The superseding indictment issued Thursday against disgraced former President Trump and his minions over the Mar-a-Lago classified documents shitshow specifically adds to the charges the unlawful retention of the now-infamous Iran war plan the fat bastard was caught on tape in July 2021 showing to dickhead former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ ghostwriters during an interview for Meadows’ lame memoir in which Trump complained about Joint Chiefs Chair General Mark Milley.

“At the time of this exchange, the writer, the publisher, and TRUMP’s two staff members did not have security clearances or any need-to-know any classified information about a plan of attack on Country A [Iran]. The document that TRUMP possessed and showed on July 21 2021, is charged as Count 32 in this Superseding Indictment,” Smith’s prosecutors wrote in the complaint. The addition of the Iran document raises questions of why it was left out of the first complaint against Trump even as the transcript of the audio of him showing it to the ghostwriters was included.

CNN first reported the existence of the Iran war plan document and the interview audio on May 31st, following up on June 2nd with sources telling them the file’s whereabouts were unknown and that Smith had issued a subpoena for its return in mid-March. That the document was not included in the first indictment just days later would have seemed to confirm that Smith’s team didn’t have it yet, which of course Trump and his fanboys seized on as proof that it never existed. Then as more details and then the actual audio of the exchange steadily leaked out they stuck to that, with Trump also for some fucking insane reason claiming it was “actually an exoneration” and even pretending to a Semafor reporter that he had been lying to the Meadows memoir ghostwriters and was trying to impress them while waving around newspaper articles or some bullshit.

“Merrick Garland, are you proud of this?  Christopher Wray, are you proud?  Mr. Higher Honor, James Comey signed three of the FISA warrants when none of the information you gave was verifiable, says ‘verified’ at the top of the warrant, are you proud tonight?  Under Garland’s disgraceful partisan leadership, the DOJ has now gone from bad to worse.  Any trust in the Department of Justice has now been shattered, and yet Merrick Garland, he seems to care less, doesn’t seem to care at all.”

Wait, I thought the fact that the lead prosecutors in neither the Hunter Biden nor the Special Counsel cases had to report to Merrick Garland was what the talking heads on Fox wanted?  Now they want Merrick Garland to meddle in investigations, in the way Trump would?

Republican Wisconsin Congressman Derrick Van Orden called a group of Senate pages resting in the Capitol Rotunda and taking photos of the dome “lazy shits” and ordered them to “get the fuck up” as he gave a tour late on Wednesday night, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.

Typically high school seniors, pages work for Senators and Congressmen delivering messages, handling errands, and acting as runners for the officials.  Pages frequently gather in the Rotunda when the Senate is in session, which it was last night in one of the final nights of the session, scheduled to end Friday.

Attempting to defend his profane outburst at teenagers, the former Navy SEAL harkened back to the sacrifice of soldiers during the Civil War.  “I would think that it’d be terribly disrespectful to lay on the grave of a soldier that died fighting for freedom,” Van Orden told the Journal Sentinel. “And I don’t know anybody that disagrees.” 

The Senate passed a defense funding bill Thursday night with an overwhelming 86-11 votes, setting up a fight with the House over its version of the bill, which includes anti-choice, pro-pollution and anti-LGBTQ provisions Democrats oppose, USA Today reports.

The bill authorizes $866 billion in spending for the Pentagon, along with a 5.2% pay increase for members of the military and civilian employees.  The Senate version of the bill maintains current Pentagon policy regarding abortion, the environment and LGBTQ service members.  It does take a couple bows to the far right in barring the Pentagon to require people list preferred pronouns in correspondence and freezes hiring for DEI training.

Legendarily uncourageous House Speaker Kevin McCarthy lived up to his billing last month as a tense confrontation between himself and Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell ended with Kev’s fighting words not being backed up by his actions, sources tell the Daily Beast belatedly.

On June 21st, just after the House GOP censured Congressman Adam Schiff for the “crime” of annoying their Orange God Emperor for far too many years, Swalwell needled McCarthy with “This is pathetic. You’re weak. You’re a weak man,” leaving the weak man fuming over the insult. The next day, as the House was readying to hear from Indian dictator Narendra Modi, McCarthy sought out Swalwell and warned him “If you ever say something like that to me again, I’m gonna kick the shit out of you,” according to a witness. “They were in each other’s faces. Basically nose-to-nose. And Swalwell said something like, ‘Are we really gonna do this?’” another House member told the Beast, escalating until McCarthy said “Call me a pussy again, and I’ll kick your ass.”

“You. Are. A. Pussy,” Swalwell then said, per witnesses. McCarthy then stepped aside and let Swalwell continue walking. “While Democrats may not love the particular insult – a gendered slur denoting that someone lacks courage – they are absolutely delighting in the exchange. They believe it’s indicative of McCarthy’s empty threats and ultimate weakness,” the Beast writes.

Fox News isn’t the national leader in right wing propaganda for nothing. They stay quick and sharp with the latest breaking whatabouting bad news for their audience’s most holy and beloved living god by with the legal travails of the left’s not-at-all equivalent figure Hunter Biden and baselessly speculating that Hunter’s troubles were the precipitating event less than an hour after the new charges dropped. If in their rush to be first Fox News blurs out some details such as the fact that it had been previously reported that Trump guy De Oliveira had already received a target letter two weeks ago or that Hunter Biden is actually trying to plead guilty to crimes he committed rather than going to trial like Trump and his two hapless sycophants, then that’s okay. They can just not correct it later and leave their audience in a state of hapless ignorance.

Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg has asked the judge overseeing the resurrected E. Jean Carroll defamation lawsuit against Donald Trump to allow Carroll’s lawyers to provide all the video and files relating to Trump’s deposition in the trial, Adam Klasfeld reports.

“[W]e believe the full transcript and the video recording of the deposition are relevant and material to our proceedings, The People of the State of New York vs. Donald J. Trump,” the letter states.

A superseding indictment has been issued in the Trump Mar-a-Lago documents case, filing two additional obstruction counts based on trying to delete security footage, with Carlos De Oliveira also being charged with lying to investigators.

De Oliveira is a maintenance worker at Mar-a-Lago.  CNN reports that De Oliveira told an employee at Mar-a-Lago that “the boss” wanted the security footage deleted, reiterating “the boss” wanted the server deleted and asking “What are we going to do?”

A 38-year-old Florida manatee named Hugh died at the Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium in Sarasota after a sexual encounter with his brother resulted in a six-inch tear in his colon, NBC News reports.  Staff at the aquarium observed the pair interacting playfully throughout the day, the pair apparently shared an intimate moment that led to the fatal wound.

Florida Republican Governor and self-promoting -phobe Ron DeSantis may have to try to ban manatees from Florida waters given the species’ wanton sexual habits that frequently involve homosexuality. and incest, the former of which is looked down upon in the Republican Party.

“They’re not too meticulous about who their partners are. They just have this kind of a sexual urge and then they’ll engage in activity with whomever seems to be in the area, and if that’s a female, great,” said Jenessa Gjeltema, an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis’ School of Veterinary Medicine.  “But if there are not enough females around or there are only males around, they may express that sexual behavior on whatever individual may be in the vicinity.”

When California Democratic Congressman Mike Garcia displays a tweet from Georgia’s self-promotion superstar Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Congresswoman objects and asks for the chair to enforce the “rules of decorum” during the committee meeting, at which the chair reads the rules. Curious about what he did wrong, Garcia presses for clarification, given that the objection came from a woman who displayed the alleged pornographic photo claiming to depict the son of the President–a photo which she did not authenticate and downloaded from the internet–during her own committee meeting, which was televised nationally.  Here’s the tweet Marge didn’t want you to see:

A hyperdramatic Florida Man wants a book from the PBS Arthur franchise removed from his local public schools because it includes a scene in which a character mentioned the children’s game “spin the bottle,” the Daily Beast reports.

Signed by Bruce Friedman, the head of an organization named No Left Turn in Education, a so-called “parents’ rights” group that supports an anti-science, pro-censorship agenda in schools, the complaint against “Arthur’s Birthday” reads in capital block letters:  “PROTECT CHILDREN!  IT IS NOT APPROPRIATE TO DISCUSS ‘SPIN THE BOTTLE’ WITH ELEMENTARY SCHOOL CHILDREN!” become checking a box that the book contains obscene material.  “SPIN THE BOTTLE NOT OKAY FOR K-5 KIDS!” he finishes.  Asked “what do you believe will be the result of a student using this material, “Friedman” wrote, “DAMAGED SOULS.”

The book is about reaching out and befriended people different than yourself.  As Arthur plans a birthday party, he invites the girls in his school to the event, which leads to this exchange between characters, which Friedman found objectionable:

“How about me?” asked Binky Barnes.

“You’re invited,” said Arthur, “and Francine, too.”

“Oh, boy,” said Francine, “we can play spin the bottle.”

That’s it.  That was the single reference to Spin the Bottle in the book.

Characteristic of the teenage mentality permeating his caucus, Speaker pro tem Kevin McCarthy gets snide with a reporter who questions him about his support for an impeachment investigation.

“Okay, let me first correct you.  Were you there when I said that?” McCarthy asks the reporter like he’s an adolescent boy trying to use Super Logic on a teacher.  “Okay, so yer– you’re claiming that I said we’re going to impeach the President.”  The reporter responds that McCarthy floated the idea, to which an indignant McCarthy snaps back, “I floated the idea of impeachment?  Okay, so you’re wrong.  So if you record, go back and watch.  I said ‘impeachment inquiry.’  There is a big difference.”

Here’s what Kev doesn’t want to admit:  at the end of said “inquiry,” articles of impeachment will be voted on because McCarthy has already promised the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene and her “little bitch” LB² Lauren Boebert vote on impeachment on the House floor.  How do we know this will happen?  Because if it wasn’t meant to lead to an impeachment, the investigation could have been pushed off onto a standing committee which already have investigatory powers, not one specifically about impeachment.

A newly-released study by the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research found that right-wing echo chambers on Facebook during the 2020 election cycle were inundated with misinformation and were far more insular than the closest liberal parallels, Forbes reports, adding to the isolation of conservatives who amplified the lies.

The study found that right-wing news outlets have far greater incidents of posts being labeled as false information by Meta’s third-party fact-checkers, with those stories rapidly circulating through the conservative Bubbles even after they were tagged as disinformation.  One study found that people who used chronological sorting of posts versus algorithm-selected sorting were exposed to more diverse posts, but it also found that it did not matter for people in the right-wing echosphere, who sought out information that reinforced their views.

MSNBC reports, per Politico’s Josh Gerstein, that a DC court officer told them that no grand jury indictments handed down Thursday, and they don’t expect to have any more issued through the day.  The timeframe does match up with the previous federal indictment of Trump, where his lawyers met with prosecutors from Jack Smith’s office three days prior to the public announcement of Donald Trump in the documents case.

It is possible, though unlikely, that indictments could have been voted on earlier today or even at a day prior to this, but have been held under seal.  The grand jury, however, is still meeting at 3 p.m. ET; they are scheduled to stop for the day at 4 p.m. ET.

The Supreme Court lifted a lower court injunction blocking further construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, Democratic West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin’s pork project, allowing work to continue on the project while legal battles proceed, CNN reports.  No reason was listed in the one-paragraph order.

The 300-mile pipeline would transport shale gas from West Virginia to processing sites in southern Virginia.  Approving the pipeline was a key concession to get Manchin’s vote to raise the debt ceiling in June.

In a surprisingly accurate and on-point assessment of Republican House performance art, Colorado GOP Congressman Ken Buck states on Fox that Speaker pro tem Kevin McCarthy is avoiding the difficult choices he promised he would make regarding the budget and spending cuts by touting an impeachment investigation promoted by the lunatic rightwing fringe of his caucus.

Speaker McCarthy has promised conservatives in the House a low appropriations number.  He’s promised President Biden a high appropriations number.  He’s doing everything he can to obfuscate, to avoid the real issues which are how do we deal with spending.  We have six different committees that are looking into President Biden and Hunter Biden at this point.  We don’t need to start floating the term ‘impeachment’ when we have such a serious investigation process going on right now.

.@NatResources passed my Western Water Accelerated Revenue Repayment Act.

My bill will generate millions of dollars for new water infrastructure and storage, decrease operating costs for water users, and cut bureaucratic red tape.

Wins all around!https://t.co/qOGk0OKbpW

— Rep. Lauren Boebert (@RepBoebert) July 27, 2023

Boebert is trying really hard to show her constituents that she’s doing more than social media posts and horrific behavior to justify her reelection campaign.  And to do that, she regularly touts her claimed legislative accomplishments in her social media feeds.  Here she touts “my Western Water Accelerated Revenue Repayment Act” that made it through committee.  But the substance of the “Act” leaves a lot to be desired:  it consists entirely of punctuation and grammar changes to the bill.

Responding to the beating death of 29-year-old Black man Tyre Nichols, who died three days after a brutal beating at the hands of Memphis Police officers on an anti-crime task force, the US Department of Justice has opened an investigation into sweeping accusations of civil rights violations throughout the police department, the Washington Post reports.

The investigation goes beyond the DOJ’s investigation into the incident that led to the death of Nichols, looking into accusations that system bias against Black and minority citizens led to unjustified use of physical force and violence against citizens.  “This federal civil rights investigation will examine whether police violated the Constitution or federal civil rights laws in a systemic way,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said at a news conference Thursday.

Hidden in the latest agenda for the board of trustees for New College in Florida–a once-innovative higher education institute that Republican Florida Governor and anti-tolerance activist Ron DeSantis is destroying by installing radical right-wing xenophobes to run–is a $2 million request for the “New College Freedom Institute,” an indoctrination effort to normalize hate speech and bigotry under the guise of “free speech.”

DeSantis’s proposal would hire “prominent figures in the free speech movement who have access to major media and are proven capable of delivering the Freedom Institute’s message” to groom audiences, both on campus and independent of the school, to accept the radical intolerance promoted by DeSantis and Republicans.

A Republican operative who was part of a group that illegally obtained and tampered with voting machines from four different Michigan counties says she was indicted by a Michigan special prosecutor for their efforts to support their false claims that the 2020 presidential election results were changed by some convoluted plot to change votes.  Stefanie Lambert’s claim that she was advised of the indictment has not been verified or confirmed by the Michigan Attorney General’s office.

“My attorney has been informed me that I have been indicted by DJ Hilson, the special prosecutor in Michigan, working at the request of [Michigan Attorney General] Dana Nessel,” Stefanie Lambert said Wednesday on a local conservative podcast. “I’m not losing any sleep over this.  I know that I’ve done absolutely nothing illegal. My clients have not done anything illegal.”