President Joe Biden signed an executive order Wednesday banning US investment in some sectors of the Chinese semiconductor and artificial intelligence industries and restricting it in others, Reuters reports.  The action is made in an effort to prevent American investment in Chinese efforts to improve military technology.

The order bans or restricts investment in Chinese companies operating in semiconductors and microelectronics, quantum information technologies, and certain artificial intelligence systems.  The Treasury Department has a proposal available for public comment, and it will oversee enforcement of the order.

The Chinese tech sector was once a target for US venture capitalists, who invested more than $30 billion in Chinese-backed start-ups in 2021, only to see that amount drop to $9 billion last year.

Republican GOP hopeful and candidate hoping the Base doesn’t target people with androgynous names next Nikki Haley became the first Republican of note, either officeholder or not, to castigate Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville for the latter’s Senatorial holds on scores of military officers’ promotions.

“For my husband who’s serving overseas, and for all those military men and women, the idea that this is what they’re looking back and seeing, and this is what they are dealing with on top of the stresses of keeping themselves safe and being away from their families, it’s wrong,” Haley said on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, according to ABC News.  “They’re, you know, dangling these promotions out there and using them as fodder.”

Tuberville has put a hold on flag and senior officers for a Pentagon announcement that it would reimburse members of the military and their families who have to travel to obtain a safe abortion where the procedure is legal; it’s the same policy for any medical procedure.  A self-declared pro-lifer, Tuberville’s protest has resulted in the first vacancy at the head of the Marines in a century and a vacancy at the chairmanship for the Joint Chief of Staff.

The Hawaiian community of Lahaina was described as “like a war zone” after wildfires swept through the community of 13,000 people on the northwest portion of Maui.  Six people were confirmed killed.  Some accounts told of residents jumping into the ocean to flee the fast-moving fire.  Hundreds of residents and tourists were sheltering at a local high school, while thousands more are seeking shelter at other locations around the island.

Besides each having religiously-led dictatorial regimes hellbent on demonizing people who don’t strictly conform to their specific interpretation of their scriptures, Iran and Florida have other things in common, like hellish temperatures.  With coastal waters hovering close to the 100ºF mark as happened at its North American counterpart, Iran is seeing the heat index in some areas reach 158ºF, nearing the calculated maximum for human tolerance.

According to the Washington Post, the spike in Iran’s coastal areas is largely due to sharp increases in temperatures in the Persian Gulf, which have been stuck in the 90ºF range for weeks, an unusually long time for such a streak.  Surface water temperatures, measured via satellites, reached 97.6ºF, the highest seen in the 20-year record.

German political pundits are abuzz with salacious gossip after it was revealed that the Berlin government has paid €55,000 (~$60,000) for hairstyling and make-up for former Chancellor Angela Merkel since she left office in 2021, Politico reports.  Merkel gets reimbursed for such costs because she is frequently called on to attend events in her official capacity as the former leader of the European leader.

By comparison, recent FEC filings show Donald Trump’s publicly funded attempt to stay out of prison is spending $600 per day for a hairstylist for Melania Trump, who makes no official appearances and does not participate in events in her role as a candidate’s wife, a defendants’s spouse or as a former third First Lady.  That’s $108,000 in the first six months of the year.  The cost was written off as “strategy consulting” by the campaign that is struggling with less than $6 million cash in its coffers.

Hey, no sympathy here for Craig Roberton, the Utah man killed by FBI agents who wanted to question him about threats against the President of the United States Robertson made online prior to Joe Biden’s trip to the state.

Robertson was questioned previously by law enforcement about posts he made on Facebook, including one that read, “In my dream I see Joe Biden’s body in a dark corner of a DC garage with his head severed and lying in a huge pool of blood.  Hoorah!!!”  In September, he posted, “The time is right for a presidential assassination or two. First Joe then Kamala!!!”  Y’know:  free speech.

After the initial FBI interview harassment, Robertson posted, “Hey, FBI, you still monitoring my social media? Checking so I can be sure to have a loaded gun handy in case you drop by again.” On Monday, Robertson posted that he heard Biden was coming to Utah, saying it was time to “clean the dust off the m24 sniper rifle.”

Well, the FBI did drop by again after Robertson continued to make escalating threats against Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and others.  And Robertson did apparently have a loaded gun handy.  He did just what the Republicans have been telling their followers to do:  fight the FBI.  Fight law enforcement.  They’re coming for your rights.  They are the enemy.  It did not end well for him, as it won’t for others who follow similar beliefs. 

A 22-page statement by a whistleblower within the FBI to the Senate Judiciary Committee alleges that an agent’s supervisors instructed him to shut down his investigations into Rudy Giuliani and other Trump allies last year, Insider reports.  The account is tenuous and sketchy, but should be addressed solely because of the feeding frenzy of rightwing politicians to exaggerate events for political benefit.

Set aside the source, which sometimes features questionable reporting.  The story, as told, is that an 14-year FBI agent who specialized in Russian-language operations was told in 2022 to back off investigating Giuliani and Trump allies.  The report notes that the agent got “excellent” or “outstanding” reviews from 2010 to 2018 and that he was part of the team that supported the Mueller investigations.

However, the story also notes that the agent was told to back away from the investigations relating to Giuliani et al in a meeting regarding the agent’s performance.  Here’s where some Columbo-ing comes in:  he stopped getting superlative job reviews five years ago.  He was told not to work on politically- and historically-significant investigations, but he wasn’t told the investigations into those people were closed.  Sounds more like a disciplinary issue rather than political cover-up.  But who knows what Jim Jordan will make of this.

The GOP is a Party of projection.  Nearly two years ago to the day after being arrested for child sex trafficking, a major GOP donor federal prosecutors likened to notorious Donald Trump friend Jeffrey Epstein–not because of the money part but because of the pimping part–was sentenced to 21 years in prison for child sex trafficking charges.

Anton “Tony” Lazzaro would groom girls around 14- or 15-years-old with gifts, alcohol and money and then lure them into sexual relations.  One prosecutor likened Lazzaro’s operation to a sex “trafficking assembly line.”  In the sentencing, Judge Patrick Schiltz noted Lazzaro showed no remote and exhibited sympathy for only two people:  himself and Jeffrey Epstein.

Lazzaro was a major funder for GOP candidates in his home state of Minnesota as well as Republican candidates across the country.  His arrest and the subsequent disclosure led to the dismissal of the head of Minnesota’s Republican Party, who was a close friend and ally of Lazzaro.

It’s like putting a convicted pedophile in charge of a nursery school.  Or letting a drunk driver drive the bus.  Or denying meeting with Russians when your son admits to meeting with Kremlin representatives.  They’re just foolish and dangerous things.  So, too, is what Donald Trump’s lawyers just proposed to Judge Aileen Cannon, so that obviously doesn’t mean she’ll reject it.

See, Donald Trump–who’s indicted on forty federal charges relating to mishandling classified documents, including charges that he flouted standard practice regarding classified material by showing it to other unauthorized people and leaving the documents unsecured–has asked the court to allow him to construct a SCIF–a secured compartmentalized information facility–on his open-to-the-public supper club at Mar-a-Lago, claiming to facilitate the defense preparation in his case.

“President Trump respectfully requests that the Proposed CIPA Protective Order be modified to approve re-establishment of a secure facility in which President Trump was permitted previously to discuss (and review2 ) classified information during his term as President of the United States,” the request reads.  Because, sure, let a man who has admitted to possessing classified documents without authorization and has even bragged about it in recorded discussions, should be trusted this time.

A Utah man who had made threats against President Joe Biden and others was killed in a shootout with FBI agents when officials went to investigate the threats, ABC News reports. The unidentified man had been making threats online since April, but only recently had the FBI determined that he had elevated his threats to include comments about taking action on them.

FBI agents attempted to detain the man in the early morning hours at his Provo, Utah home, but he resisted leading to agents having to use fatal force.  Few details are available.

With his latest move to suspend Monique Worrell, the elected prosecutor for Florida’s 9th Circuit which encompasses Orange and Osceola Counties, Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, a man desperately trying to tread water in a failing presidential campaign, has removed two of the three Black prosecutors Florida voters put into office in the last election cycle.

Florida has 20 judicial districts.  After the last election, three state attorneys races were won by Black candidates, all Democrats:  Andrew Warren in the 13th Circuit, Monique Worrell in the 9th , and Harold F. Pryor in the 17th.  DeSantis removed Warren and replaced him with a white woman.  He replaced Worrell with Andrew Bain, a Black Federalist Society judge DeSantis appointed to the 9th Circuit in 2020 who was previously better known for his time on the Florida A&M football team.  Worrell, a liberal, won her position with two-thirds of the vote;  Bain, a conservative, has no public support.

In a leaked memo from the Republican-led House Oversight Committee, James Comer’s staff asserts that it doesn’t have to prove Joe Biden or any specific Biden family member were paid to attempt to influence foreign policy, relying simply on the specter of impropriety, not evidence of corruption, to provide a reason for impeachment.

“President Biden’s defenders purport a weak defense by asserting the Committee must show payments directly to the President to show corruption,” the memo states.  “This is a hollow claim no other American would be afforded if their family members accepted foreign payments or bribes. Indeed, the law recognizes payments to family members to corruptly influence others can constitute a bribe.”

Without noting that the GOP is led by a man who has 20-foot gold letters spelling out his name adorning buildings he manages and who put his name on everything from a defunct bottled tap water product to a bankrupt airline, the memo also notes that Hunter Biden was pushing “the [Biden] brand” to make money.  It also claims that simply because “millions of dollars have come into the Biden family’s bank accounts from foreign sources,” corruption must be implied without noting that Donald Trump, while president, collected hundreds of thousands of dollars from China personally and had a previously undisclosed bank account in the Asia nation.