New York Democrats’ second shot at redrawing the state’s Congressional map is moving forward at the appellate level after they got fucked out of a “fair” map by the state’s top court in the lead up to 2022, with new effort expected to redraw the lines ahead of 2024, Politico reports.

When we put fair in scare quotes it’s to note that no, in a vacuum it’s not going to be fair at all and as many as four Republicans could end up losing their seats from a new redistricting process. But we’re not in a vacuum and it’s very much a fair response to the scams in pretty much every Red State – North Carolina in particular as its new conservative majority state Supreme Court is expected to squash at least three Democrat-held US House seats in an upcoming challenge.

“For all their pontificating and high-minded rhetoric about trying to defend democracy, well here they’re trying to subvert it,” said Republican former Congressman John Faso, whining like a bitch. “Their goal here, if they win, is to put this case back into the backrooms of Albany and DC so they can gerrymander the whole state.” Fuck him. Expecting Dems to disarm unilaterally in a Blue State while they do whatever the hell they want in Red States is the apex of MAGA hypocrisy.

A source tells Fox News political reporter Chad Pergram outright “to be clear, the document does not say Joe Biden received any payments.” Surely that will be the end of this shitshow, right?

Disgraced former President Trump’s lawyers on Thursday filed an appeal of last month’s verdict in writer EJ Carroll’s federal rape and defamation lawsuit in which the jury found the Orange Degenerate liable for sexual abuse, with Team Trump seeking either a new trial or a reduction in the $5 million in damages awarded to the plaintiff Trump still pretends he doesn’t know, CBS reports.

House Oversight Committee asshole James Comer tossed a layup to those who rightly mock his obsession with outlandish conspiracy theories and inability to find his “Biden bribery whistleblower” by confirming through a spokesman on Wednesday that his committee plans on holding a hearing on claims of the US military’s studies of retrieved alien spacecraft, ABC News reports.

“In addition to recent claims by a whistleblower, reports continue to surface regarding unidentified anomalous phenomena. The House Oversight Committee is following these UAP reports and is in the early stages of planning a hearing,” said majority spokesman Austin Hacker. It’s not clear if there are any plans to call in former Army officer David Charles Grusch, who went public with the claims of secondhand knowledge of such a program in a piece by the Dispatch on Monday.

Disgraced former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows might be in a shit ton of trouble concerning his own intentional theft of classified documents, independent investigative journalist Murray Waas reports in a new post based on previously unreported testimony from former top Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson to the House January 6th Select Committee.

Hutch “personally witnessed Meadows remove the papers from the White House and place them in the trunk of her car to take home,” Waas writes, with our emphasis added. Waas stresses that this removal is separate and apart from the investigation into the fat bastard taking documents down to Mar-a-Lago with him and connects it to his previous reporting about the files concerning the Russia investigation being given to John Solomon and Kash Patel before or on January 19th, 2021.

The post is messy, hard to follow, has more than a few spelling and punctuation errors (shit happens when you’re your own editor), and more than a little hard to distill here. Waas did manage to get John Solomon on the record though, who seemed thoroughly terrified when asked who provided him with a manila envelope filled with classified documents about the Steele Dossier.

Sources tell CNN a former career White House official who worked in both the Obama and Trump Administrations testified to the grand jury and detailed that the Orange God Emperor was fully aware of proper declassification procedures and followed it while he was still in office, further undermining the fat fuck’s so far contradictory public excuses for the crimes. It also indirectly corroborates last week’s reporting on that 2021 audio recording of Trump telling Mark Meadows’ ghostwriters he should’ve declassified that Iran war planning document his lawyers now can’t find.

It was this in fact unnamed official’s job to advise presidential administrations on declassification practice, making them probably the kind of person the prosecution will want to put on the stand at trial for both the background on secrecy and as a witness to Trump knowing full well he couldn’t declassify them with his mind or whatever bullshit they’re going to try to use in court.

Damn, they sure are taking the sting out of mocking them for the utter banality of their round-the-clock updates by self-satirizing like this. We get that these reporters might be bored, but they shouldn’t be cramping our style. It was all that and a bag of chips until they pulled this bullshit.

Yeah, that’s a headline alright. We’ll just start from the beginning on this one: On January 7th, 2021, the day after the Capitol riot and when fat then-President Trump had already (sort of) given up the ghost, total MAGA dipshit now-former Coffee County, Georgia Clerk Misty Hampton opened the doors of her office to right wing conspiracy theorists connected to Sidney “Kraken” Powell – among them businessman Scott Hall and fake Trump 2020 Georgia elector Cathy Latham – and let them take whatever they wanted from the server room, which you will not be shocked to learn was Dominion Voting software and likely voter data. On January 19th, 2021, just a day before Biden’s inauguration, more showed up, including none other than “Cyber Ninjas” asshole Doug Logan.

The next month Hampton resigned after coming under investigation for falsifying her timesheets. A few months later in May 2021, the new Coffee County clerk James Barnes found a business card from Logan underneath his keyboard and promptly emailed the Secretary of State’s office. By then the “Cyber Ninjas” were nationally known, particularly among elections administrators, for the ultimately failed “audit” of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, Arizona. The Secretary of State’s office opened an investigation, the first reports of which began surfacing in August 2022.

While all this was going on, Hampton had already found a contract position as election director in Treutlen County, 60 miles north. It didn’t go so well there either, WXIA reported this week.

In a 5-4 decision joined by Chief John Roberts and beer guy Brett Kavanaugh, the US Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the Voting Rights Act’s protection against racial gerrymanders, refusing to allow Alabama to create a new standard that would’ve been almost impossible to challenge district maps drawn along racial lines, Talking Points Memo reports on a surprise win for democracy.

Elections nerd Dave Wasserman writes the decision “could reverberate” to Louisiana, South Carolina, and Georgia, “forcing creation of 2-4 new Black majority districts and netting Dems 2-4 seats.”

Staked out at the federal courthouse in Miami where Justice Department Jack Smith’s new grand jury in the Mar-a-Lago classified docs clusterfuck has been convened, NBC News reporters on Thursday spotted veteran public corruption prosecutor David Harbach headed in to the room. The significance of this is otherwise unknown but they didn’t mention anyone else going in there.

Late Wednesday night after CNN’s Manu Raju first reported that House Oversight dipshit James Comer had backed off on his push to hold FBI Director Chris Wray in contempt for refusing to provide him with a copy of the FD-1023 “Biden bribery” document – even after both Comer and ranking Dem Jamie Raskin were shown the document in a SCIF – the Gateway Pundit and other right wing propaganda outlets spun the FBI’s agreement to allow all members of the Oversight committee, Republicans and Dems, as a “cave” which prompted Comer to end the contempt effort.

The first problem however is that earlier in the week, Comer had already drawn the line at either the FBI hands over the document or they move for contempt. “FBI again refused to hand over the unclassified record to the custody [of the committee],” Comer told reporters after he and Raskin had viewed the document on Monday, adding “and we will now initiate contempt of Congress hearings this Thursday.” Sticking to his guns, Comer went ahead and introduced the contempt resolution to the committee at around 12:30 PM EDT on Wednesday, teeing it up for a vote the next day.

Conservative Christian TV guy Pat Robertson died Thursday at age 93 after a lifetime of damage to American religion, the Associated Press reports. Robertson had founded the Family Channel, which became the Fox Family Channel, then the ABC Family Channel, then Freeform while still running his show “The 700 Club” the whole time. It’s not clear who still watches “The 700 Club.”

Ukrainian armed forces fully launched a furious counteroffensive against Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s occupiers late Wednesday night, the Washington Post reports citing pro-Kremlin military bloggers reporting heavy fighting in the southeastern Zaporizhzhia region with severing Russia’s land connection to Crimea being seen as a likely objective. Glory to Ukraine.

Utah Governor Spencer Cox on Wednesday asked state lawmakers to come back for a special session to set up a special election on November 21st to replace now-former Congressman Chris Stewart in the state’s 2nd District – while also pushing local elections back to the same date rather than the first Tuesday in November as they would normally been held, the Salt Lake Tribune reports.

It’s not clear why the hell Utah simply can’t hold the special election on the same date as regular elections given the lead time or, more pertinently, why they won’t try to fill the seat as soon as possible. Special US House elections are a scattershot process, but we would have to assume that a Republican governor would generally want to fill an empty seat in a red district quickly, going by Florida Gov Ron DeSantis’s cunty 2021 move to delay a special election to replace the late Dem Congressman Alcee Hastings by nine months. Then there’s Virginia Gov Glenn Youngkin doing the opposite after Richmond-area Dem Congressman Don McEachin died in late November 2022, setting the special election for February 21st, 2023, which also shows that it’s not that hard to slap one together in a reasonable timeframe. Utah Republicans ought to be pissed over this.

New age weirdo Democratic 2024 presidential primary longshot Marianne Williamson’s new campaign manager Roza Calderon, who has been on the job for less than three weeks after the last guy fucked off, unsurprisingly turns out to have a checkered past in Dem politics, and was accused of looting $1,900 from the Placer County, California Women Democrats in 2017, Politico reports.

The matter was the subject of a police report but, per the Williamson campaign, was settled quietly in the courts without further action and Calderon repaid the funds. “I’m hoping that Roza has learned lessons, and she has a professional accounting firm and has learned the rules,” said Placer County Dem Chairwoman Kathleen Crawford, almost definitely in a hilariously condescending tone.

“These on-going attacks on the Marianne Williamson campaign are again an effort to diminish the significance of her second run for President and now, the corporate media establishment is waging war on campaign staffers,” said the Williamson campaign. “We’re confident in the leadership abilities of Roza Calderon and happy to have her on board to lead this campaign to victory.”

Well this fucking sucks: The thick cloud of smoke from Canadian wildfires hanging over New York City and other parts of the Eastern United States will last until at least the end of Thursday, and possibly even through the weekend as the wind patterns stall, the AP reports.

Trump’s “truths” aren’t usually a part of the nighttime beat at National Zero, but given the events of the day–a “target letter,” his VP’s disastrous town hall in which he called both for Trump to be held accountable and for the Justice Department to drop charges so the US can remain the pillar of democracy internationally–tonight’s rant seems pertinent.  One curious aspect:  this “truth” was in two parts, posted more than a half-hour apart.  (And for the sake of reader’s sanity, it will not be published here in the native shouty CapsLock.)

[11:46 p.m. ET]  Shocking!  One of the top prosecutors at the Department of Injustice was reportedly so obsessed with “getting Trump” that he tried to bribe & intimidate a lawyer representing someone being targeted & harassed to falsely accuse & fabricate a story about President Donald J. Trump & a crime that doesn’t exist.  This criminal & salacious act from within the DOJ has brought shame & embarrassment to this once great & respected institution.  Because of this, there is now extreme turmoil inside the DOJ…. [12:20 a.m. ET] Page 2. A top overzealous & dishonest DOJ prosecutor offered a witness’ [sic] lawyer an important “judgeship” in the Biden Administration if his client “flips” on President Trump, who has done nothing wrong!  The highly respected lawyer was incensed & disgusted at this corrupt & illegal offer.  The fake “case” against me must be immediately dropped, and the Inspector General should launch an investigation into this & the many other all too obvious wrongdoings & crimes taking place at the DOJ & FBI.

If Donald Trump is to be believed (and he shouldn’t be), someone in the Biden Administration offered a lawyer for a Trump-aligned witness a federal judgeship, including a nomination from Democratic President Joe Biden, if he convinced his client to turn on Trump, because of course, this is exactly what Trump would do if he had any remaining power.  And no, there’s no evidence to back up his claim.

Violent pro-abortion activist James Comer on Wednesday pulled the plug on the effort to hold FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt of Congress for failing to comply with a subpoena for the legendary FD-1023 document alleging Joe Biden took a $5 million bribe from blah blah blah back in 2015 or whenever, CNN’s Manu Raju reports, adding Speaker Kevin McCarthy told Comer to back off after Wray offered to let the entire Oversight committee review the document.

Too bad Chris Licht isn’t still around to enjoy this must-see TV he cooked up for CNN audiences because boy Mike Pence is bringing down the house. The fly guy also refused to rule out pardoning Trump for his crimes in the extremely unlikely event he’s actually elected president.