Former South Carolina GOP Gov. Nikki Haley reminded everyone she still exists Sunday. Maybe she felt a little jealous because Senator Tim Scott is considered a top contender for the GOP vice presidential slot in 2024. She’s not content to just fade into the background as a loyal Donald Trump enabler who casually suggests President Joe Biden is senile. She’s also demonstrating that she’s just as gross as GOP sedition caucus members Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert.

Here’s what Haley tweeted on Sunday, God’s day for watching football:

HALEY: When I was governor, I worked with Democrats who still believed in America. I didn’t share their views on policy, but at least we agreed on some basic principles. Those days are over. The Democratic Party has become the Socialist Party.

Yep, when Haley was elected governor in the distant past of 2010, Democrats still believed in America, that shining city on a hill. Now the Democratic Party is the Socialist Party, led by noted socialist Joe Biden from Stalingrad and his radical Senate accomplices Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.

Bolsheviks all.

Back in the real world, the Democrats are not a socialist party. Yes, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, and Jamal Bowman are members of the Democratic Socialists of America. That’s five Democrats out of 222 in the House of Representatives. There were also six self-identified DSA members in the Democratic caucus well before 2010. We’re hardly witnessing a socialist takeover of the party that twice rejected Bernie Sanders in favor of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, both of whom Republicans still insisted on calling socialists. It’s as if the word doesn’t mean anything, other than as convenient shorthand for “n-word lover."

Meanwhile, 139 out of 213 House Republicans voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and install Trump as the forever president. A clear majority of Republicans is openly opposed to democracy and much of the remainder is at least fascist-curious. And while we’ve often noted that the GOP’s been hot garbage for decades now, this is a far more dramatic shift and an escalating threat.

https://www.wonkette.com/nikki-haley-still-an-asshole

"...at least fascist-curious"...

Source: New York Times

Evergrande and Kaisa must come up with hundreds of millions of dollars in days. Beijing sought to reassure markets overall, but signaled it might let Evergrande fail.

China’s debt-loaded property market is headed for a reckoning, as China Evergrande Group and another troubled housing developer face deadlines for millions of dollars’ worth of payments in a test of Beijing’s narrative that it can handle the threat to the Chinese economy.

Evergrande, with bills totaling $300 billion or more, will need to come up with more than $82 million in cash by the end of Monday in the United States to fend off creditors. The developer said late last week that it was unable to make a separate payment worth $260 million, an indication investors took to mean the beginning of its eventual demise. Its shares tumbled by 20 percent on Monday in Asia.

The other developer in distress, Kaisa Group, must pay bondholders $400 million on Tuesday after it said it failed last week to get approval from investors to renegotiate the terms.

China’s property sector has kept global markets on edge for months, as developers have struggled to find cash to pay their soaring debts. They have been hampered by slowing demand from home buyers, falling property prices in many Chinese cities and Beijing’s crackdown on excessive bank lending.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/business/china-evergrande-kaisa-property.html

CLEARWATER, Fla. (WFLA) — A Pinellas County man called police Saturday afternoon when he found a nearly five-foot-long red-tailed boa deep inside his new couch, Clearwater police said.

In a Facebook post, officers say the man bought the couch days earlier adding he believed the snake was hiding in the couch since it was moved inside his home.

In response, officers temporarily removed the couch from the home and found the snake burrowed deep inside the couch. They then carefully extracted the snake from its hiding place adding “it was easily five feet long,” the Facebook caption said.

Authorities say the snake was taken to a local pet store after being plucked from the couch.

https://www.wfla.com/news/pinellas-county/its-a-jungle-out-there-clearwater-police-pull-5-foot-python-from-mans-new-couch/

Only in Florida...

During the run-up to the November election between President Joe Biden and the former guy, Fox News and other conservative propaganda machines went back to the only playbook the Republican party has used for decades—scandal mud-slinging. Having not spent the last 30-plus years building a boogieman out of Joe Biden (as they had with Hilary Clinton), the Hail-Mary attempt at tilting public opinion away from President Biden was to push a scandal surrounding the reported finding of the soon-to-be President’s son. Hunter Biden, who has had a long and well documented history of addiction issues and a complicated divorce, gave the right wing rags the promise of just enough seediness to mix with the implication of some vague whiff of impropriety on the part of Joe Biden during his tenure as Vice President next to Barack Obama.

It was all hot garbage, and most of what was leaked showed a man with a lot of problems and messiness, guilt and shame, recovery and stumbling. One of the most vociferous sounds to rise out of the ultra-conservative cacophony machine was Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. It wasn’t a surprise as Carlson has shown himself to be willing to do and say anything in the service of libertarian and right-wing nihilism, as long as he maintains power and financial support.

Guess what? Weird story. According to Vice and the Daily Mail, wacky former Trump conspiracy theorist, Lin Wood—who has been attacking everybody and everything not named Lin Wood of late—claims to have access to and has posted all kinds of screen grabs. Those screengrabs purport to be correspondence between Hunter Biden and Tucker Carlson. If real, and they have not yet been verified, they show a very close buddy buddy-type relationship between two pretty wealthy guys. In fact, Tucker seems to have asked Hunter to write a college recommendation letter for his son, Buckley.*

*Every time—barf.

The correspondence seems to cover a period of their friendship between 2014 and 2016. Here’s the exchange where Tucker “can't thank you enough for writing that letter to Georgetown on Buckley's behalf. So nice of you. I know it'll help. Hope you're great and we can all get dinner soon.” Buckley ended up going to another college and graduating about a year before Tucker made the baseless claim that Hunter Biden had ‘kiddie porn’ on his computer? No good deed and all.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/12/3/2067478/-Tucker-Carlson-asked-Hunter-Biden-to-help-him-get-his-son-into-college

Ghislaine Maxwell was a boss who made almost impossible demands.

She ordered employees at Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion to keep their eyes lowered, to not speak unless they were spoken to — and to clean up and put away their sex toys, an ex-houseman testified Thursday.

No detail was too small — from ensuring that every tissue box was full to checking for holes in Epstein’s fence so that Maxwell’s Yorkie, “Max,” wouldn’t escape.

Maxwell — Epstein’s former girlfriend — was Epstein’s “number 2” and managed Epstein’s households, doing most of the hiring and firing of the staff for his homes in Palm Beach, New Mexico, New York and on his private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

To help the employees remember all their daily chores, Maxwell compiled a 58-page instruction booklet that included checklists of tasks that the employees had to do every day for every room in the house.

https://news.yahoo.com/epstein-houseman-describes-degrading-regimen-023053300.html

Antebellum pro-slavery radicals spoke freely of secession and violence; Democratic Party paramilitaries planned their attacks on Reconstruction governments in public view; and the men who codified segregation into Jim Crow did so in the open. Bad actors, in other words, do not always make their plans in secret.

When people plot to do wrong, they often do so in plain sight. To the extent that they succeed, it is at least partly because no one took them as seriously as they should have.

And so it goes with the plot to restore Donald Trump to power over and against the will of the voters. The first attempt, prefigured in Trump’s refusal in 2016 to say whether he would accept the results of the presidential election, culminated in an attack on the Capitol this year, broadcast on camera to the entire world. Since then, the former president and his allies have made no secret of their intent to run the same play a second time.

Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser and White House official, hosts a popular far-right podcast where he has urged his listeners to seize control of local election administration. “It’s going to be a fight, but this is a fight that must be won. We don’t have an option,” he said in May. “We’re going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/opinion/trump-bannon-2024.html

NEW YORK—Officials from Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center issued a statement Thursday acknowledging a security lapse that led to Ghislaine Maxwell spending the night in the prison’s noose room.

“As a high-risk prisoner, Ghislaine Maxwell should never have been allowed in the noose room for more than two hours unaccompanied at a time,” said warden Heriberto Tellez, who explained that the mistake that sent the defendant to the cell full of dozens of nooses dangling from the ceiling was the result of a clerical error.

“We apologize for the oversight and promise it won’t happen again. And beyond that, the fact that water started rushing into the noose room and filled the space to the ceiling is very regrettable.”

At press time, officials confirmed that they had rectified their mistake by transferring Maxwell to the fire room.

https://www.theonion.com/prison-acknowledges-security-lapse-that-led-to-ghislain-1848147121

Sen. Rick Scott of Florida wanted to talk about anything but abortion when he was asked whether the issue would motivate GOP voters in next year's midterms.

“They’re talking about inflation. They’re talking about the border. They’re talking about the Afghanistan debacle. They’re talking about parental involvement in education,” Scott, the Senate GOP campaign chief, told The Washington Post. “If you look at the polls and what people are caring about, that’s what they’re focused on.”

Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who is facing a challenge next year from Democratic Rep. Val Demings, downplayed the matter in his reelection bid.

“It’s never been a political issue to me,” he said, noting he errs on the side of life. “So that’s been my position pretty consistently, and there’s no mystery about it.”

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/12/2/2067314/-Republicans-are-already-running-scared-on-abortion-and-they-should-be

The league suspended each player for for “misrepresenting their vaccination status.’’

TAMPA ―The NFL has suspended Bucs receiver Antonio Brown, safety Mike Edwards and former Bucs receiver John Franklin III three games without pay for using fake COVID-19 vaccination cards.

All three players accepted their discipline and waived their right to an appeal, the league said in a statement released Thursday.

The league began its investigation after the Tampa Bay Times reported that Brown obtained and utilized a fake COVID-19 vaccination card, according to his former live-in chef, Steven Ruiz.

The NFL Players Association represented all three players during a joint review that supported the allegations and found all three players violated league protocols.

https://www.tampabay.com/sports/bucs/2021/12/02/nfl-suspends-antonio-brown-mike-edwards-john-franklin-iii-for-fake-vaccination-cards/

Way to go, Antonio...

Robert Kessler, 69, was arrested in connection with the murder of a woman found in McKay Bay. His daughter, 8, has been with the Department of Children and Families since. Her family wants her to come home.

An 8-year-old girl is a witness in the gruesome death of a woman whose dismembered body was found in Tampa’s McKay Bay. Her father, Robert Kessler, is charged in the homicide. The girl’s family hasn’t seen her since.

The child, whom the Tampa Bay Times is not naming because of her age, has been in the custody of the Department of Children and Families since her father’s arrest on Nov. 24, according to her maternal grandparents, Michael and Beth Gray. The girl’s mother, April Thompson, 34, died in September of an accidental drug overdose, they said.

Sarah Gray, Thompson’s sister and the 8-year-old’s aunt, said they didn’t get a clear answer on where her niece was until Monday. They’d been searching for answers since Kessler’s arrest. The Gray family is hoping to gain custody of the girl.

Robert Kessler previously had full custody of the girl and Thompson had visitation rights.

https://www.tampabay.com/news/crime/2021/12/01/tampa-girl-8-is-witness-in-fathers-dismemberment-murder-case-family-wants-her-home/

Hope this kid turns out OK in the future.