After three days of silence, NASA scientists on Monday morning picked up a faint “heartbeat signal” from the Voyager 2 probe, traveling about 12 million miles from Earth, giving hope that astronomers will be able to reorient the craft to communicate with operators, the Associated Press reports.

A programming error tilted the antenna two percent more than intended, causing operators to fear that the new position of the antenna would make it impossible for the craft to receive signals from Earth.  After enlisting the assistance of NASA’s Deep Space Network of telescopes to listen for the craft, engineers will now flood the craft with radio signals, which take 18 hours to reach Voyager 2, to get the craft to reorient itself into a correct position.

Sheila Oliver, the Democratic Lt. Governor of New Jersey, has died of an undisclosed condition after being hospitalized Tuesday, a statement from the family released Wednesday confirmed.  She was 71.  The Associated Press reports Oliver was taken to the hospital Monday, with her staff saying she was seeking “medical care.”

Oliver was serving in the governor’s capacity as Democratic New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy is vacationing out of the country.  Until Murphy’s return, Democratic Senate President Nicholas Scutari will assume the duties of governor.

The day conservatives have long-feared has arrived:  the end of the incandescent light bulb in the United States.  Except not really.  According to CNN, the long-planned end of manufacturing most incandescent light bulbs in the United States takes effect Wednesday, the first day of August.

Originally proposed during the George W. Bush administration, the ban pushed consumers to adopt higher-efficiency, longer-lasting LED bulbs.  The new rule bans the manufacture of bulbs that produce less than 45 lumens per watt; LED bulbs typically produce 75 lumens per watt, while incandescent bulbs produce 15 lumens per watt.  When fully adopted, switching to LED bulbs will save consumers an estimated $3 billion per year in US versus using incandescent bulbs.

Sources tell Rolling Stone that disgraced former President Trump’s defense in any potential trial on charges over his failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election will center on an “advice of counsel” argument blaming dickhead lawyers John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani for the treason.

Evidently lost on the current Trump lawyers formulating this defense is that, even if it’s not the worst idea since Eastman and Rudy are indeed guilty as fuck and almost certainly going to end up getting disbarred for their bullshit anyway, that it probably won’t be enough to save Donald – and more importantly they might do well to avoid encouraging their deranged client to throw fellow members of their profession under the bus. They just might end up in the same spot sometime down the road.

The uninspiredly-named Super PAC supporting former Republican South Carolina Governor Nimrata “Nikki” Haley is planning a $13 million spend in early primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire starting this month as she gears up for an early campaign push, the New York Times reports.

Wallowing at around 3-4% in national polls, Haley stands in fifth place in most polls of Iowa and New Hampshire voters.  She’s yet to blaze a path with signature policy initiatives, something common among GOP candidates who concentrate on attacking Joe Biden, LGBTQ people, voting rights and the results of the 2016 election rather than promoting programs that would benefit voters.

“After talking with my family. I have decided to run for reelection in Wisconsin’s Seventh District. While Tammy Baldwin is vulnerable due to her record as a rubber stamp for President Biden, I can make the greatest impact continuing to serve the great people of Wisconsin in the House of Representatives. Let there be no doubt, I will continue to hold the Biden administration accountable for their fiscal recklessness, open border disaster, and the weaponization of the Justice Department against the American people. America and Wisconsin can do better than the current status quo. I look forward to working with our nominees for President and U.S. Senate to turn Wisconsin red in 2024,” says right wing Wisconsin Congressman Tom Tiffany in a statement.

The US continues to have a strong market for job seekers, with the Department of Labor showing 9.582 million jobs open across the country, or 1.6 openings for every worker, CNN reports.  The number of openings decreased slightly from the previous month and was effectively on-target for estimates.

Other factors listed:  job “quits”–people voluntarily leaving their jobs–dropped about 8% to 3.722 million, with new hires dropping about 5% to 5.91 million, and layoff dropped minimally.  Worker shortages are one of the factors driving inflation, as wages increase with employers recruiting new staff.

The grand jury that could soon end up handing down an indictment of fat former President Trump and his minions for their attempt at overturning his humiliating defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 election were spotted entering the DC federal courthouse by CNN’s Casey Gannon on Tuesday.

I have never called my dad & put him on speakerphone during a business meeting to talk about the weather. In fact, I’ve never called my dad during any business meeting in my life & had him talk to the people in the meeting. How about y’all?

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) July 31, 2023

Looking at the freakout after Hunter Biden’s former business partner Devon Archer told the House Oversight Committee that Hunter had called his dad Joe about 20 times during their meetings and put him on speaker about a decade ago it seems the fanboys really want it both ways: They love the part about the “20 times” but not the rest where Archer said that they talked about boring shit like the weather and not anything at all about business, much less taking bribes from foreign scumbags.

Does it need to be said that if they’re going to make the testimony of this Archer guy (a convicted felon who ripped off Native American tribes) the center of all their “Biden Crime Family” bullshit that they kind of need to take all of it as credible, not just the parts that they want to believe? We guess so considering this Clay Travis wiener’s ongoing meltdown over the outcome of the interview.

Tuesday’s edition of Politico Playbook points out two major problems for disgraced former President Trump with the amount his PAC has been pissing away on legal fees. The first is that the spikes in his fundraising on each indictment diminished from when he was charged in New York over the Stormy Daniels shitshow and when he was hit federally in Florida because of his theft and hoarding of classified government documents – down two thirds from the first hit in late March to the second in early June, which Playbook writes “His greatest fundraising asset – the ongoing state and federal prosecutions targeting him – may be losing potency” in scamming his fans for money.

Worse – actually far worse – is that what’s true now in the primary since Donald doesn’t need to spend much if anything to curb stomp DeSantis, Pence, and the other future has-beens in the GOP field will not be in the general against Biden who will have an absolute shit ton of money to spend on actual campaigning. Remember the Trump 2020 campaign was basically broke in the final September-October stretch because of former manager Brad Parscale’s terrible budgeting. Millions upon millions in TV ad buys in crucial swing states had to be canceled because of shortfalls. How much that sort of shit actually really mattered is unknown and maybe unknowable but being at a severe disadvantage in spending power versus an incumbent Biden certainly will not help in 2024.

A New York Times/Siena College survey finds President Bidens and fat former President Trump tied at 43 in the 2024 election, numbers that Times egghead Nate Cohn says actually isn’t at all indicative of strength for the twice-impeached loser in a rematch against his 2024 rival.

“Trump’s resilience is not necessarily an indication of his strength. In most respects, he appears to be a badly wounded general election candidate. Just 41 percent of registered voters say they have a favorable view of him, while a majority believe he committed serious federal crimes and say his conduct after the last election went so far that it threatened American democracy,” wrote Cohn.

State Department officials on Tuesday imposed new travel restrictions on Hungarian citizens after determining that as many as 1 million visitors from the fascist Central European state were not sufficiently verified over the last nine years, the AP reports. Dictator Viktor Orban’s regime opened the doors to naturalize any person claiming Hungarian ancestry with basically no verification process back in 2011, regardless of whether they even intended to live in the country or not. The scam was meant to give Orban’s Fidesz party an electoral edge… which obviously worked because the asshole’s still in power. The upshot was allowing all sorts of scumbags and criminals from neighboring countries an easy path to the US visa waiver program afforded to EU members.

“Sean, we must take care of our Americans first and foremost.  We didn’t ask for these people.  We don’t know where they’re coming from,” regular Fox guest Curtis Sliwa declares on Trump advisor Sean Hannity’s show, without Hannity stepping forward to end the racism on his show.  “We don’t know who’s paying for them to come here, and then once they reach the border, our non-profit agencies–Catholic Charities and others–ask them what city do they wanna go to.  They need to go back to where they came from because they serve no purpose here.  They have no negotiable skills.  It’s not gonna help America.  It’s gonna cost us money and destroy our cities.”

Much anticipated in the Monday dump of PAC disclosure forms was the one from Donald Trump’s Save America PAC.  Rob Pyers of California Target Book did a deep dive into the PAC’s filing and found some interesting tidbits, the least of which is the fact that the Save America PAC had $5.6 million on hand after distributing about $31 million to affiliates and spending $20 million on operating expenses.

One of those expenses seems a little excessive for someone who hasn’t set foot on the campaign trail this cycle:  $108,000 over the last six months for Herve Pierre Braillard, Melania Trump’s personal hair stylist, paid for “strategy consulting.”  That’s $18,000 per month.  $600 per day.  I’m sure their small-dollar donors can relate.

Asked by Newsmax’s Bill O’Reilly wannabe Greg Kelly if President Joe Biden should be impeached based on the evidence only Republicans believe exists, Congressman James Comer, chair of the oversight committee, continues to give underconfident answers to direct questions on if there’s any impeachable offense discovered in the various investigations the Republican House is holding:

Well, I know how I would vote, but again, that’s a decision for Speaker McCarthy but I’ll tell you this:  right before I came on the show, Speaker McCarthy called me and I gave him a rundown of what was said today and we talked about steps movin’ forward so… ah… y’know, stay tuned.

A gap in the timeline of drunken shitbrain Rudy Giuliani’s $320,000 “arrearage” to documents firm TrustPoint One that held up discovery in the federal defamation lawsuit brought by Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shae Moss has been filled in, as Politico’s Kyle Cheney has found that Trump’s “Save America PAC” likely paid the invoice for Rudy.

On May 1st, Giuliani told the court he couldn’t afford to have the firm search for documents sought in discovery because he owed them $320,000 before reversing on May 30th saying the “arrearage has been cured.” Cheney spotted a $340,047.43 payment to TrustPoint on May 26th from “SaveAmerica” in the Trump PAC’s midyear finance filing. Though it was among at least seven other payments to TrustPoint, it was by far the largest of the ones screenshotted by Cheney, with its amount and timing unlikely to be coincidental. The $20,000 difference is probably what TrustPoint was charging Rudy for another search of his documents after he paid what he’s already owed.

Or what Trump donors, really, paid to unfuck the deadbeat and soon-to-be-disbarred former NYC mayor’s situation in a case he’s all but guaranteed to lose and be hit with a massive judgment for defaming the two innocent women as part of his failed effort to overturn Trump’s humiliating loss in the 2020 election. But hey, send more to the Trump campaign and PAC. Give til it hurts.

A programming error tipped the dish of Voyager 2 an additional 2% out of line, cutting off communication between the Earth and the probe, and sending astronomers into a frenzy to try to capture a signal from the craft, the Guardian reports.

Traveling 12 billion miles away–the second most-distant human-made object in the universe–Voyager 2 currently flies in interstellar space.  A signal from Earth takes 18 hours to get to the probe, and to increase the opportunity to hear any signal, NASA engineers will use the massive Canberra antenna to bombard the calculated location of the probe with instructions to correct itself, hoping that one hits.

During an appearance Monday of Fox News host Sean Hannity’s program, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer said he was optimistic that his investigation would be able to prove that President Joe Biden accepted bribes from foreign entities, telling Hannity there was a “lot of smoke and where there’s smoke there’s fire” after a former business associate of the president’s troubled son Hunter Biden testified to the committee earlier in the day about their interactions.

We had to try to mainstream media that lede because even in the most charitable, anodyne, ESPN SportsCenter-fucking-vanilla way of describing this summation of where Comer is at right now still screams how pathetic and sad their situation is. Six months of failure after miserable failure to make any progress whatsoever and here he is expressing “hope” that he can make a case against Biden. Show us a MAGA hatter who didn’t just want to reach into the screen and throttle Comer to death with his bare hands after watching that. It would be embarrassing to all Americans if it wasn’t much more freaking funny to those of us rooting for Biden to prevail against these assclowns.

Fulton County (Georgia) District Attorney Fani Willis warned the county’s commissioners and other officials this weekend that they should “stay alert” over the coming month as she presents her case against already-indicted former president Donald Trump and his henchmen for attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.

CBS News reports Willis sent an email to commissioners advising that she received a number of threats and warnings, including an email with the subject line, “Fani Willis = Corrupt N*****.” The body of the email read, “You are going to fail, you Jim Crow Democrat whore.”  Willis said the email was fairly typical of the kind her officer is getting from the general public lately.

“I took an oath. No one other than the citizens of Fulton County put me in this seat. I have every intention of doing my job. Please make decisions that keep your staff safe,” Willis wrote.  In response to her email, the county’s solicitor general called the threat “reprehensible” and said his office will coordinate to “align us with other law enforcement partners within the county.”

After calling out colleague Ken Buck for having the common sense not to follow her down her fantastical rabbit hole, de facto House Minority Leader in her own head Marjorie Taylor Greene claims that the testimony of Devon Archer’s testimony was damning, even though other similarly conspiracy-minded Congressmen were less than enthused.

But I think after today, Eric, this had to move the needle.  Finding out, in fact, that Joe Biden lied had to move the needle.  Um, you remember, Richard Nixon was proven that he lied, that’s when Congress started to move towards impeachment before he resigned.  President Bill Clinton, it was proven that he lied and that’s when Congress started moving towards impeachment.  So today I think was a huge revelation that should push any Republican member that isn’t there yet that hey, it’s time to take that vote for impeachment inquiry.