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Yr Wonkette began our Tuesday with Tabs and with a gif of hungry hungry capybaras devouring a punkin’ as is only right and just.

The Justice Department is going after James Comey again, but couldn’t get a grand jury on board, so it’s Todd Blanche dialing Information.

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Barack Obama made a joke about Donald Trump’s White House looking like “Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory,” and the rightwing outrage factory sprang into action. You’d have thought Obama had asked for Dijon mustard while wearing a tan suit.

Democratic leaders are already planning to use their constitutional powers to rein in Donald Trump’s attempts to sic the Justice Department on his political enemies. It’s about way more than just Ilhan Omar and James Comey. And this time, they’re ready to investigate not just Trump, but all his little fascist helpers.

Donald Trump fails again, California Voter Suppression edition.

Military boards are ignoring Pete Hegseth’s directive to cashier transgender service members, and it’s beautiful.

That’s it for today; we’ll be back tomorrow with all the news and snark that’s fit to … transmit electronically via the internet.

A few months back there was a funny and wonderful story that illustrated just how fragile Pete Hegseth’s undeserved, unearned authority really is, and the degree to which everybody in power in the military understands that he is temporary.

CNN reported that Hegseth had recently boarded a naval ship and was furious to observe that nobody had been taking seriously the edicts handed down by He, The Secretary of Hairstyles. Lo and forsooth upon that ship he saw beardos and he saw weirdos. He saw an entire ship of people who heard all his prissy hairstyle regulations and promptly told them to pound sand. And why? Likely because the chain of command on that ship is more concerned about its men and women, and less concerned about the temper tantrums of the least qualified Defense secretary in American history, who they know is highly, incredibly temporary.

We were reminded of that story when we read this much more serious story in the New York Times that says that some military boards are flat-out ignoring Secretary Shitfaced and Donald Trump’s bigoted dumbass transgender bans.

The Times remind us that along with Hegseth’s “no beardos” and “no weirdos” proclamations, he has declared that the military would also have “no tr*nnies.” He set up boards to get rid of trans troops and everything. Alas:

The Pentagon had set up review boards at bases around the globe, manned by everyday uniformed service members with narrow orders that all but ensured that the trans troops appearing before them would be voted out.

But just steps from the auditorium where Mr. Hegseth spoke, at Marine Corps Base Quantico, boards assigned to carry out those orders were doing the opposite. Instead of firing trans Marines, the boards were voting to keep them.

The same was happening in the Navy: Boards given strict rules instructing them to force out sailors were rebelling and voting to let them stay.

You can’t “all but ensure” anything when they’ve already decided that the answer is Fuck Off, Secretary No Tab.

The Times makes clear that there have been 12 of these board votes with trans troops in the Navy and Marines. They voted to keep those troops nine times.

Now, to pour cold water on that good news, we should note that the boards for the Army and Air Force appear to be obeying Dear Leader and the belching red flag from Fox & Friends Weekend he chose to run the world’s most powerful military. The Times also notes that these decisions from these board are recommendations, not the final answer.

But it matters that the Navy and the Marines (which are technically part of the Navy) are telling him to eat shit.

“These boards are being told to do something that they know is wrong — to rubber-stamp a non-choice given to them by the administration,” said Rachel VanLandingham, a former Air Force lawyer and a professor at Southwestern Law School who has been tracking the cases. “We are seeing them say they’re not going to play that game. We are seeing them nullify a process they see as unjust.”

One of the Marines who had to go in front of one of these boards — and whom the board voted to keep — put it this way: “I was shocked at first, but when you come down to it, it makes sense. You have war fighters looking at war fighters. They see I’ve always done my job, I’ve deployed, I’ve mentored other Marines, followed the rules. They say, ‘Hey, this is a good Marine, why wouldn’t we retain him?’”

Those kinds of thought processes are way above the paygrade of the Christian Nationalist Secretary of Bigotry and Beard Maintenance.

The lawyer for many of these troops notes that there was a marked shift this summer in how these boards voted. She says the Army got started much earlier kicking out trans troops, back in February, that it’s held 50 boards, and voted to kick the servicemember out in 45 cases. The Air Force is six for six.

But then the Navy and Marines got started, and everything changed. One of her clients in the Army just won their case. She’s worried those in charge are going to notice.

Rachel VanLandingham, quoted above, suggests that “There’s been a chipping away at any kind of confidence that Hegseth actually cares about service members,” and adds that “I think that’s given the boards license.”

He’s temporary, they know he doesn’t know how to fight any war but a culture war, and perhaps they’ve heard that these MAGA losers are about to get their asses handed to them in the midterms, and that Pete Hegseth is the (hopefully!) new Democratic Congress’s first impeachment target.

About That Impeachment!

It was reported earlier this week that Democrats are raring to go on day one on Hegseth’s impeachment, we guess because you might as well start by kicking the weakest one while he’s down and work your way up from there. Reportedly current Pentagon officials are ready to “spill their guts” on what they know about him.

“There’s going to be a lot of people that are going to very quietly go to the chair of the armed [services] committee and are going to spill their guts, provide them with everything they can and leak everything they can,” said a well-connected source.

“It’ll be horrendous. It’ll be consistent embarrassment.”

“Hegseth has two huge problems,” said a former senior administration official. “Through his arrogance, he’s made many former allies willing to work with Democrats to hold his feet to the fire for all the damage he’s done to our military.”

That is what we like to hear, and it couldn’t be happening to a more deserving person.

Everybody hates him, and nobody who’s qualified to have an opinion thinks he deserves to be where he is.

He’s a bloodthirsty war criminal and an allegedly over-Botoxed dumbfuck with severe vanity and manhood issues. (No really, Zeteo reports he gets his Botox at the Defense Department’s Special Missions Auxiliary Clinic, which is a very manly way to go get your Botox constantly.) He’s driving the Pentagon into the ground; he’s lost the unnecessary Iran war in record time, but not without murdering over 100 little girls on the first day through his own vicious incompetence. He’s cleaned the Pentagon out of as many qualified people as he’s been able, because he’s a racist, sexist, homophobic holy warrior bigot whose sense of his own masculinity is threatened by non-white, non-straight, non-men who are clearly superior to him in every way.

And this is what he looks like doing pull-ups.

LOOK AT ALL THESE STORIES! YOU SHOULD RE-READ EVERY ONE!

It really is impossible to overstate how much Pete Hegseth has personally driven the military into the ground, with his humiliating testosterone crusades and his goddamned pathetic WARFIGHTER! shit and his firing of all the qualified people and replacing them with beardos and weirdos and goons like Newt Gingrich, Elon Musk, and Palmer Luckey. Also his new (acting) Army Secretary Adam Telle, whom Army staff is reportedly calling “Big Pussy,” because of how he’s never worn the uniform a day in his life.

Deus Ex Mommy Marsha Blackburn?

So it stands to reason that Pete would be angling to slide into another job he’s not qualified for, that of Tennessee Republican senator, so that he can hide from impeachment, hide from accountability, hide from having to force his true father Donald Trump into a position where he has to figuratively slap the shit out of his disappointing son in public like the story says Trump literally did with Don Jr. in college, by firing him.

Reports suggest that’s why Hegseth is all up Marsha Blackburn’s ass right now, following her around like a puppy dog to football games, hoping she’ll appoint him to her Senate seat if she wins the governorship next week. Secretary Shitfaced’s Pentagon spokespeople deny it, but they are brazen, pathological liars.

Is Marsha that stupid? OK, bad question. Is Marsha that politically stupid? And does Pete really think that would stop the humiliating revelations from coming out? Unclear. Obviously, Secretary Shitfaced becoming Senator Shitfaced would be awful for Tennessee, but we’re not sure it would be that much worse than Senator Marsha Blackburn becoming the governor. Plus, it would be fun to watch literally every Senate witness try to keep a straight face under “tough questioning” from Major Whiskeydick.

A new national poll commissioned by The Bulwark and Pablo Torre finds that only 28 percent of Americans think Hegseth is a good role model for men. In the 18-29 demo (you know, the age of young military recruits) that number slips to 18.

The only man who fared worse in the poll as a model of a strong American man was the guy whose balls Pete bathes every time he gets to sit next to Daddy in a Cabinet meeting.

Receiving top marks in that same poll? Barack Obama, who, when he’s not making Saddam Hussein at the Cheesecake Factory jokes about Donald Trump’s garish new money taste, is clowning on the loser Defense secretary.

Like so:

We’ll let that real man right there have the last word.

Best wishes to Pete or whatever, we’re sure it’ll all work out and he won’t end up in the Hague. Yet.

OPEN THREAD!

[New York Times / Telegraph]

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The encouraging news about democracy continues!

So this time around, this absolute dipshit of a lawsuit against my state, California, has been stayed on account of it not being based on anything but racist brainworms. On Monday, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declined to hear a challenge to our voting process.

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The three-judge panel ruled that it did not have jurisdiction over the DOJ’s request that the Ninth Circuit tell Judge David Carter that he better order California and LA County to segregate all the ballots — like 20,000 of them! — from “likely non-citizens” (not likely non-citizens). Here’s what the good old Los Angeles Times had to say about it:

In an unsigned order — joined by Judge Mark J. Bennett, one of the Trump appointees, and Judge Gabriel P. Sanchez, the Biden appointee — the court granted a request from Los Angeles County to dismiss the appeal, writing that the Trump administration “failed to allow the district court adequate opportunity to consider” its request for a temporary restraining order barring the ballots from being counted before filing its unusual appeal.

Those same two judges added that they had plenty of other grounds to deny it on though, too, so it’s not like they were just using that as an excuse.

Let’s see what that other Trump-appointed judge had to say. Surely he had a reasoned basis for not rejecting this appeal outright, given that there have been so many decades of similar attempts to nail “non-citizen voters” that have just ended up with right-wingers falling flat on their faces.

Judge Patrick J. Bumatay, the other Trump appointee, dissented — arguing the Trump administration was well within its legal rights to intervene, and the appellate court did have jurisdiction to grant its request and bar the state “from accepting and processing ballots likely cast by aliens until their citizenship could be verified.”

Oh.

“The question — does the federal government have the power to stop this potential attack on the integrity of our elections?” he added. “Under both federal law and the Constitution, the answer must be ‘yes.’”

Ooooookay, buddy. Sure.

Bumatay’s name rang a bell, so I looked him up, and oh yeah! He got nominated abruptly by the Trump administration under a cloud of controversy back in 2018. I can’t believe I remembered that!

“Instead of working with our office to identify consensus nominees for the Ninth Circuit, the White House continues to try to pack the courts with partisan judges who will blindly support the president’s agenda, instead of acting as an independent check on this administration,” said Kamala Harris’s spokeswoman Lily Adams at the time.

Welp! Anyway, it wasn’t enough this time around. The lawsuit stemmed from our California Secretary of State, Dr. Shirley Weber, not complying with a bullshit demand from the fully brainwormed federal government to set aside a bunch of ballots. Those assholes wanted to seize at least 20,000 of them, for uh, umm, Reasons!! But now the hearing will continue under Judge David Carter — today apparently! — and that guy is always hilariously mean to Trump.

PREVIOUSLY!

The New York Times calls this an “incremental setback” for the Trump administration, but what do they know? They aren’t here!

Meanwhile, Riverside County Sheriff-Coroner Chad Bianco is now begging for money to foot the bill for his own anti-democratic bullshit. This QAnon-brained Threeper motherfucker was trying to do the same type of election interference using debunked conspiracy theories, but with ballots from the 2025 redistricting election.

He ended up snatching up hundreds of thousands of ballots! Then our state AG smacked him the fuck down and the California Supreme Court quickly followed. Now he’s threatening to sue for damages, like the gigantic pissbaby he is.

Bianco maintains the investigation was legitimate and argues the county should cover the associated legal costs.

The Riverside County Board of Supervisors previously denied additional funding for the investigation earlier this year.

On social media yesterday, Supervisor Jose Medina pushed back against the sheriff’s request, writing, “Accountability begins with those entrusted to enforce our laws, and taxpayers should not be left paying the price when that authority is exceeded.”

Hahaha! I love it when rotten people fail and the voters win!

These little creeps aren’t just trying this “non-citizen voter” shit in California, though. They’re trying to instill doubt in the electoral process in Alaska, using all the Dan Sullivans who ran for office there as their excuse, but everybody already knows that you are legally required to change your name to Dan Sullivan in order to live in Alaska, so it isn’t going how they hoped there, either.

And now they’re running crying to Washington state to try the same thing, according to the Washington Post. It’s great how their numbers of “suspected illegal voters” keep dwindling as reality continues to intrude:

“We have identified over 400 non-citizens who are registered to vote and have voted in multiple elections,” acting U.S. attorney for the Western District of Washington Neil Floyd said in a news release, describing it as the “tip of the iceberg.”

Sure you have, sweetie. Sure you have. You’re not even a real US Attorney for the Western District of Washington!

At this rate, I think I am starting to feel a little hope for democracy, and I’m pretty sure the last time I felt hope it didn’t go super well for me, but I don’t remember, because I can’t remember the last time I felt that way. It’s this feeling of lightness, as though the world isn’t crushing me with every breath.

Probably just gas though.

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With just a week to go until Election Day, Donald Trump keeps giving us reasons to elect Democrats to the House and Senate. Like, beyond the high gas prices, the endless Culture War bullshit, or our insatiable elitist hatred of the Cheesecake Factory, valid those those motives are. If Democrats retake the majority in the House, which looks likely, they’ll be able to use powerful tools to block the authoritarian agenda at every step.

For one important example, as Greg Sargent reports at New Republic, House Democratic leaders are already making plans to use the power of the purse and Congress’s investigative powers to rein in Trump’s attempts to attack his political enemies. Trump can order the Justice Department to find some pretext for stripping Rep. Ilhan Omar of her citizenship, or to punish James Comey for breathing, but those orders won’t go too far if Democrats halt funding for those investigations and prosecutions. On top of that, Sargent says, House Dems are ready to “extensively deploy subpoena power against officials at many levels to expose the corrupt processes by which Trump orders underlings to carry out these directives.”

Notice that bit about “officials at many levels” too. Trump couldn’t get away with the fascist crap he’s pulled without an army of little fascists willing to do his bidding, and they all need to be dragged from their stinky little bunkers into the sunlight.

One thing Democrats appear to have learned from Trump’s first administration is that while impeaching the fucker may be satisfying (and now justified on even more grounds), it doesn’t accomplish anything when Senate Rs are perfectly happy to overlook a few high crimes and misdemeanors. With voters demanding an opposition that actually does something, Dems need to recognize that if they retake the House (and let’s hope the Senate), they can’t just write angry letters, they need to shut the fuckery down using the tools the Constitution provides them.

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Real Democracies Don’t Deport Political Enemies (We Would Support The Hell Out Of Deporting Elon Musk Though)

Stopping Trump’s racist vendetta against Ilhan Omar is vitally important, because if a president can order the Justice Department to gin up a prosecution to denaturalize and deport a sitting member of Congress, we’re all fucked. Neutralizing duly elected representatives of the people is some shithole-country Dictator shit in itself, but the implications go well beyond a vendetta against one member of Congress. (They’ve investigated Omar before, of course, and found nothing improper with her citizenship. Which simply won’t do!)

Trump makes no secret of his hatred for Somali Americans, and with his vile October 8 endorsement of race war — “The Somalians [sic] should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing. They view you as weak and stupid people. Fight back Minnesota, fight back!” — effectively declared an entire ethnic community enemies of the state.

As a Doktor of Rhetoric, we are by nature leery of slippery slope arguments. But Trump is enthusiastically preparing a very muddy hill that he’d like to push people down. He’s targeted Rep. Omar and the folks who elected her — not only Somali-Americans but also lots of white progressives in her district. At a rally in Michigan Sunday, Trump invited 9/11 family member David Beamer onstage to insist that Democratic Senate nominee Abdul el-Sayed may be a citizen, but is not an American. Beamer’s son Todd died aboard United Flight 93, and Trump told the crowd they must vote for Republican Mike Rogers because “Michigan needs to stand up and fight just like Todd did to stop a jihadist from walking into the Capitol.”

Yes, yes, he really did say “with votes.” This time. But Trump’s most fanatical supporters talk all the time about negating the First Amendment to bar Muslims from citizenship, insisting it’s not even a religion but a “totalitarian political movement” that’s fair game for persecution. They’re full of shit, but Trump is happy to encourage them to wallow in it.

How Democrats Can Fight This Foul Fuckery

Democratic Reps. Jamie Raskin (Maryland) and Pramila Jayapal (Washington) are already preparing to gum up Trump’s misuse of the DOJ. Raskin, who’ll chair the House Judiciary Committee if Dems win the majority, told Sargent that a Democratic House will coordinate with “our Appropriations Committee partners to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to cut off money that is being used for political harassment and persecution.” That can come in the form of limiting budgets for particular parts of the DOJ, and with language in funding bills prohibiting funding for politically motivated prosecutions. If that leads to Republicans shutting down the government rather than limit Trump’s vengeance program, that’s fine.

Democrats can also use their committees’ investigative powers to put Trump officials on the hot seat, in line with Sen. Elissa Slotkin’s call for holding midlevel political appointees responsible for helping Trump subvert the Constitution. Sargent notes that Dems could aggressively use their oversight powers to

subpoena all communications between Trump, the White House, DOJ, and the Department of Homeland Security about the targeting of Omar. Trump has claimed he didn’t personally direct DOJ’s decision to pursue Omar; internal communications might show otherwise.

Beyond that, and even if individual underlings refuse to cooperate (hello, contempt of Congress charges), Democrats could also hold hearings and subpoena documents and former Trump staffers to examine Trump’s first-term investigations of Omar and of Comey. Neither of those attempts resulted in charges, but a close look at emails between the White House and DOJ could help show patterns of corruption.

Raskin told Sargent that “Everybody involved from top to bottom will be subject to legislative investigation,” and that’s a welcome step.

That’s an important change from previous attempts to hold Trump accountable on his own: Dogged though Jack Smith’s investigations were, they focused almost solely on Trump, not his coconspirators. Dems shouldn’t let that old proverb about a fish rotting from the head down keep them from investigating all the rotten fish guts of the Trump administration.

[TNR / NBC News]

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Save The Congresswoman, Save America

I don’t know if you heard or not, but this weekend (deep breaths) former president Barack Hussein Obama told a joke. A joke about Donald Trump’s taste in decor, and a joke about The Cheesecake Factory.

Yes. That most solemn and serious of places, The Cheesecake Factory.

Specifically, he suggested that Trump’s redecorating jag had made the White House look like if “Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.”

Naturally, because MAGA people are very, very normal, they all went absolutely ballistic, claiming that to insult the subtle, understated decor of The Cheesecake Factory is to insult the working class of America, all of whom famously love The Cheesecake Factory and cheesecake writ large.

And it wasn’t just online discourse, either. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went so far as to go to The Cheesecake Factory for lunch, just to make a point.

He thought he was being a real sly man of the people by suggesting that “the Martha’s Vineyard set” give it a try. Let us note that the last time Bessent was involved in an incident at a restaurant, he was, the Daily Beast reported, “at the Brazilian-influenced Italian restaurant Reveler’s Hour in Washington, D.C., where a starter of grilled carrots cost $19.” That was the time when Code Pink showed up and gave a mock toast to him, after which he pitched a fit at the owner for not removing them forthwith, spat in his own food and left. I guess that’s something you can do when you are worth somewhere north of $600 million. Me, I’d at least get a to-go box.

But sure, he’s a real, salt-of-the-earth man of the people.

Trump himself was also quite miffed at the comparison, not least of all because he’s probably spent more time making the White House into a Liberace-splosion than he has his actual job, and went on for about three minutes describing the splendor of it all.

Now, I actually happen to be a fan of The Cheesecake Factory. I only get one thing there — the grilled steak medallions from the Skinnylicious menu, because I’m just too neurospicy to take on looking at the entire regular menu without having a panic attack — but my sister and I almost always go whenever we’re together. (She also gets the steak medallions.) But I, like anyone else who has ever been in a Cheesecake Factory, am aware of what a Cheesecake Factory looks like.

Many many years ago, actually, I wrote an article for XOJane (remember that one?) about why I despised that “HEY, IT’S ME your Facebook friend from high school who never left our hometown & thinks Olive Garden is fancy. Anyway here’s a racist article” tweet that was constantly going around at the time. In part, it’s because people thought I would be particularly amused by the sentiment because I’m Italian-American and am therefore supposed to have especially strong feelings about how the Olive Garden is bad. In reality, I have not, to my knowledge, ever even been to an Olive Garden and not for reasons of fanciness so much as, until I was 15, I lived in a town that was so small that it did not have any restaurants at all. Not even a Dunkin’ Donuts! In Massachusetts! Can you imagine?

But really, I didn’t like that joke because it actually was classist and elitist, and also ironically so because no one needs a lot of money to make some really good Italian food. But that was not what Obama’s joke was. His was a joke about something that most people would have a reference for. Also, Saddam Hussein, who also famously loved to drench everything in gold, is not exactly most people’s idea of a working class middle American.

Even as a person who is pathologically extra, aesthetically speaking, I am not blind to the fact that the decor in The Cheesecake Factory is a little over the top. I can certainly tell the difference between what a Cheesecake Factory is supposed to look like and what the White House is supposed to look like. Similarly, no one loves a diner like I love a diner, but while a 1950s decor might be appropriate there, I can see how it might be a weird choice for a funeral home. This has nothing to do with money and everything to do with having eyeballs and a modicum of taste.

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The classist thing, really, is to assume that people who don’t have a lot of money are somehow more ignorant and less “tasteful” than those who have millions, that they can’t tell that The Cheesecake Factory is gaudy, or that they all look at Donald Trump slathering the White House in gold and think “Boy, now that’s some real elegance right there!” That’s absolute bullshit. If you have style, you can do more at a thrift shop than most people can do in a Neiman Marcus. If you have skills when it comes to cooking or can follow a recipe, you can make yourself a fabulous dinner for under $30. You can decorate a room and make it look great with things you got on clearance from Home Goods. These are not skills that necessarily cost money to develop, and a lot of the time, they are skills that people who are raised with silver spoons in their mouths never bother to develop, because they don’t have to. Which is probably why rich ladies used to come see me, a girl who was making about $14 an hour, to tell them how to put a damned outfit together.

Donald Trump has been rich his whole entire life and is still the tackiest motherfucker on this planet. If he is not living proof that “money can’t buy you class or taste” then I don’t know what else would be.

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Let us stipulate right off the top that James Comey sucks. He sucks because he is a Republican, or at least was for many years while the party was turning into a Nazi incubator around him. He sucks because his extremely ill-timed and unnecessary announcement that he was not reopening an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email practices (God, so quaint) played a huge part in getting America into this Wes Craven nightmare from which we have still not escaped 10 years later. He sucks because Amazon is charging $19.99 for the Kindle edition of his last two novels, which is an absolutely ridiculous price even if we wanted to read them, which we very much do not.

BUT. That does not mean it is in any way okay for the United States government to keep hounding him with bogus felony charges for non-crimes just because Donald Trump hates him and wants to see him in handcuffs, even if it’s for something as trivial as shoplifting a Blow Pop from the checkout line at Harris Teeter. (Do not shoplift Blow Pops from the checkout line at Harris Teeter, it’s still shoplifting.)

On Monday the Trump administration announced it has filed criminal charges against Comey for a third time on a trivial nothingburger of a non-crime. This follows a failed indictment for lying to Congress and an ongoing charge for allegedly threatening Donald Trump’s life by arranging seashells in an ominous manner. That first one was dismissed because the prosecutor who brought it, nitwit Trump lawyer Lindsey Halligan, had been illegally appointed to her job. The second hasn’t been dismissed yet, but Comey’s lawyers are arguing that pursuing it is selective prosecution by the government. If anything, it is likely to get dismissed for being so galactically stupid.

But the third time, as they say, is the charm. Or at least that’s what the Department of Justice hopes, having apparently solved all other crime in America.

PREVIOUSLY!

On Monday, an unsealed court filing revealed that the DOJ has brought charges against Comey for allegedly leaking national defense information to The New York Times back in October of 2016. How bogus is the case? It was investigated twice during Trump’s first administration, and both times the DOJ recommended against filing charges.

But this is the second Trump administration, whose motto concerning abusing the legal system is YOLO. Hence, the new charges.

How desperate is the DOJ? Desperate enough that they did not take the case to a grand jury. Instead, they filed something called an information charge, which allows prosecutors to seek an indictment from a grand jury even after the 10-year statute of limitations runs out.

Comey’s leaking allegedly occurred on October 5, 2016. The DOJ filed the information charge on October 5, 2026. We can do that math even when drunk.

On Monday afternoon, Comey released a video statement in which he sounds resigned to the continuing stupidity:

This is all silly and grotesque. But using his own Justice Department to hound his enemies on even the flimsiest of pretexts is probably the only thing that stirs Trump’s withered and sagging loins at this point in his life. And he has a sycophantic Attorney General who makes John Mitchell look like Perry Mason. It will get worse after the midterms if Republicans lose Congress and Trump’s brain continues disintegrating. He’ll probably start demanding indictments of Obama’s White House portrait for aggravated looking at him while Black.

Comey’s lawyers are going to argue this case should be dismissed on the grounds that the statute of limitations ran out. Personally, we think they should argue for dismissal based on Todd Blanche and Donald Trump being vindictive, shit-brained ogres. At this point, even the nation’s judges might go for that.

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MORAL HIGH GROUND MONDAY: Found yet another Republican out there in the wild whining that the Democrats keep calling them pedophiles and pedophile protectors. Just because of how their party is full of pedophiles and the people who protect them! Totally unfair. Anyway, this time it was Sherrod Brown, and some Republican asshole whining about it, and at the Moral High Ground I figured it was a good time to remind everyone how different our definitions of “groomer” and “protecting kids” are from their definitions. Print it out and give it to anybody who is very confused! Come read that and subscribe, etc. [The Moral High Ground]

Speaking of assholes upsetly whining, my goodness, you guys, Donald Trump is so extremely stung that Barack Obama said he’s made the White House look ugly like Saddam Hussein opening a Cheesecake Factory. One of the funniest things about Trump is how desperate he is for people to believe he’s classy, when all his taste is just new money trash.

Surprise, he is also claiming the Brazil election was “rigged.” Meanwhile loser Flávio Bolsonaro has abandoned plans to call it rigged, because fuck off is why. [Barron’s / Bloomberg]

Everything in Donald Trump’s brain is a hallucination from a broken memory of a movie he saw in the 1980s, before his brain ceased functioning. Change our minds about that.

Donald Trump’s ball-licking pomeranian Todd Blanche has made up a new reason to indict James Comey, surprise. Guess they got upset when a judge ruled that it was illegal for them to fire Maurene Comey for the crime of being James Comey’s daughter. Comey’s lawyers note that the event in question “was investigated by two separate U.S. Attorneys over the past ten years. Both declined to prosecute.” Both were during the last Trump regime. But we’re sure Resting Blanche Face will get it done, you betcha. [CNBC / BBC]

Pramila Jayapal and Jamie Raskin have a plan for how to deal with Trump’s fucked up persecutions, prosecutions and targeting of political enemies in the new Congress. Just gotta make sure they win it big. [The New Republic]

Related, JFC, how desperate, how pathetic:

Uh oh, now that video Zohran Mamdani made where he spoke in the forbidden and sexual language of “Spanish” to tell immigrants their actual rights when dealing with ICE is TREASON! [JoeMyGod]

You know that one set of grandparents that gives you a trip to Europe, but the other set of grandparents gives you socks with Bible verses on them and a Dave Ramsey financial planner? Have fun at the White House Halloween celebration, fellow kids! [The Hill]

What the fuck is wrong with Matthew Yglesias?

Please give us the thought process for this earnest take. What exactly is bad for democracy about people caring about other democracies that are not their own? Nah for real, bro, tell us.

Benny Johnson is pretty tore up about Hitler’s vacay house burning down. [Media Matters]

How much of a piece of shit do you have to be for this to be what everybody from your private Catholic high school says about you?

This “Exxon” ad with Woody Harrelson is so fucking amazing, we don’t even want to tell you.

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OK, Monday stories! BRAZIL!

There was this trashfire. Not Elissa Slotkin, the man threatening her.

These trashfires named Mike.

This trashfire.

BRAZIL!

And finally this trashfire.

And that was the end of the day. Goodbye!

Our fondest wish for Todd Blanche after he no longer occupies the attorney general’s office — whether because Donald Trump fires him, or a new president takes power, or he’s frog-marched out in handcuffs, defenestrated out his office window, or dragged out by his stupid fucking hair — is that he spend the rest of his miserable life being shunned by society until he is driven so mad by loneliness that he retreats to a cave high in the Rockies to live out his days wracked with regret and self-loathing so enormous that he can do little but curl up in a ball and rock back and forth, muttering gibberish and praying for a bear to wander by and eat him. (Also obviously disbarred.)

In short, Christ, what an asshole.

Blanche made the rounds of a couple of Sunday morning chit-chat shows this weekend, where he was interviewed by Margaret Brennan on CBS and Dana Bash on CNN about the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against the state of Alaska over its ballot for the midterm election. He was by turns petulant, whiny, smug, condescending, smarmy, defensive, abrasive, and childish. Personally, we were in favor of both Bash and Brennan cutting his mic and telling him to come back when he could behave like a goddamn adult and stop performing for the bloated Nazi gasbag watching him from the White House and grading him like he’s auditioning for the Yale School of Drama.

Yeah, we were that irritated after watching Blanche’s performance. If we want to watch a pile of hair bloviate at the top of its lungs on Sunday morning, there are plenty of evangelical churches in our area. Or we can watch the NFL pregame shows. So many options!

For instance, here Blanche is losing his shit at Dana Bash for reasonably wondering if all this election denial might lead to another January 6 if Trump doesn’t get the results he wants next week:

“Oh stop it! You gotta stop it with that! You’re not even being a real person! Come on, man. … You’re saying, Mr. Attorney General, because the president of the United States is concerned that there is an absolute fraud happening in Alaska, is he going to do something crazy? That is not a real question.”

Yeah, can you imagine Donald Trump throwing a fit over an election he falsely claims is fraudulent and doing something crazy over it? This president? Who just wants to make sure all of America’s elections are free and fair, so long as he wins all of them? Todd Blanche is offended that you would even entertain such a thought in your pretty little head, Dana Bash!

Apparently Todd Blanche has been orbiting Alpha Centauri for the last decade without a helmet.

Then there was the moment Blanche told Bash she was embarrassing her employer by asking him obvious questions like What in the fuck are you doing? (We’re paraphrasing.)

The Alaska lawsuit turns on the fact that there are two people named Dan Sullivan on the ballot for the Senate seat. One is Dan S. Sullivan, the incumbent Republican senator. The other is a retired schoolteacher named Daniel J. Sullivan, Jr. The DOJ contends that the latter is only there as a ratfucking exercise by Democrats, who recruited him to run. (He denies this.) The DOJ argues that this confusion will cause voters to mark their ballots for the wrong Dan Sullivan, thus denying the incumbent his rightful victory.

It is important to remember that this whole situation has already been adjudicated by the Alaska state government. State officials have agreed to put the word “incumbent” next to Senator Sullivan’s name, along with noting that he is a registered Republican. Like so:

This seems like an obvious and solid solution to us, and we have so low an opinion of the intelligence of Republican voters that it is probably floating around in the Quantum Realm somewhere.

You know who has an even lesser opinion of Republican voters? The president. Donald Trump claimed at a rally the other day that voters don’t know what the word “incumbent” means, which is as close a thing to proof as we’ll get that Donald Trump himself only just learned what the word “incumbent” means and therefore assumes no one else knows this previously obscure bit of lexicology. (A lot of people don’t know it has a “B” in it.)

Anyway, the Alaska State Supreme Court blessed this solution four months ago. The states run their own elections. That should be the end of it.

Now the DOJ is demanding that Alaska come up with a solution that will segregate any ballots cast for Daniel J. Sullivan so that it can investigate later whether voters who marked his name meant to mark the incumbent’s name. Since that will be any ballot marked with the former’s name, the net effect is that the Trump administration is announcing ahead of time that the only election result it will accept is if the incumbent senator wins. Otherwise, it will scream and carry on and hold its breath until it turns blue.

In other words, as law professor Steve Vladeck put it, DOJ is “assuming there will be mischief rather than responding to actual evidence thereof.”And this is even before we get to the practicalities of how Alaska would go around questioning every voter who marked Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. on the ballot, since it’s not as if voters sign their names to their ballots before turning them in. Bash actually asked Blanche this at one point and he sputtered and blustered and never answered the question. Because he can’t.

Vladeck and other legal and elections experts are describing the lawsuit Blanche spent Sunday polluting the airwaves to defend as “frivolous”, “abusive”, “sanctionable”, shot through with “blazing incompetence”, and more like “press releases masquerading as lawsuits.”

That last one is probably the key descriptor. There is really no legal action to take, because there has not been any sort of violation committed. This is all just bad faith noise meant to sow confusion ahead of elections where polls indicate Republicans are going to lose a lot of races they might have been expected to win if the current presidential administration didn’t suck harder than a Dyson factory.

Blanche more or less admitted all this when Dana Bash asked him what crime the lawsuit was trying to address and he had to admit that it isn’t:

We get it, the administration’s entire electoral strategy is being overseen by the pre-cogs in Minority Report.

What’s fun about watching both of Sunday’s interviews is that you can practically see Dana Bash and Margaret Brennan trying very, very, VERY hard to not scream in frustration as this walking dingleberry mansplains the election to them. They know why he’s lying, the audience knows why he’s lying, your freaking cat knows why he’s lying. And yet.

Blanche also spent a lot of time claiming the president did not order him to file this lawsuit, which HA HA HA HA HA, sure thing, bubba.

Watch both interviews below if you have a hardy stomach and no gag reflex:

And yes, this is your OPEN THREAD.

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Hello friends and frenemies! How’s everybody doing this fine Monday after watching the global far right get its ass beat into the ground by voters in Serbia and Brazil?

These victories may not be the be-all, end-all defeat of fascism that we all crave, but they certainly are a sweet beginning to a long-overdue turnaround. What makes it even nicer of a time is that this defeat took place even after all the hideous actions of the global far right to get a Bolsonaro back into power over the country that maintains “the lungs of the world” and all the resources that come with it.

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That includes the Trump administration and its ghouls and enablers all over the world, and of course Jair Bolsonaro and his rotten failed politician of a son Flávio (i.e. the candidate), as well as Vlad Putin and all his global hangers-on, and naturally the bootlickers over at Meta and the titushki scum they did their best to motivate with their propaganda.

But in a shocking plot twist, the global far right suffered an extraordinary defeat at the hands of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, the 80-year-old leftist whose victory was not a given, or predicted!

“Mr. Lula, in contrast to many world leaders, has often and defiantly clashed with Mr. Trump, and his victory highlights that Latin America’s left-wing forces still wield influence despite a string of losses across the hemisphere,” sez the New York Times, adding that “This is the first leftist victory following seven straight wins by right-wing leaders in the region over the last 18 months.”

It turns out that disinformation and reality-bending propaganda has a shelf life after all.

The final blow that may have lost the fash the election — speaking of hands — was when Bolsonaro the Lesser insulted Lula for having only nine fingers, which is apparently because when Lula was 17, he damaged his left pinky in an industrial accident and the doctor amputated it in lieu of treating it, because he was just a poor kid whose life wasn’t going to amount to anything anyway. I would be so goddamn mad.

Of course, Palhaço Flávio is having himself a little temper tantrum shit fit and refusing to concede, as if what he wants matters to the millions more voters who wanted Lula than Flávio. (Did we mention the margin? Millions. It wasn’t close.) He’s calling the results “inexplicable,” hahaha.

Yes, this probably means the next few months are gonna be a pain in the ass, but what is Bolsonarito going to do about it? Organize a coup? Your asshole family already tried that, fucko!

Sorry, ya little shit, it’s time to move in with your dad and your brother. Or maybe you could head on down the way to Argentina, whose leader as of Monday morning is the only Latin American president not to congratulate Lula on his victory, lol. What’s wrong, Javi? Cat got your lengua?

And then there’s Serbia!

Let no one ever say the kids are not all right, at least where Serbia is concerned. A youth-led anti-corruption movement, the Students’ List, nailed the country’s former leader to the figurative wall last night. But don’t worry, while Aleksandar Vučić was able to bring himself to concede after twelve years in power, he’s still an asshole!

In his concession speech, Vucic said projections had the youth-backed Students’ List taking between 135 and 140 seats, whereas the SNS was projected to win around 105.

Vucic blamed Serbia’s independent media for the loss, while also alleging interference from unnamed European countries and the “US deep state,” which he claimed, without elaborating, is also “against President [Donald] Trump.” Vucic also has maintained close ties with Russia and President Vladimir Putin throughout his tenure.

I heard the mood is really somber round Moscow way right now because of this too. Hahahaha. GOOD.

Russia has viewed Vučić’s Serbia as a key ally in Europe and a bulwark against what Moscow presents as aggressive attempts by the European Union (EU) to contain and punish it over the war in Ukraine, according to Reuters.

Serbia buys large quantities of gas from Russian energy giant Gazprom and, while it aspires to join the European Union, has not joined the EU sanctions imposed on Russia over the war in Ukraine. Instead, under Vučić, who has maintained close relations with President Vladimir Putin, it has continued to develop strong economic, political and military ties with Moscow.

HA HA HA. Eat shit, fascist scum!

That giant sucking sound you may have heard last night was the sound of thousands of extremely stupid articles about the “unstoppable march of the populist right” or similar getting deleted by hack journalists, and I am not at all sorry to report that.

In fact, it’s almost as good as the hours I spent yesterday watching sad fascists in Brazil jerseys crying on my street while I gave them my most annoying smiles! Which was great!

I haven’t found any Serbian fascists on my block yet, but I promise you to be really annoying in person to any fascists I find, no matter their nationality. You should be annoying too. Irritate a fascist today. Go five minutes under the speed limit if there’s one behind you. Force them to repeat their racist shit, only louder, again and again, because you’re hard of hearing. Make their lives just a little tougher.

The kids deserve it!

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All of last week, Vivek Ramaswamy doubled down on the grotesque ad he ran about Amy Acton, his Democratic opponent in Ohio’s gubernatorial race, trying to pretend as though giving a platform to the mother who hasn’t seen her since the age of 12, a woman who chose her pedophile boyfriend/husband over her children, was not an especially vile or even morally questionable action to take. Unsurprisingly, both Donald Trump and JD Vance were very happy to support the ad, with Trump stating that he wished he’d been able to run such an ad against his own opponents.

“I told him, leave it up and look upstairs and say, 'Thank you, God, very much. I appreciate it,'” Trump said at an Iowa rally last week. “But that’s a hot story today. They want him to take down an ad. I only wish I could have had an ad like that against somebody.”

It’s not exactly an ill-advised strategy; Republicans have been very much able, in recent years, to overcome hideously bad press simply by saying “This is fine, actually!” over and over again.

And yet, it just does not seem to be going all that well. The Cook Political Report has moved from labeling the race a “toss-up” to “Leans Democrat.” The Cleveland Plain Dealer, which had previously decided to stop endorsing candidates for political office, decided to change that policy in order to endorse Acton in light of the ad.

“A candidate who uses childhood sexual abuse as a weapon against the person who endured it has crossed a line that Ohioans should defend, whatever their party,” the editorial board wrote.

Other Republicans across the state and even the country have distanced themselves from Ramaswamy after the ad. While current governor Mike DeWine has said he wouldn’t retract his endorsement — or, more specifically, his endorsement of the Ohio Republican ticket as a whole — he’s also not campaigning for him.

Republican Iowa Senate candidate Ashley Hinson has also condemned the ad, not so much wanting to associate herself with a candidate who accuses 12-year-olds of lying about sexual assault.

“It’s terrible,” she told ABC News’s This Week host Jonathan Karl on Sunday. “I think about it as a mom, and you think about your kids surviving childhood sexual abuse and having to relive that trauma on TV again. I think it’s absolutely terrible, and I think they should take the ad down.”

Even Ramaswamy is now claiming the ad had nothing to do with child sexual abuse.

“Our ad had nothing, nothing to do with childhood abuse, sexual abuse,” Ramaswamy told reporters from the Ohio Capital Journal on Friday. “We condemn that as forcefully as anyone.”

His running mate, Ohio state Sen. Rob McColley, also stated that he did not think Acton was lying about her childhood abuse.

“Oh no, that is horrible,” McColley said on Friday, according to the New York Times. “We are accusing her of lying in her adult career.”

Except the thing is, Donna Arthur has not known Amy Acton as an adult. She didn’t even know Amy Acton as a teenager. What the hell would Donna Arthur, who hasn’t seen Acton since she was 12 years old, know about her “lying in her adult career”? It seems fairly clear that Arthur’s claims that her daughter is a liar stem from when Acton reported her stepfather to the police for rape, so the idea that she would be any kind of authority on anything else Acton has said or done over the last four decades is rather absurd.

Additionally, the ad itself has recently, mysteriously been edited down in a way that omits the part where Acton’s mother claims that Acton lied about living in a tent, following reports that showed that they did, in fact, live in a tent on a campground.

Now the ad just has Arthur calling her daughter, who she hasn’t seen since the age of 12, a liar, for unspecified reasons.

“I love my daughter, and Amy is a liar. I saw her lying about her opponent. That’s why I’m speaking up to you now,” she says in the re-edited ad. “Don’t vote for people who lie. Don’t let her become your governor. If you think she’ll make your life better, you’re fooling yourself. It will only get worse.”

Again, she hasn’t actually seen her daughter since she was 12, so it’s not remotely clear how she’d be qualified to make that kind of assessment.

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Ironically, it’s possible that editing the ad is probably the worst thing the Ramaswamy campaign can do. As I mentioned, people actually seem to like it when Republicans refuse to back down from their more repulsive actions and behavior and even their lies. JD Vance was entirely open about the fact that he straight up lied about Haitians eating people’s pets and insisted that doing so was the right thing to do.

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he said, to literally no consequence.

The fact is, there are a lot of Republicans out there who would be more than happy to support Ramaswamy were he to claim he was 100 percent certain that Acton was lying, as a 12-year-old, about being sexually assaulted by her stepfather. Indeed, there are a lot of people already claiming this online.

You know, because she surely knew, at the age of 12, that she would be running for office at the age of 60 and thought accusing a now-dead man of sexual assault would help her … somehow. The police were in on it, too, which is why they removed Acton and her brother from Arthur’s custody. It only makes sense.

Others have claimed the attacks are justified because Democrats ran ads with RFK Jr.’s family members and Paul Gosar’s family members calling them both nuts. But there’s a pretty big difference between that and the reason why Arthur is accusing her daughter of being a liar. The issue isn’t that it crosses a line because it’s her mother, it’s what her mother actually said in the actual ad. This is not hard, Ben Shapiro!

There are lots of conservatives who will see the new altered ads and his other justifications for the campaign as “weak,” particularly when so many others are willing to go along with the story. Will that affect whether or not they vote for him? Well, I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!

Sunday was not a good day to be a right-wing douchecanoe.

Brazil decided to tell the failson of its former authoritarian president and current prison inmate, Jair Bolsonaro, to get fucked as it reelected President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to a historic fourth term. (Although it seems Flavio Bolsonaro wants to follow in his election-denying father's footsteps right into a future prison stint.) A student-led movement defeated Serbia’s authoritarian leader Aleksandar Vučić, ending the Vladimir Putin-endorsed strongman’s fourteen-year reign of absolute power. These global election results have provided a brief preview of the GOP’s very possible future.

Meanwhile, the MAGA stooges on the Sunday shows seemed desperate and shaken, even before those results started rolling in. So let’s all take a moment to savor their attempts to deny reality, either as an amuse-bouche for the November 3’ reckoning or a treat in case it goes sideways.

Mike Rogers

Let’s start once again with former Michigan Republican congressman Mike Rogers’s desperate, racism-tinged attacks on his Democratic Senate opponent, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.

Appearing on NBC’s Meet The Press, Rogers began flailing almost immediately upon host Kristen Welker’s very first question.

WELKER: [P]resident Trump is going to be out in Michigan campaigning with you a little bit later on today. Let me ask you, Congressman, is a vote for you a vote for the Trump agenda?

ROGERS: I’m — I’m apologizing, I’m having some difficulty in my earpiece, but I — is a vote for you? I’m not sure. […]

How weird blessing that Mike Rogers’s earpiece suddenly went out immediately after the initial greeting and his introduction? It’s like the remote studio just somehow drove Rogers into a very useful tunnel.

Welker did a live mic and audio check. After Rogers confirmed he could hear and answer clearly, Welker asked Rogers if he would repeal the Trump tariffs that are hurting his constituents in Michigan.

ROGERS: Well, again, the best way to do this is walk in and say, “Can we work this out?” And I’ll give you a great example how I’ve done that, and I’m not even in office yet.

Rogers then proceeded to filibuster about his “achievements” of stopping the flow of Canadian trash (which in this instance was not some kind of likely Trump epithet euphemism, but literally garbage), and GM reshoring production of the Chevy Silverado in Michigan from Mexico. While we sympathize with dealing with unfinished poutines and empty Tim Hortons boxes, we fail to see how this actually helps Michiganders hurt by Trump’s tariffs that Rogers once seemed really into, in comments to Breitbart. Or how GM deciding to build one of its vehicle models (and an expensive one) will offset its anticipated total $2.5 to $3.5 billion costs in 2026.

Rogers spent the second half of his segment being unable to square his previous defenses of the Muslim Brotherhood in 2012 with his constant Islamophobic attacks on his opponent.

During the final minutes, having confirmed there were no audio issues with Rogers’s earpiece now, Welker returned to the very first question by asking Rogers multiple times if he considered himself a “MAGA Republican.”

ROGERS: Listen, I’m going to tell you something, this is — I get you guys on the national press, but this is a little bit disgusting to me. […]

WELKER: Are you a MAGA Republican?

ROGERS: I’ve already answered the question, Kristen.

WELKER: That’s just what I want to know. Do you consider yourself to be a MAGA Republican?

ROGERS: Kristen, let me — I’m going to go right back through this. […] Nobody wants to talk about that on national press.

Rogers’s terrible attempts to avoid a very simple answer while attacking the press in a Trumpian manner kinda answer Welker’s " MAGA Republican " question, despite his attempts to dodge it.

Mike Johnson

On Fox News Sunday, another wormy republican named Mike, namely current House Speaker Mike Johnson, was trying a different way to deal with this: lethal levels of denial cope.

From trying to convince host Shannon Bream that it’s not Republican policies but the old “it’s the media” causing all their polling problems.

JOHNSON: Look, it's a hostile media environment. Most of the mainstream media of course is advancing the false narrative of the other side — the Democrats and the Marxists. They're on the other team.

That’s a very funny thing to say when right-wing oligarchs own CNN, CBS, Fox News, One America News, Newsmax, and most social media platforms.

Johnson then used an anecdote to discredit polling that shows his party headed for a seismic loss this midterm.

JOHNSON: When I'm in these big arenas, I ask for hands — 'Show me your hand if you've answered a poll in the last six months.' There will be like three hands among 300 people. I'm telling you, these polls are off. All of them.

This is called confirmation bias, Mike. (It’s also called an unscientific poll.) This denial of objective reality is not gonna help Republicans cope if they lose in November. Nor is trying to pull a Bolsonaro move (both of them) to steal an election (again) gonna work when their party loses, and Johnson’s speakership comes to an end.

Have a week.

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Last week, Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin took part in a University of Michigan Institute of Politics event where she discussed what Democrats should do to restore constitutional checks and balances and trust in the government if they retake Congress in the midterms. She warned against only “going after Trump,” although impeachment should be on the table. Beyond that, she noted that Trump wouldn’t have gotten away with high-profile outrages and corruption — like his lawless demolition of the East Wing of the White House, for just one of one million examples — without the help of his loyal underlings.

Slotkin pointed out that while the Supreme Court gave Trump a Get Out of Jail Free card for any crimes he commits in office, “the people around Donald Trump, who are doing his bidding and enabling this, have no such immunity,” so they should be held accountable. She went on to say that bringing Trump’s enablers to justice is a vital part of “Trump-proofing” the government “so that no president, of any party, can abuse the system the way he did.” She noted that under Trump, Americans have learned the painful lesson that “a lot of the stuff we thought were laws were actually just norms, standards, habits, expectations” that a corrupt administration felt free to ignore. We used to think shame would be enough to prevent bad behavior, but Trump and his people have no shame, so we need laws with teeth to ensure real accountability.

After a brief digression about impeachment, Slotkin returned to the theme of holding the enablers accountable, to send a clear message to young people entering careers in government: Don’t do crimes, and don’t help the politicians you work for do crimes.

Nothing terribly inflammatory there, but that didn’t stop rightwing shitlords from snipping a few seconds of video out of context and spinning it into a frightening example of “Leftist fascism”: That monster Elissa Slotkin is vowing to weaponize government to threaten young conservatives away from careers in public service! When can we put her in jail???

Why yes, it’s the very same playbook we’ve seen a million times. The rightwing propagandasphere seizes on some fairly unremarkable comments about holding bad actors accountable, spins them into a plot to persecute Republicans for their “views” (even — or especially — when Republicans are in power), and then they keep banging on about the supposedly horrifying remarks until mainstream media covers the “controversy.” Virtually all coverage takes the rightwing framing as the starting point, and all too often, the bad actors get away with it.

Slotkin herself has already been through the cycle once herself, with Donald Trump threatening the death penalty for Slotkin and other Democrats who reminded members of the military that they took an oath to only obey lawful orders. And this week Trump is again calling for government to be weaponized against Slotkin for her “dangerous statement.”

Hey, you know how Slotkin said we can no longer rely on shame to keep politicians from doing horrible things? Shame him all you want for making actual threats about a political enemy; he doesn’t care. In fact, you’re the enemy, and you will soon be next on the list.

Note especially that Trump claimed that Slotkin’s call for making sure that “no president, of any party, can abuse the system” was in fact a vow to prosecute young people who want to work in “the Trump administration, or any Republican administration.” And then the dismissal of Slotkin as a “lightweight, a stupid person.”

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OK, let’s look at the facts and the bullshit, shall we? Here’s the relevant part of the U of Michigan interview, cued up to Slotkin’s full answer, which is worth watching for context. (Yes, we know, America doesn’t do context anymore.) It’s not long; just the bit from 27:21 to the 33-minute mark.

Out of that six-minute discussion of how to bring some accountability back to government, the Professionally Outraged Influencers seized solely on Slotkin’s remarks warning people — again! — that they shouldn’t expect immunity if they help their bosses commit crimes. Here’s the bit that went viral as a “threat” to destroy the lives and careers of nice young people who only want to make America great again:

“I want young people coming out of school to say, ‘Should I go work for the Trump administration?’ I want them to be like, ‘Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want, and so let me avoid participating in that.’ I want that deterrence message.”

The sputtering in response to the 26-second clip was intense. Slotkin had declared war on everyone who supports Trump, and she openly admitted that Democrats want to scare young people from ever voting Republican!

Habitual liar Mike Lee (R-Utah) declared it was “absolutely disgraceful to threaten young Americans for participating in politics and serving their country.” (Slotkin said midlevel Trump staffers who committed crimes should be prosecuted.)

Creepy rightwing slug Mike Davis went even farther, with a casual call for stochastic terrorism to anyone who might be interested in killing a commie for Trump:

“If Elissa Slotkin deploys these fascist tactics, like illegal arrests and political persecutions to intimidate young Americans with opposing political views, she will learn why we have the Second Amendment.

”Fuck her and her CIA tactics.”

In another tweetpoop, Davis forwarded a New York Post story that lied “Sen. Slotkin urges Dems to use prosecution to make young people afraid to serve in Trump admin” with a more direct (but still not actionable) suggestion that someone should rid us of this turbulent lady senator, writing, “Try it, @ElissaSlotkin. Learn about the Second Amendment, sweetheart.”

This is all very familiar and very stupid, and it’s endemic in our politics. It’s not even especially new. When the FBI warned in 2008 that violent rightwing groups sought to recruit soldiers returning from the Forever Wars, the rightwing blogosphere went ballistic with warnings that jackbooted thugs were coming for Republicans and patriots, Janet Napolitano meekly apologized, and the neo-Nazis kept right on recruiting. They still are.

In the years since, the Fake Outrage Cycle has only been accelerated by Trump and by rightwing social media, and it’s gonna be a hell of a challenge to resist. Happily, Slotkin is standing firm and is calling the bullshit campaign what it is: “Manufactured outrage.” She told CNN Monday, “The truth is, if you commit a criminal act, if you use taxpayer dollars in a way that violates the law, you should be held accountable, no matter who you are,” and noted that Republicans are trying to make her the issue to take some of the attention off their painfully bad polling in midterm races.

Elissa Slotkin is doing it right. She’s on Team Fight, and she’s not going to apologize.

[New Republic / NYT (2009) / ABC News4 / Off Message]

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Stand Your (Rhetorical) Ground

NOTA BENE: Remember the contest, the one with prizes for if Wonkette gets enough new paid subscribers? That’s right, the membership drive! Well, we are 39 away from our first benchmark — AKA more than halfway there! — so we just need the rest of the ones of ya what’s been waiting for this exact moment to do the thing to Do The Thing! Then we can move to the next benchmark!

For your convenience, here is the Do The Thing box, for Doing The Thing:

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BRAZIL, YOU GODDAMN DID IT! After a day full of fuckery and what looked like some last-minute attempts at fascist election interference, it didn’t matter, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was re-elected in the presidential runoff election, and it wasn’t even close. After all the money MAGA fascists and Donald Trump’s far-right oligarchs spent, after all that good old-fashioned election interference American fascists have been doing in Latin American countries forfucking ever, it didn’t matter.

Guess it wasn’t the greatest election strategy for Bolsonaro to be a fascist who was totally open about how he was teaming up with far-right oligarchs and MAGA fascists to destroy Brazil, what with a runoff election coming up. Also might not have been cool with Brazilian voters how he kept calling Lula “nine fingers,” considering how Lula lost his finger when he was 17 actually working, as opposed to Little Lord Fauntleroy Flavio Bolsonaro, who’s never worked a day in his life. Here’s how that went down at the debate:

Then there was the funny thing where Bolsonaro was like “oh hey isn’t it bad how all the PEOPLE IN PRISON want to vote for Lula?” and Lula was like “dude, I want all the prisoners to vote for me, even your dad.” This clip’s in Portuguese, there are English overdubbed versions out there, but we think you can catch the exchange from body language alone.

So there you go. Brazil!

Interesting thing about Brazilian politics: in Brazil, voting is compulsory between ages 18 and 70. But once you’re 16 you have the option of voting. So whatever happened here, it just might have been the kids these days and the olds these days.

And then … SERBIA! Aleksandar Vučić, the Putin puppet who’s been president forever, got his ass ousted also yesterday, by the Student List, a student-led movement that has really gotten its legs protesting all this fucking corruption, which seems to be a global theme. This is also fucking huge. Hit the second link for an explanation of what the Student List really is. [Guardian / Demócrata]

Lots of really huge elections coming up worldwide, in case you haven’t heard. There’s Israel, then US America, then New Zealand, then Spain. Also Bulgaria and probably some other stuff we haven’t even heard about. Really big stuff that’s going to have quite a say in what the world looks and feels like for the next few years. The trifecta of (earlier this year) Hungry, then Brazil and Serbia last night? That’s some momentum, and oh boy what a bad day the Nazis are probably having!

Speaking of and back to your regularly scheduled domestic tabs:

Donald Trump is a white supremacist shitfuck who doesn’t understand why the US can’t get white immigrants from Scandinavia. Spoiler: Because nobody from those countries wants to visit the US, much less live here. Largely because of Donald Trump and the rest of the Republican Party! Anyway, click the link for more white supremacist shitfuck racism from Donald Trump. [JoeMyGod]

MAGA loser racists are extremadamente BIG MAD because Zohran Mamdani made a video telling immigrants what their rights are when dealing with ICE, and he did it in the secret language of Spanish. [Latin Times]

Here’s the video, if you think it’s hot when Zohran Mamdani speaks Spanish or something.

The Federalist has the REAL news, it is that the DSA is going to incite all the violence before the elections, to TRICK Donald Trump into being a fascist! Got it? To TRICK him! [The Federalist]

Oh boy, Jared Kushner and his lawyers are mad about that Vanity Fair story. Which one? Oh, you know the one. [The Hill]

Former AND CURRENT Pentagon officials are reportedly super excited to get DMs from the new Democratic Congress asking them to spill all the beans on what an embarrassing loser fuckup Pete Hegseth is. And he’s first on the impeachment list [Telegraph]

Marco Rubio Tells Latin American Country To Just Trust The CIA. That’s the headline here.

It is bad that the Republicans’ gay conservative quisling weirdo GOTV guy was letting out-of-state people vote in Pennsylvania using his address? And is literally every accusation a confession with these people? [Bulwark]

Did Melania broker a ceasefire in a Ukrainian town? No the pope did and she stole credit. Have you stolen the credit for any of the pope’s ceasefires lately? If not, is it because you have a soul in your body? [New York Times / Daily Beast]

Has anybody ever done the bird at you during a city council meeting (you are the mayor) and you lunged at them and had to be physically restrained and yelled “I’M FUCKING GETTING YOU”? Never? Well then you might not be a Republican man who never learned to control his emotions.

Are low testosterones a national security threat? Yes, according to the totally real men of the Trump regime! [New York Post]

OK, here are your videos of Barack Obama clowning around and upsetting lesser inferior men Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth very much.

Yes, Trump is already crashing out over it. We’ll talk about it in a post if we feel like it.

Want to read more Evan than just what’s at Wonkette? Visit The Moral High Ground and subscribe to it!

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Retro Nice Times!

Remember when you had to change the TV channel by turning a knob? Back when your only choices were whatever was showing on a very limited number of stations. And night owls got stuck with a video of the American flag waving and a test pattern.

Joey Cato has created a place where you can bask in the nostalgia of simpler times in the form of what appears to be an ancient analog TV. My Retro TV’s offers random clips from old TV series, specials, news items, and commercials. The TV has a power button that you must click to get it started, then there’s a knob you can click on to change the channel and be shown something different, even imitating the fuzz and buzz when it changes. You can pick what year you want to watch during any of the decades from the 1950s to the 2000s. Joey Cato also created My Retro Tunes which has music videos from the 1950s to 2019.

On My Retro TV you might find a clip from Barnaby Jones or stuff like this newsreel from 1962.

Thank you to Reader for sharing this really fun website.

Courtroom Nice Times!

Appearing in court can be a stressful time, especially so for juveniles and also for adults in recovery trying to get their lives back on track. Those dealing with trauma need special attention in these situations and in 2021 North Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul Newby created a task force to find ways to minimize additional trauma for those going through the court system.

The final report from that task force in 2023 recommended changes that might seem small but they were big for those who needed them. Things like simplifying the legalese and removing graffiti from holding cells. One judge, Sam Hamadani, was given financial assistance to improve her Juvenile Justice and Adult Recovery Courtroom. With help from artists the dreary room was transformed with colorful and serene wall murals. They added a room just for the kids with books and art materials, and headphones to shut out the noise. For the adults there were resources explaining the court system and freshly painted benches. They even slightly raised the temperature in the holding cell to make it less harsh.

The Public Defender for Wake County, Deonte’ Thomas, is happy with the improvements in Hamadani’s court, saying,

The pendulum of justice swings back and forth, and unfortunately, we’re in an era right now where it’s more on the side of ‘punish, punish, punish.’ But that is not what courts are for generally, and even more specifically for juveniles, that should not be what it’s about. It’s about correction, rehabilitation, second chances.

Those things make a difference in all of our lives.

Thank you to JCfromNC for this story.

Wildlife Nice Times!

There are lots of interstate highways across the country and they are in places where wildlife also needs space to move. It is a dangerous and deadly situation for both animals and humans. In an effort to reduce the collisions Colorado gave the critters their own overpass. And not just any overpass, this is the largest man-made wildlife crossing in North America.

The project was funded with $22 million from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and $8 million from the state of Colorado. But in a surprise twist the cost came in at just $15 million. Considering there are nearly 4,000 vehicle accidents with wildlife yearly in Colorado the benefits favor both man and beast.

Utilizing fencing to direct the wildlife to underpasses and the new overpass, Colorado has seen crashes between animals and vehicles drop by 91 percent! The 209 x 200 foot crossing has allowed pronghorn and elk to move freely and back into areas they had been avoiding. Not just the big animals use it, so do the small ones like foxes and frogs — with piles of wood put in place to allow the little critters to cross without getting eaten by predators. CDOT will be adding plants; the current drought has slowed down progress on the plan for vegetation to be included.

There are plans for more of these crossings all across Colorado. Brandon Marette, a biologist from the Colorado Park and Wildlife department said this,

“One of the most heartwarming moments for me was when CDOT sent me a picture of an elk mama taking her calf under I-25. All the hard work for six years, all came to fruition in that one moment. That elk with her calf was just standing there in safety, getting to the other side of I-25.”

Thank you to ElderlyLoudCatWomyn for this story.

Funny Commercial Nice Times!

That line may ring a bell, it was from Bob Uecker (Mr. Baseball) for Miller Lite, one in a series of ads he did for the beer company in the 1980s. This year’s World Series has the Tampa Bay Rays taking on the Milwaukee Brewers; Bob Uecker started his professional career playing for the Brewers from 1962-63; he ended his career announcing for the Brewers, spanning from 1971 till 2024. The team will be honoring him before the start of the Series on October 23.

Obama is back!

President Obama in Cleveland supporting Dr. Amy Acton and Sherrod Brown and he is classic Obama, this is the good stuff, shoot it right into my veins! I signed up to go but so did another 100,000 or so people, and I did not get the notification of where it was being held. Instead I watched it live on YouTube.

Sherrod introduces President Obama at 42:31. Describing Trump’s decorating of the White House:

This is Obama at the top of his game, give it a watch and stand up and cheer when he really gets going.

Wonkers’ Nice Times!

• From Dave’s Not Here: “A neighbor had hip replacement surgery and is recovering at home. I made a batch of homemade chicken noodle soup, and we carried it over. We all talked a bit and caught up for a spell.

  Couple hours later the phone rang. ‘That was the best chicken noodle soup I’ve ever had,’ neighbor said. Geez, I was only going for tasty. This made my week!”

• From cynmac: On 9/25/2026 cynmac met Grandmaster Flash at the book signing for his memoir.

  

• From ziggy: As requested, here is another one of my animal pencil sketches, a baby gorilla.

  

Random Recommends!

On this, my birthday weekend; Random Recommends! 1986’s The Fly, co-written and directed by the maestro of body horror, David Cronenberg. A remake of the classic 1958 film of the same name, the premise is the same: A scientist experimenting with teleportation slowly turns into a grotesque hybrid of man and fly after a test goes wrong. But there are no goofy fly masks here, no sir! There’s so much I love about this film: the legitimately tragic love story between Seth and Veronica; the effortless chemistry between Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis; Howard Shore’s music swerving between nerve-wracking and heart wrenching; Chris Walas and Stephen Dupuis’s fantastic special effects (on par with Rob Bottin’s work in The Thing); and Cronenberg’s refusal to offer easy answers or happy endings. For me, a true classic and one of Cronenberg’s best. Available with subscription on Hulu, Disney+, Peacock and Philo; $3.99 in the other places.

The song referenced in the title is (I’ve Had) The Time Of My Life by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes. You will most likely remember it from Dirty Dancing.

As we near Halloween, we finish with two badass women covering Season Of The Witch (originally by Donovan). The first is by Alanis Morissette, the second by Joan Jett.

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On October 25, 1940, John L. Lewis gave a speech denouncing Franklin Delano Roosevelt and endorsing the Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie. This alienated Lewis from the rest of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which he had founded and funded. To his credit I suppose, he resigned as head of the federation and then pulled his United Mine Workers of America out of the federation. But this moment showed the limitations of the man who had transformed the labor movement through bringing industrial unionism to America. It also showed how Lewis was determined to keep his unions independent of the Democratic Party, for better or for worse.

Lewis transformed the labor movement when he decided to leave the American Federation of Labor in 1937. Creating the Congress of Industrial Organizations and then marching out of the American Federation of Labor brought millions of people into the labor movement because he organized them on industrial lines, instead of the old craft model of the AFL. The AFL did not want to organize industrial workers period. There were millions of workers who wanted unions but couldn’t have them. The CIO then won major campaigns and created the United Auto Workers and United Steelworkers of America, and other giant unions with strong political agendas to transform the lives of working class Americans. Lewis employed boatloads of communist organizers to organize workers ranging from auto factories in Detroit to the mines and fields and timber camps of the American West.

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But don’t fool yourself — Lewis was a politically conservative man. He wasn’t an idiot — he understood what was needed for the labor movement to survive. But Lewis, like most of the old AFL leadership, was fundamentally a man with 19th century values. These were people who did not actually like class conflict that much. They did not like the US engaging with the rest of the world. One of the things that made Lewis infamous is him punching Carpenters president Big Bill Hutcheson on the floor of the 1935 AFL convention over the issue of industrial unionism. But those guys were old poker buddies and they were both Republicans their entire lives. Lewis would use the communists to serve his interests, but he was no radical at all.

So when the CIO formed, most of its leaders quickly realized that its future was going to be tied to the Democratic Party. One huge difference between the federations was their understanding of politics. The AFL preferred to stay above politics. Their leaders were naive. They still thought the future of labor was a contest to be decided between unions and employers in the contract, without a role for the government. The long history of government putting its thumb on the scale for the employers did not seem to break this. But new CIO leaders such as Sidney Hillman worked hard to seal those connections. They knew that the Roosevelt administration had created the legal conditions for unions to succeed, through the National Labor Relations Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act, not to mention his Supreme Court appointees.

But none of this made Lewis comfortable. He still saw the future of labor as between his workers — whom he was happy to mobilize to flex their power — and the employers. Moreover, like a lot of the AFL labor leaders, he was fundamentally an isolationist and hated FDR’s increased involvement in Europe as World War II developed.

So Lewis came out against FDR and went so far as to endorse Wendell Willkie for president. Now, Lewis’s move wasn’t strictly cynical. He seems to have really believed that FDR should have been a bought and sold man of the labor movement. He felt that Roosevelt did not put enough effort behind getting labor legislation passed. He believed that organized labor needed political independence to play the parties off each other and increase their power. He was concerned that organized labor would just become a junior party in the Democratic coalition that didn’t have real power but also didn’t have the ability to extricate itself. He wasn’t wrong about this. That’s exactly what happened to organized labor in the postwar period and it continues to be a problem for the labor movement today, though the Biden administration deserves credit for centering union concerns more than Obama, Clinton, or Carter.

When Lewis denounced FDR, he quickly found out that the rest of the CIO didn’t see him as their personal lord and savior. He had some suspicions that would happen. Lewis was also an autocrat’s autocrat, a man with a long history purging his union of anyone who challenged his power. Other labor leaders might be autocrats too — many of them were — but they weren’t going to put up with it from Lewis. So Lewis pulled the UMWA out of the CIO in 1942. This was a serious move. His union had mostly paid for it after all. His lieutenant Phil Murray, who now headed the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, did not follow him out. Murray understood what made his new union succeed and it wasn’t Lewis’s feelings. It was the government sitting the steel companies down and telling them as the war started that if they wanted contracts from the government, they were going to have to accept the union.

Lewis did not just then sit on his hands. He simply was not going to sit back and let the government dictate the terms of employment to labor during the war. Almost every union gave a no-strike pledge, but not the United Mine Workers. Lewis was more than happy to pull his workers out of the mines during the war, imperiling the war effort. In 1943, he did this very thing and 500,000 people went on strike. For Lewis, the war effort simply was not worth considering for a labor leader. He was there for his workers and if the employers didn’t like it, they should give the miners what they wanted.

The government saw this situation somewhat differently, to say the least. Roosevelt nationalized the mines and Congress passed the Smith-Connally Act in 1943, which laid the groundwork for the Taft-Hartley Act that busted much of labor’s successful tactics in 1947. Alarmed, FDR vetoed Smith-Connally, but Congress overrode the veto, demonstrating just how much Lewis had overplayed his hand. This laid the groundwork for the anti-union legislation that would succeed to reducing labor power after the war.

FURTHER READING:

Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography

Steven Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor

Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor

Robert Zieger, The CIO, 1935-1955

Randi Storch, Working Hard for the American Dream: Workers and Their Unions, World War I to the Present

A high school musical + zombie horror + Christmas + comedy = Anna And The Apocalypse. It may sound like a hot mess but somehow each theme is done really well and they pull it all together to make for a fun flick. The songs are memorable and not cheesy, same thing for the zombies. There is definitely a Shaun Of The Dead vibe happening; because it is a film that is scary undead, run for your life, don’t take it too seriously but yet still deals with the terror and sadness that one might face in an apocalypse kind of cinema.

Anna and her friends are near the end of their high school years and starting to think about the future. Anna wants to travel but her dad wants her to go to university. John wants Anna’s love although he is securely in the friend zone. Steph wants to spend the holiday with her girlfriend; after her parents took off to Mexico she doesn’t want to be alone but even the girl she loves has abandoned her. Nick is a dick in need of redemption. And Lisa and Chris just want to make out.

As morning breaks on a new day, Anna and John dance with oblivious joy on their separate routes to school. John feels love and Anna feels independence, and they’re so caught up in their daydreams they fail to see the devastation happening around them. Blissfully unaware until the zombie snowman shows up and loses his head. They break one of the sillier unwritten rules for movies about the undead when John actually says the word zombie. Because these teenagers are quite aware of what they’re going through, and the changes they’re about to experience in their lives may be even bigger than the ones they experienced before the zombie apocalypse.

As reality sinks in and Anna and John see the smoke rising, they head to the closest safe place they can think of, the bowling alley where they have shitty jobs. There they meet up with Steph and Chris, they are hoping to get on the internet. It is really fascinating how much this means to them, it is a connection to other people. The four of them sing of wanting to hear a human voice while looking at a screen.

They realize they need to save themselves and the ones they love. That is now all that that matters, the people they hold close, just wanting to hear a human voice.

I have many plans already in my head for when the zombie apocalypse hits, it is a question that those of us who love this genre can answer quickly. Please share yours in the non-comments! I know there’s plenty of us here, zombie fans unite. What is the attraction to this type of entertainment?

“Catharsis through chaos.”

Here are some of my recommendations for free zombie entertainment, some are trashy, some are scary, all are fun:

Cooties

Cockneys Vs. Zombies

Day Of The Dead

Z Nation (TV series, 5 seasons)

[REC] or Quarantine (I consider these films to be part of the zombie genre.)

Anna And the Apocalypse stars Ella Hunt, Sarah Swire, Ben Wiggins, Malcolm Cumming, Marli Siu, Christopher Leveaux, Paul Kaye, and Mark Benton. Directed by John McPhail.

To make requests and see the movie lists and schedules, go to WonkMovie.

The animated short is Rooty Toot Toot created by UPA and John Hubley in 1951. It is not a kid’s cartoon, it is a story of revenge and murder told through song.

Our Halloween Movie Night selection is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), available with subscription on Peacock, AMC+, Prime; free with ads on Tubi, Pluto TV, Xumo Play, and Plex; $2.99-3.99 in the usual places.

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Having ended bullying with her Be Best campaign, haunted porcelain figurine Melania Trump needed a challenge. What could occupy her prodigious energy and time between spa treatments? Solving world hunger? Ending cancer? Spending five minutes alone with her husband without wishing for the sweet veil of death to descend on her?

Oh, ending the Ukraine-Russia war? Sure, why not. Might as well take a run at it while she’s waiting for the latest Botox injections to cure.

On Friday, the first lady announced that she had brokered a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine. A temporary ceasefire. In one city, Oleshky, which has been occupied by Russia for almost five years and has been so cut off from the world that the few remaining residents are facing starvation.

Da Chicago pope, Leo, has been trying to get Vladimir Putin to agree to a brief pause in the fighting so humanitarian aid can get in and any civilians who want to leave can do so. Then on Friday, we learned that Melania Trump had also been lending her time to the effort. In fact, if you listen to her and the paid toady she has glazing her on right-wing TV networks, she did all the work.

Is Melania, in claiming responsibility for brokering the ceasefire, stealing the pope’s valor? Let us consider the sequence of events:

1. The Pope calls Vladimir Putin from his hospital bed after surgery for lung cancer to lobby the Butcher of the Donbas for a ceasefire around Oleshky so aid can get in and civilians can leave. It is only the latest in a year and a half of conversations about the war between the two men.

2. A week later, the ceasefire is announced.

3. Melania says, “I did it! Me, Melania! I am greatest first lady in history of United States! Take that, Ida McKinley!”

Hey, don’t tell us, lady. Tell your husband, the president, who capitulated so completely to Putin last week that the Russian leader figured he could humor the old man. Make himself look reasonable to anyone who isn’t an idiot. He tossed you a bone and you grabbed at it like a Doberman.

The announcement was made on Newsmax by Marc Beckman, the senior adviser who has spent the past months trying to convince the public that Melania Trump is “the single most consequential first lady in the history of our nation.” That he said this on television without his tongue immediately swelling up and choking off his airway is probably proof of Satan’s existence:

“In my opinion, this is the first step in everlasting peace between these two nations,” Beckman told the golden retrievers manning the Newsmax anchor desk. Oh sure, man. Melania Trump is going to get Vladimir Putin to do what his flailing, contracting economy and 1.5 million soldiers killed, wounded or missing haven’t: Give up his decades-long imperial ambitions to reconstruct the Russian empire of Peter the Great.

Beckman was back at it on Saturday on Fox, crediting Melon with doing all the work and claiming the pope just sort of rode her coattails and basked in her reflected glory:

This is true if you conveniently ignore the fact that stopping the Ukraine war has been on the pope’s agenda since the beginning of his papacy a year and a half ago. Last week was far from the first time he’s called Vladimir Putin to discuss what it would take to bring a resolution to the conflict.

We honestly don’t remember any first lady having a hype man before, or at least not one who was this unsubtle and embarrassing. John Holmes couldn’t have done a better glaze job.

Could Melon really have had something to do with the ceasefire, which won’t start until Oct. 29, and thus right now is more of a concept than an actual thing? Sure. She has been yammering for over a year about Ukraine and her great work getting Putin to return 34 kidnapped Ukrainian children to their families. (Only about 20,000 more to go!) She has written letters and claims to have a direct line to Putin. Which isn’t that unusual. Plenty of people, for a variety of reasons, have the numbers of their spouses’ friends programmed into their phones.

And the spouses of leaders can play important roles in diplomatic efforts. First ladies throughout history have probably not gotten the credit they deserve for smoothing their husbands’ relationships with foreign leaders and softening their images with the publics of other nations along with our own.

Of course, if you are Raisa Gorbachev you can almost derail nuclear disarmament talks by being a huge bitch to Nancy Reagan. But at least Nancy Reagan — and we can’t believe we are saying this, given that she was no stranger to the “being a bitch to other people” department — made the effort.

So how much did Melania’s efforts play into this outcome? It is impossible to say, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind.

First, given how much he’s won from Trump the last couple of weeks, it makes sense for Putin to throw him one tiny victory that will likely change nothing about the ongoing war. It’s not as if he’s giving up the territory, just letting some humanitarian aid into it. It costs him nothing.

Second, many of the negotiators and leaders involved in the temporary truce thanked Melania for her contributions. But of course it is in everyone’s interest to flatter her and, indirectly, the walking cholesterol clot that she’s married to. Particularly the Ukrainians, given the president has recently abandoned them and aligned himself with Russia.

Finally, call us cynical, but why after all these years is Melon, who has been the least visible first lady of our lifetime, suddenly jumping up and down to find a high-profile cause? Did she realize she only has two years left and her legacy has mostly been putting up Christmas decorations at the White House that replace any holiday vibe with that of an abstract film by a student who has watched too much German Expressionism?

In other words, Melon has the usual Trumpist arrogance and neediness for praise that afflicts the rest of the family. Thus we are given the impression that no one else could have pulled this off, only Melania can go to Moscow, et cetera and so forth.

From her statement on the White House website:

“It was abundantly clear that without my intervention, the possibility to bring humanitarian aid into the city and to evacuate the elderly would be impossible,” she said in a statement.

Okay, sure. The pope did not need divine intervention to get the ball into the end zone; he needed Melania Trump.

Melon’s statement also had this extremely funny line:

“I have also secured an impartial American media organization to accompany and document Russian and Ukrainian teams on the ground throughout the process. This will play a significant role in ensuring that the wishes of each family are faithfully respected.”

That impartial American media organization? It’s Newsmax. Which we suppose is a step up from sending LindellTV or the Gateway Pundit, but not by much.

Of course, if you wanted to really spread the good word, you’d get multiple media organizations to cover the blessed event. What Melon is doing here is getting a right-wing network to stage a photo op for her husband’s administration. Did we mention that a vast majority of the public disagrees with Trump’s Ukraine policy?

The United States used to have a secretary of State and an entire diplomatic corps that would have done all the legwork here. But this is the Trump administration, which throws jobs at Trump family members the same way Donald might have once told Eric to take over the family winery because Don Jr. was too busy developing a Trump Tower in Manila. This is Melon pulling her weight.

You know what would be a hysterical troll? If the Nobel Committee awards Melania the next Peace Prize. JD Vance will be taking the oath of office approximately fifteen seconds later.

And if the Nobel committee refuses to recognize the world-historic peacemaking abilities of yet another Trump, maybe FIFA can make up another peace prize to give her.

Don’t get us wrong. Any relief of the suffering of the civilians left in Oleshky is a plus. But at the end of the day, this is the Trumps once again using the nation’s resources for their own self-aggrandizement. Any help to real people is purely accidental.

Does the White House think this softens the president’s image? Helps with the midterms? Makes everyone forget that Trump just finished selling Ukraine out?

All we know is that the Trumps don’t do anything out of the kindness of the blackened cinders that are their hearts.

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[NYT / WH Website]

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There’s a lot of real shitbirds who are part of the Trump administration, but Donald Trump has a plan for that, I guess. Can you guess what it is? One guess!

If it was anything other than “using his power to do lots of corruptions,” you are totally wrong and also congratulations on waking up from your decades-long coma, kinda.

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So here’s what we’re contending with this week: the existence of a pardon racket, revealed (again we mean) by Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Alina Habba, a name that I block out every time as I hear it and then have to learn all over again, and a Venezuelan billionaire dope named Julio Herrera Velutini, who wanted a pardon for his convictions on conspiracy, federal program bribery, and wire fraud.

But Herrera didn’t just want a pardon. He really, really, really super wanted it. And he’s a billionaire, so suck it, plebes!

So [Julio Herrera Velutini] deployed his lawyer, Christopher M. Kise, the former Florida solicitor general who was on President Trump’s personal legal team, to help with a plea for clemency. His 27-year-old daughter, Isabela Herrera, who is an American citizen, donated $3.5 million to a super PAC tied to Mr. Trump. But as of last fall, the pardon remained elusive.

Then the Herrera family hired Alina Habba, who had been one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers and at the time was an adviser at the Justice Department. They offered her $10 million a year for four years along with a range of bonuses. In total, including bonuses, she was guaranteed more than $50 million over four years, according to interviews and documents obtained by The New York Times.

If you’re rich and you really really want something, you can just throw money at it until it’s yours, and that is why being a billionaire is like being kicked in the head by a horse, every single day, with apologies to whomever I stole that phrase from.

According to Salon, Trump hired Habba because he saw her on TV (Fox News, of course) defending some fucked-up thing he had done. Soon, she was a busy little bee, working her way up the ranks because boots don’t just lick themselves!

And then the Herrera family hired Habba because they saw her on TV defending some fucked-up thing Trump had done, and you’ll never believe what happened next! Herrera got that pardon.

Should Habba be worried about jail, seeing as how she was working for the Justice Department when she got that fuckin SWEET fifty mil to suborn justice? Actually, she should!

She finalized the deal while still acting U.S. attorney for New Jersey. And she started work as “general counsel” for the company on Jan. 1—when she was still a senior adviser to the attorney general.

Jay Kuo walks you through the various statutes in that link back there, which is good, because that is not our bag! Alina Habba got her bag though, and oh would we love to see that bag IN JAIL!

But Herrera’s just one out of many, many corrupt people who have been paying off the President of the United States for official pardons. There’s a whole international industry of warlords, ghouls, fuckwits, shitlords, and other assorted filth circling around Trump like so many vultures, except that vultures actually perform beneficial services for the environment and have an important place in local ecologies.

So sez the New York Times:

In Mr. Trump’s second term, a pardon industry has sprouted up, with wealthy criminals paying well-connected lawyers, fixers and lobbyists to appeal to the administration and its allies in an effort to secure pardons. Many pardon seekers have come to the conclusion that supporting Mr. Trump and his political agenda is the fastest way to secure clemency.

Some people looking for pardons have reported paying hundreds of thousands of dollars or even $1 million to hire people promising access to the president or influence over the pardon process.

All sorts of filth has been lining up to pick over the corpse of our once-vibrant, if unevenly applied, justice system. It’s pretty disgusting and disturbing to see all these assholes walk around free. However, the Trump administration keeps a handy list of the pardonees online, which has been archived quite a lot and which will be very helpful when the next administration of the United States, or whatever we will have left after this shit, has to go back and un-pardon them so that they can be re-convicted!

Here’s just a tiny smattering of the hundreds of presidential pardons and clemencies, in no particular order:

George Santos, former member of Congress and all-around enemy of good aesthetics
Rod Blagojevich, former Illinois governor and murderer of good hairstyles
Brian Kelsey, former senator
Juan Hernández, former president of Uruguay and convicted drug trafficker
Jason Galanis, election conspiracist and defrauder of Oglala Sioux
Changpeng Zhao, that Binance guy with an unsettlingly lightbulb-shaped head
Thomas Edward Caldwell, a January 6th insurrectionist, but there are like 1,500 more!
Michele Fiore, who used public funds intended for a slain police officer memorial to pay for cosmetic surgery
HDR Global Trading Ltd., a crypto company (come ON, you can’t fucking pardon a corporation, but I guess you can, if you’re corrupt as fuck)
Ozy Media, Inc. and Carlos Watson, (hahaha, there are so many corporations in this pardon list)
a whole bunch of other assholes, and, of course,
Herrera.

So many of them are frauders, and guess who gets to keep their stolen funds once they’re pardoned? ALL OF THEM!

I would offer more names, but seeing too many of them together is way too depressing, so I guess you can just check the rest of that list for yourself!

I’m old enough to remember the good old days, when there was a controversy that went on for months and months and years and decades about Bill Clinton pardoning Marc “Fugitive Financier” Rich without going through the proper channels. Back then, I thought it might be in good faith, but I was young and naive, and everyone involved back then hadn’t yet shown themselves to be fully corrupted by decades of unearned power, so that’s on me.

Then again, it’s not like the president has unlimited reach, despite what this administration and its nearly completely captured Supreme Court would have you believe. There are limits to these commutations and clemencies, and they don’t vacate convictions so the people who received them aren’t running around completely free and clear. According to ProtectDemocracy.org, presidential pardons have to be in the public interest and can’t allow for more criming!

Pardons cannot be used to obstruct justice or as part of a bribery scheme. Such pardons would violate certain federal criminal laws enacted by Congress and would thus be unlawful. […]

Additionally, obstruction laws prohibit corruptly motivated actions to hinder a criminal investigation “by means of bribery” or by “corruptly persuad[ing] a witness or potential witness to withhold information about the commission of a federal offense.” Promising a pardon to prevent a witness from cooperating with an investigation would thus constitute obstruction. Consider how President Trump’s counsel discussed the possibility of pardons with Paul Manafort’s counsel. After Manafort’s counsel was told by Trump’s to “sit tight” and that he would be “taken care of,” Manafort refused to cooperate with a grand jury and investigators.

The president cannot exempt himself from criminal laws. And in the event that the president violates the law, he is not immune from liability by virtue of having used an official act to commit the violation.

Ah, to be back in the heady optimistic days of March 2024, when this was published and we still sort of had a government.

Here’s some more literal reprobates who we are going to need to track down and scoop up with butterfly nets, when the time comes. This is from the first Trump administration, so no one can say in 2026 that there weren’t signs. These are people (and corporations) who were convicted of very bad things for very good reasons! The best thing I can say, which is sort of damning with faint praise, is that at least these fuckers are losing a lot of money to Trump to get their stupid corrupt bullshit pardoned, I guess.

The abuse of clemency is one of those things that was a big deal during Trump’s first term, and now everyone is so exhausted by all the fuckery that we’re just, like, of course this is going on, of course it is, but we’re all just trying to stay alive over here under the Super-Duper El Niño’s looming skies, thank you very much.

But it’s important to remember this, because we may be in the utter shit as a country right now, but there will come a time that we will need to remember it, and put things right by perp-walking their asses right back to prison, hopefully as they are screaming their heads off in front of news cameras.

In conclusion, fuck these people!

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