Disgraced attorney and excessive hair dye user Rudy Giuliani is reportedly traveling to Georgia Wednesday morning, telling CNN that he is going to “comply with the law.”  Earlier reports had Giuliani flying to Atlanta to meet personally with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to discuss terms of his bond release, with some speculation that Giuliani was eying a potential deal.

Former Georgia GOP chairman and state legislator David Shafer and former Coffee County GOP chair Cathy Latham checked into Fulton County’s Graybar Hotel very early Wednesday morning.  lawyer Ray Smith and Trump campaign attorney Kenneth Chesebro were shown on the jail docket to report Wednesday morning.

Democratic and Republican Senate leaders are looking into the potential of initiating a stopgap spending bill in their chamber to potentially head off the obstructionism in the GOP House caucus that has caused the United States to lose its credit rating, Roll Call reports.

Per the Constitution, all appropriations bills must originate in the House, but Senate leaders note that the rule only applies to bills to raise revenue, not direct spending.  The Senate can also attach an appropriate measure to an existing appropriations bill, but the House only passed one appropriate bit of legislation in the last session–a military construction bill for 2024–and Speaker pro tem Kevin McCarthy has not transmitted the bill to the Senate to prevent them from attaching a stopgap measure to it.  Senators could also resurrect a dormant bill, like the first debt limit increase bill passed by the House, as a zombie host for the measure.

The Senate eyes a move to prevent the intraparty gridlock that has characterized Republican control of the House since Newt Gingrich took the gavel during the Clinton Administration.  Senators worry that the continued mismanagement and effective leadership in the House will lead to a stopgap funding bill that contains so many fever-dream wishes of far-right nihilists that it would be impossible to consider.

Russian General Sergei Surovikin, the top commander for Russia’s forces in Ukraine has been at least figuratively defenestrated from his office, with “office” being used here as a synonym for “role,” though conceivably he could have been thrown from the window of his actual office as part of his termination – which could have a double meaning like he was both fired and killed.

The New York Times reported this minus the speculating that Surovikin had been literally killed by being thrown out of a window. They might’ve just shot him too. Anyway this isn’t terribly surprising given Surovikin’s reportedly close relationship with rogue mercenary commander Yevgeny Prigozhin and that Surovikin hadn’t been seen in public since the failed Wagner rebellion in June.

North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum is questionable for Wednesday night’s big GOP primary debate after being hospitalized with a pick-up basketball game injury on Tuesday, CNN’s Dana Bash reports.

In a new set of findings previously embargoed for release from the big NBC News/Des Moines Register survey of Iowa Republican voters, 54 percent of respondents said they wouldn’t vote for a candidate who would “aggressively criticize” fat former President Trump for getting indicted. Only 16 percent said the opposite while 29 percent said it wouldn’t matter for their support.

So yeah this is kind of over. It’s been over for a while but that a candidate would be penalized by the electorate for “aggressively” capitalizing on what’s supposed to be a liability for their leading opponent is like, seriously what the fuck, it’s hard to come up with a comparable situation because there’s simply so many one could imagine. It’s treating Trump’s self-inflicted legal issues almost like they’re some sort of off-limits personal or family tragedy when the reality is they’re by far the freshest argument as to why he shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the White House again.

Try to map say, Iowa Senator Joni Ernst’s failed marriage onto this. Think of how voters would react if a Dem or Republican primary opponent had used that as an argument as to why she was unfit for office. As shitty as Ernst is of a politician, voters would be absolutely correct to punish a challenger for weaponizing her abusive asshole ex-husband against her. That same sort of disgust they would have felt is what the majority of Iowa Republican voters are expressing now in this poll. How the fuck are Ron DeSantis and Tim Scott supposed to campaign around that? They can’t and won’t and that’s why, barring a very unlikely shake-up, this primary race is pretty much already over.

India’s Chandrayaan-3 is scheduled to touch down on the surface of the moon at 8:34 am EDT Wednesday, a feat that would make India the fourth nation on Earth to successfully have a functioning probe on the moon, following the Soviet Union, the United States and China. Not sure if Russia technically counts after the little mishap their much-hyped Luna-25 probe had last weekend.

“For the first time in three years, brave American Patriots will be able, in Court, to show how the Presidential Election of 2020 was RIGGED & STOLLEN. For those RINOS, Radical Left Democrats, Communists, Marxists, Fascists , & others who say, ‘Don’t Look Back, Look Forward,’ they either do not want to reveal the answers because they ‘got away with murder,’ or are FOOLS & COWARDS because we now know the answers to all of the Fraud, Irregularities, & Cheating, & WE CANNOT LET IT HAPPEN AGAIN!” wrote fat former President Trump in a really glass half full Truth Social post on Wednesday, just as Georgia GOP co-conspirator David Shafer put up a new “badge of honor”:

Good morning! #NewProfilePicture pic.twitter.com/EADF0zYSSH

— David Shafer (@DavidShafer) August 23, 2023

Definitely a contrast with the way other defendants John Eastman and Mark Meadows have been handling it, with the latter being told to stop crying over the charges and show up for his mugshot – or face an arrest warrant. Meadows isn’t being a very brave American patriot or “PROUDLY BEING ARRESTED TOMORROW AFTERNOON” like Trump wrote in an earlier post.

We can, and maybe even should just copy verbatim this article from August 6th titled “No word from Trump campaign yet on fundraising since indictment,” but not really feeling self-plagiarism right now.

There’s no real novel dimension to add to this besides the time and additional indictments elapsed since we last tried to check in on any public mention of how much disgraced former President Trump’s felony charges added to his campaign’s coffers – in contrast to the boasts about how much the first two big indictments supercharged the MAGA base’s willingness to set their money on fire.

The bottom line is that it’s been 22 days since he was hit with four federal counts in DC for his post-2020 election coup attempt, 13 days since two more superseding obstruction charges for trying to cover up his hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago dropped, and nine days since the Fulton County, Georgia grand jury slapped him with 13 different Georgia state felonies and there’s still no new Google or Twitter results in a search of “Trump campaign raises after indictment.”

Again, it’s not always what they are saying that can tell you how things are going. The silence from the MAGA Reich on how much money is coming in is growing louder and louder as more time passes. It doesn’t mean anything in the primary given Trump’s sense of entitlement being pretty well justified by his polling numbers, but that’s the primary. The general’s going to be a little different.

An Australian court this week ordered Murdoch Media Imperial Prince Lachlan I to pay $1.3 million AUD or $840,000 in legal fees to Australian website Crikey after Murdoch had pressed libel charges against owner Private Media over a piece which declared, correctly, “Trump is a confirmed unhinged traitor. And Murdoch is his unindicted co-conspirator,” the New York Times reports.

Murdoch’s complaint was dropped just two days after Fox and Dominion Voting Systems settled the massive US libel lawsuit for $787 million. In a statement, butthurt Murdoch lawyer John Churchill tried to spin Lachlan having dropped the complaint, saying they didn’t want to “facilitate a marketing campaign designed to attract subscribers and boost their profits.” Cool story bro.

Possibly reacting to the news that drunken shitbrain Rudy Giuliani is headed to Atlanta to meet with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis before he also presumably shows up to the local jailhouse for booking on the multi-count felony indictment against him, disgraced former President Trump on Tuesday announced he’ll be throwing a $100,000 a head “evening in support of America’s Mayor, Rudolph Giuliani” dinner at the Trump Bedminster golf club on September 7th.

While we’d always suspected that Rudy would continue to remain loyal to the fat bastard one way or another, that Trump, who himself is dealing with 91 felony counts in four separate jurisdictions on top of running a presidential campaign, would actually put the time and effort into such an event is actually fairly surprising and seems almost like a desperate, last-minute damage control effort to keep Mayor Wetbrain from flipping. It’s like after years of laughing at Giuliani’s desperate pleas for help, even just to get paid for the time he put in on the failed post-2020 election coup attempt, Trump suddenly was like “Oh fuck. Wait. Okay, maybe we should do something for Rudy,” and that rather than quietly just writing some checks he’s doing his own version of “Queen for a Day.”

Jeez. You’d think fascist MAGA lawyer John Eastman would smile a little if he wanted his mug shot on merch to fund his defense on with two counts of conspiracy to commit false statements and writings, conspiracy to commit the filing of false documents, two counts of conspiracy to commit forgery in the first-degree, conspiracy to commit the impersonation of a public officer, filing false documents, socilitation of the violation of oath of office by a public officer, and two counts of violating Georgia’s RICO law in Fulton County. All the Eastmaniacs out there would’ve loved to rock a defiant “fuck you” grin from their democracy-hating idol. Such a waste of good fan service potential.

Disgraced lawyer Rudy Giuliani is set to meet with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in Georgia on Wednesday, presumably to discuss bond provisions relating to 13 racketeering and other felony charges he faces, CNN reports.  Why Giuliani is flying down to personally discuss the terms is unknown, although he could just walk over to the jail once an agreement is reached.  And curiously, Giuliani is taking fellow felon Bernie Kerik with him.

“I just wanted to say how he was so present with so many, like one after one afte– hundr– he spoke with, like, hundreds of people and hugged them and kissed their cheek and heard what we all had to say, and there were really–,” one of the Maui residents who spoke with President Joe Biden during his visit to the devastated island said to a local news crew.  “Since this happened there haven’t been that many smiles in one place on this island and it was profoundly touching.”

Joe didn’t throw paper towels.  Joe didn’t joke with a homeowner about a boat laying in your backyard after a hurricane.  And he didn’t tell the survivors of wildfires to rake the forest.  It seems Joe knows how to relate to people.

Eight candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, all unindicted to date, hit the polling and fundraising requirements needed to qualify for the Fox cable propaganda network debate slated for Wednesday.  We’ll have live commentary here at National Zero for the 9 p.m. ET Wednesday, so make sure you know the players:

Doug Burgum: the Eugene Levy lookalike who currently serves as the governor of North Dakota.

Chris Christie: the Jersey giant will not hesitate to attack Trump, a different debater, or the Green Room cheese board.

Tennessee state troopers were called to the state Capitol in Nashville on Thursday to clear out the entire audience – among them parents of students at the nearby Covenant School – from a hearing of the state House’s K-12 Subcommittee as they considered and then advanced a bill allowing any member of the military or law enforcement, be they active or retired, or holders of an enhanced gun permit, to carry a pistol on school campuses and buses, the Tennesseean reports.

“This is an attack on our First Amendment rights,” said Nashville woman Allison Polidor through tears after she was forcibly dragged out of the room. “I’m here for my kids, everybody’s kids. The people are in there making oppressive laws, or lack of laws, and we’re here for our kids… When we’ve come to point where you can’t hold up a sign, that’s not okay. That’s not democracy.”

Governor Billy Lee had called for a special session of the state legislature to pass laws restricting the ability of mentally ill people to purchase guns after the late March massacre at the Covenant school claimed the lives of three students and three employees, instead they pass this stupid bullshit bill. For off-duty cops, okay. It’s probably unnecessary but it’s harmless to codify allowing them to carry at schools. Not knowing more about the “enhanced pistol permits,” we can’t make a call on it though likely the same. Active military however is just fucking stupid considering psychopaths like Nidal Hassan, Duke Webb, Jack Teixeira, and God knows how many others we could name here.

Donald Trump, the five-time indicted former president, will turn himself in at the Fulton County Jail on Thursday evening around prime time to maximum viewership of the event, the Guardian reports.  Instead of feeling ashamed of his indictment on racketeering charges for his attempt to disenfranchise the voters of Georgia, Trump will make the proceeding into a circus with himself in the center ring.

A witness who was represented by a lawyer also representing Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, two of Donald Trump’s co-defendants in his Mar-a-Lago documents criminal case, changed his grand jury testimony in the case after ditching the lawyer and getting independent counsel, new documents filed in the case reveal.

In a response to a Garcia hearing to alert defendants about their lawyer’s potential conflicts of interest, lawyers from the Special Counsel’s office note that a client, known in court filings as Trump Employee 4 and represented by Stanley Woodward, Jr. “recanted his prior false testimony” after consulting with an independent lawyer.

Trump Employee 4 has been identified independently as Yuscil Taveras, an IT worker at Mar-a-Lago who reportedly was asked to help delete recordings of people, presumably Nauta and De Oliveira, moving boxes of government documents around the facility after they had been subpoenaed for return to the National Archives.

Marjorie Taylor Greene may not have her “little bitch” Lauren Boebert to push around much longer if apparent voter sentiment holds in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District.  A new poll shows Democratic challenger Adam Frisch leading the Rifle misfire by a 50% to 48% margin, well within the margin of error in the Keating Research poll reported by USA Today.  In a 2022 race in a district widely seen as Safe-R, Boebert clawed out a 546-vote victory to secure her second term.

With more than 86% of the vote, the 340,000 UPS drivers who are members of the Teamsters union approved a five-year contract Tuesday, avoiding a strike that would have had ripples across the American economy, NBC News reports.

“This contract will improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of workers,” Teamsters President Sean O’Brien said in a statement Tuesday. “Teamsters have set a new standard and raised the bar for pay, benefits, and working conditions in the package delivery industry. This is the template for how workers should be paid and protected nationwide, and nonunion companies like Amazon better pay attention.”

Part-time workers will get $21 per hour starting wages, with rates increasing to at least $23 per hour over the course of the agreement.  Average top rate pay for drivers will increase to $49 per hour.

Is Trump trying to be Putin, or is Putin trying to be Trump?  It’s difficult to tell sometimes with the incessant lies and bravado to pamper their fragile egos and pump up their horrific legacies.  While the leaders of the other four BRICS nations were gathering in South Africa for a summit, Russian President Vladimir Putin told his underlings that the Russian economy is thriving, exceeding that of Germany.  In reality, it’s not.

According to state-owned Sputnik News, Putin told the national Council on Strategic Development and National Projects that Russia’s economy has filled the holes left by sanctions from foreign nations for Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine–although, of course, he phrased it to glorify the deeds of Russia. In the same vein, he noted that the use of Russian currency in its trade has increased but fails to mention the cause is the freeze on the use of foreign currency–specifically the dollar–by Russia.  Putin claimed that despite the sanctions, Russia had leapfrogged multiple nations to become the fifth-largest economy in the world, overtaking Germany.

In reality, the World Bank generously ranks Russia eighth on the list for national GDP; others rank it as low as fourteenth.  Just last week, the Russian central bank instituted an emergency rate hike after the ruble collapsed, and the nation is facing a loss of talent as young men flee the country to avoid be conscripted into the war.