As 2024 got underway, Susie Wiles, one of Donald Trump’s top advisers, spoke with wealthy Republican Party donors at a luxurious Florida hotel. That wouldn’t have been especially notable, except for the fact that Wiles delivered a curious message to her deep-pocketed audience.
As NBC News reported at the time, she specifically warned the GOP donors that they’d probably hear the former president say all kinds of ridiculous things in the coming days, weeks and months, and they should simply disregard those comments. The prospective campaign contributors were instead told to focus on the fact that Trump was likely to win, whether his public comments made sense or not.
This came to mind watching Sen. Tim Scott on CNBC trying to defend the former president’s stated plans for inflation-driving tariffs. HuffPost noted what happened after the South Carolina Republican was asked to defend Trump’s threat to hit John Deere with a 200% tariff in a possible second term.
‘You agree with all the tariffs. Do you think John Deere, 200%? Do you think companies that make stuff here should have a 15% tax? That’s industrial policy, isn’t it?’ [‘Squawk Box’ host Joe Kernen] asked of Trump, whose tariff proposals have prompted warnings by economists. ‘I believe that President Trump oftentimes talks in the abstract, number one,’ Scott replied.”
It was at that point when CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin interjected, asking, “What are we supposed to believe, then?” [video at the link]
That need not be a rhetorical question.
In reality, the GOP senator almost certainly knows that Trump’s increasingly bizarre tariff agenda would be a disaster. I can say this with some confidence because Scott is on record already having said so.
The result, of course, was a challenge for the South Carolinian: He was on national television as a surrogate for Trump, whose tariff plan he opposes. And so, asked about his party’s nominee and his bad idea, Scott was reduced to saying that Trump “talks in the abstract.”
This generated on-set chuckling, and for good reason. For one thing, as far as the former president is concerned, there’s nothing “abstract” about his economic and trade plans, which he talks up on a nearly daily basis.
For another, to Sorkin’s point, we’re in the midst of a presidential campaign. The stakes couldn’t be much higher. If Americans are supposed to see the Republican Party’s presidential nominee and perceive his promises as “abstractions,” the result is a race in which no one will know — or even can know — what the candidate actually intends to do with power.
Many Americans have forgotten about Jan. 6 and Donald Trump’s plot against the 2020 election. They’re now getting a timely reminder from the special counsel.
After Republican-appointed justices on the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that presidents cannot be prosecuted for their official acts, it fell to special counsel Jack Smith to tweak one of his cases against Donald Trump. Specifically, the prosecutor and his team had to tell a federal court that the indictment against the former president for his alleged election-related crimes can continue, regardless of the high court’s controversial decision.
Last week, Smith’s office submitted a court filing, not only explaining why the criminal charges remain on firm ground, but also offering new details about the merits of the case. For obvious reasons, the Republican candidate, who has denied any wrongdoing, did not want this court filing to reach the public during the election season.
Broadly speaking, there are a handful of angles to the story. The first is the legal dimension, as prosecutors take careful steps to protect their case and explain why Trump’s post-defeat plot must not be seen as an official presidential act.
The second angle is the scope of the new revelations. Politico had an excellent report chronicling some of the most notable details, though NBC News’ report highlighted an especially memorable quote from the former president, which helped summarize his post-defeat perspective in a tidy and important way.
Another piece of evidence Smith’s team plans to introduce is testimony from an unnamed assistant to the president who overheard a remark Trump made to family members aboard Marine One after the 2020 election. ‘It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election,’ Trump allegedly said. ‘You still have to fight like hell.’”
But the other angle to keep in mind is the timing of these developments. The Washington Post had a good report along these lines, noting that the court filing “at the very least served as a late reminder of an ugly, Trump-inspired episode, with just more than a month to go before voters decided whether to return him to the White House.”
Those reminders and new details have been few and far between since the Jan. 6 committee wrapped up its business nearly two years ago. Trump hasn’t appeared to pay any real political price for his four indictments, which include a financial fraud conviction in Manhattan. But many casual voters appear to be unfamiliar with these cases, and the race is looking extremely close. That makes the new disclosures untimely for Trump.”
I can appreciate why this might seem difficult for well-informed news consumers to believe, but a significant chunk of the population no longer remembers Jan. 6 or the GOP nominee’s efforts to overturn the will of his own country’s voters. [video at the link]
I’m reminded of a report from Columbia Journalism Review, which spoke to Celinda Lake, one of the leading pollsters who worked on President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, who was stunned during a focus group session earlier this year with swing voters.
According to the report, Lake had asked how the voters felt about Trump’s indictment related to Jan. 6.
“They go, ‘What court case around Jan. 6?’” the pollster recalled. “These were swing voters, and about half of them weren’t sure what we were talking about. And I said, ‘Well, you know, the insurrection and that he was the one that provoked it.’ They go, ‘Oh, yeah. I kind of forgot about that.’”
A few months later, a national poll from Yahoo News and YouGov found an astonishing number of Americans were unfamiliar with the criminal cases against the former president.
Many voters don’t know a jury found Trump guilty of 34 felonies. They don’t know that a different jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse. They don’t know that a separate court found that Trump oversaw a business that engaged in systemic fraud.
And they don’t know that federal prosecutors have charged Trump with a variety of felonies related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. As Election Day nears and early voting gets underway across much of the country, Smith’s filing offers a timely reminder.
The Department of Homeland Security is warning that domestic violent extremists, many of whom will be motivated by political policy and ideological grievances, pose the most “significant physical threat” to the election system and those who will work to administer it next month.
In its annual Homeland Threat Assessment released Tuesday, DHS said both domestic extremists and nation-state-aligned foreign malign influence actors pose a threat to the 2024 election administration process. In particular, the department is warning that the potential for violence by domestic extremists won’t diminish after Election Day.
“Some domestic violent extremists (DVEs) likely view a wide range of targets indirectly and directly associated with elections as viable targets for violence with the intent of instilling fear among voters, candidates, and election workers, as well as disrupting election processes leading up to and after the November election,” DHS officials said.
“We expect DVEs will pose the most significant physical threat to government officials, voters, and elections-related personnel and infrastructure, including polling places, ballot drop box locations, voter registration sites, campaign events, political party offices, and vote counting sites,” the report continued.
Officials warned that extremists motivated by “anti-government or anti‑authority” ideology, “many of whom likely will be inspired by partisan policy grievances or conspiracy theories, will pose the most significant threat.” DHS also warned that “perceptions of election fraud” may motivate some bad actors to try to disrupt voting and “ballot counting processes.”
Per the report:
We have also recently observed a rise in disruptive tactics targeting election officials and offices—like those observed in past election cycles—including hoax bomb threats, swatting, doxxing, and mailing white powder letters, intended to instill fear and disrupt campaign and election operations. We remain concerned that the use of these tactics will increase particularly as we approach Election Day, with the intent of disrupting voting and ballot counting processes. Some DVEs could also react violently should their preferred candidate lose, or they could seek to exploit possible civil unrest if there are perceptions of election fraud.
It’s the type of official warning from the Department of Homeland Security that’s become more common in the years since Jan. 6 and since anti-government extremists found a prophet in Donald Trump, who has no qualms about embracing conspiracy theories or sacrificing democratic institutions at the alter of his grievances.
It’s also all part and parcel of what election administrators on the ground have been telling TPM for months as we report on the 2024 election threat level and the ways in which election administration has had to change since 2020, as election administrators and poll workers increasingly find themselves in the crosshairs of election deniers’ and Trump followers’ ire.
Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance is facing criticism from a veterans advocacy group for his refusal to condemn the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump.
During Tuesday’s primetime debate with Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, Vance was asked about the attempt to illegally seat “alternative” electors backing Trump instead of the election’s real winner, now-President Joe Biden.
Vance deflected from the question and told debate co-moderator Norah O’Donnell that he and Donald Trump are “focused on the future.”
“Remember, [Donald Trump] said that on Jan. 6, the protesters ought to protest peacefully. And on Jan. 20, what happened? Joe Biden became the President. Donald Trump left the White House,” Vance added. [Slick, smarmy Vance attempting to rewrite history.]
Walz characterized Trump’s election denial as a threat to democracy and asked Vance if Trump lost the election. Vance again reiterated that he was “focused on the future.”
“That is a damning nonanswer,” Walz replied.
VoteVets, a progressive veterans advocacy group, responded to Vance’s comments, posting on Threads, “January 6th was among the darkest days in American history and JD Vance won’t condemn it and say it was wrong for Donald Trump to stoke it. Tim Walz is right—the reason signs say ‘Trump-Vance’ and not ‘Trump-Pence’ again is because Donald Trump told the mob that Pence was the ‘enemy’ too.”
Vance was asked about his comments at a campaign event on Wednesday, but he refused to answer, saying, “The media’s obsessed with talking about the election four years ago. I’m focused on the election of 33 days from now.” [video at the link]
On Wednesday the Harris-Walz campaign released a digital ad highlighting the contentious debate exchange, juxtaposing Vance’s comments with footage of the Jan. 6 attackers breaching the Capitol. [video at the link]
Vance has allied himself with Trump’s anti-democratic stance before, telling the hosts of a tech summit in early September that he would have sided with the fraudulent electors.
Shortly before the debate, Trump again refused to say he would acknowledge the outcome of the presidential election if it was unfavorable to him.
Asked by a reporter if he had trust in the electoral process, Trump replied, “I’ll let you know in about 33 days.”
Trump has expressed sympathy with the Jan. 6 rioters and has said on multiple occasions that if he is elected to another term in office, he would use the power of the presidency to pardon them.
During their Sept. 10 debate, Vice President Kamala Harris sharply criticized Trump’s stance on the issue.
“I was at the Capitol on Jan. 6. I was the vice president-elect. I was also an acting senator. I was there,” Harris said. “And on that day, the president of the United States incited a violent mob to attack our nation’s Capitol, to desecrate our nation’s Capitol. On that day, 140 law enforcement officers were injured. And some died. And understand, the former president has been indicted and impeached for exactly that reason.”
Private equity decimated emergency care in the United States — without you even noticing.
John didn’t start his career mad.
He trained as an emergency medicine doctor in a tidily run Midwestern emergency room about a decade ago. He loved the place, especially the way its management was so responsive to the doctors’ needs, offering extra staffing when things got busy and paid administrative time for teaching other trainees. Doctors provided most of the care, occasionally overseeing the work of nurse practitioners and physician associates. He signed on to start there full-time shortly after finishing his residency.
A month before his start date, a private equity firm bought the practice. “I can’t even tell you how quickly it changed,” John says. The ratio of doctors to other clinicians flipped, shrinking doctor hours to a minimum as the firm moved to save on salaries.
John — who is being referred to by a pseudonym due to concerns over professional repercussions — quit and found a job at another emergency room in a different state. It too soon sold out to the same private equity firm. Then it happened again, and then again. Small emergency rooms “kept getting gobbled up by these gigantic corporations so fast,” he said. By the time doctors tried to jump ship to another ER, “they were already sold out.”
At all of the private equity-acquired ERs where John worked, things changed almost overnight: In addition to having their hours cut, doctors were docked pay if they didn’t evaluate new arrivals within 25 minutes of them walking through the door, leading to hasty orders for “kitchen sink” workups geared mostly toward productivity — not toward real cost-effectiveness or diagnostic precision. Amid all of this, cuts to their hours when ER volumes were low meant John and his colleagues’ pay was all over the place.
Patient care was suffering “from the toe sprains all the way up to the gunshot wounds and heart attacks,” says John. His experience wasn’t an anomaly — it was happening in emergency rooms across the country. “All of my colleagues were experiencing the same thing.”
[Snipped details regarding rushed doctors missing important health history details.]
The story of how private equity has been able to so thoroughly debilitate emergency care is one of the more dramatic examples of how corporate interests are corrosive to America’s health care system — and how powerless they leave individual consumers. Today, private equity continues to operate a shocking quarter of ERs nationwide, as of March 2024.
Still, there’s some hope: Academics, patient advocates, and doctors say you can make defensive moves to protect your finances and care before, during, and after you or a loved one visits an ER.
Understanding private equity’s transformation of America’s emergency rooms is the first step.
Modern private equity got its start in the early 1980s, when a free-market acolyte — and former member of the Nixon administration — completed the first major “leveraged buyout.” Using mostly borrowed money, William Simon and his partner bought a greeting card company, extracted huge fees, and then sold it for a massive profit less than two years later.
Over the next few decades, what was then called the leveraged buyout industry moved into other sectors. Firms flipped businesses to yield spectacular profits, often cutting corners on the products and services they offered, eliminating jobs, and reducing employee benefits.
It was only a matter of time until the industry, now rebranded as private equity, turned its gaze on the US’s $4 trillion health care sector, which was already becoming increasingly commercialized as nonprofit health systems consolidated, paid their executives ever more extravagant salaries, and otherwise played business hardball. Private equity takeovers in health care started around 2000 and have steadily increased since; when several big banks crumbled in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, private equity’s growth only accelerated.
Emergency medicine wasn’t always an appealing target for private equity. Physician staffing in many emergency rooms around the country was traditionally handled by co-op-like groups, run by working doctors, that contracted with hospitals. In the 1990s, ex-physicians and businesspeople began taking ownership of these so-called contract management groups (CMGs). As they did, they started acting more like for-profit businesses, centralizing decision-making and earnings. […]
“What they were buying was the ability to charge patients who were consuming a non-shoppable service,” Adelman says — one for which patients are unable to compare prices. If you’re having a heart attack, you’re not going to call around to hospitals to find out who is going to give you the best deal.
Hospitals that increasingly have profit on the brain often found private equity a more attractive partner than doctor-owned CMGs. The firms are flush with cash, which means they don’t look to the hospitals to shore up their finances. “They won’t ask you for a penny,” Adelman explains. “They’re making plenty of money.”
Once a private equity firm bought an emergency room, there were two levers it could pull to make a profit: It could maximize what it reaped from patients who’d received services, and it could cut what it spent paying the clinicians who provided those services.
Doing both at the same time has made emergency medicine practically unrecognizable.
[…] Private equity can only do what it does because so many other parts of American health care are so dysfunctional. “Just to be really clear, private equity is not the main harm of health care in the US,” says O’Grady. “I think it’s a symptom of a much bigger problem.”
In the US health care ecosystem, private equity is a bottom-feeder, an entity that can only exist because of the bad behavior and misaligned incentives of the bigger players in the marketplace. Private equity’s deep pockets, its willingness to extort patients, its heavy-handedness with telling doctors how to practice wouldn’t be possible — much less an advantage — in the absence of these larger upstream problems.
Maybe there wouldn’t be as many opportunities for private equity to make money in health care if hospital budgets were stable; if insurance companies didn’t play hardball with both providers and patients; if pharmaceutical industry players didn’t artificially and unevenly inflate drug prices; if elected officials weren’t so susceptible to powerful lobbies that block comprehensive, loophole-closing health care reform. […]
America’s Hitler Can’t Wait To Revoke Haitian Migrants’ Legal Status, Make America White Again
He says they’re not here legally IN HIS OPINION. Is it because he’s a white supremacist? (Yes.)
During the vice presidential debate, when JD Vance saucily looked at the camera and protested that the rules said they weren’t going to have fact-checks, he was angrily trying to get his racist, alternate universe explanation of an immigration policy into the debate transcript.
While he was waiting for host Margaret Brennan to mute his mic, which she eventually did, he protested that the legal status of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, should not count, because that is not the kind of legal status he likes. He whined that there is an app where migrants are able to “apply for asylum or apply for parole and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand.”
It’s right there on the app, the Kamala Harris open border wand, it makes a cute little whooshing sound when she waves it. (That’s not quite how the app works. How the app works is Wonksplained in this link right here.)
But this is a good example of how full of shit racist Republicans like Vance and Donald Trump are when they swear up and down that they’re fine with immigration (they are lying!), it just has to be done legally. (They are still lying!) These Haitian migrants in Ohio are here legally, so the MAGA Nazis simply move the goalposts and explain why that kind of legally is not valid, in their all-important MAGA Nazi opinions.
Yesterday, amid all his other dementia babbling on the campaign trail, Donald Trump clarified that he will remove the legal status from those Haitian migrants, because it does not count, in his all-important MAGA Nazi opinion.
“You have to remove the people, and you have to bring them back to their own country. They are, in my opinion, it’s not legal,” Trump said in an interview with NewsNation.
In his opinion.
You see, they have dark skin and they come from what Trump considers to be a “shithole” country. Oh yes, he’s felt this way for a looooong time. Donald Trump thinks Haitians “all have AIDS.”
Now, if these people with Temporary Protected Status were from, say, Norway, would Trump consider them legal? Haha, of course. When Trump was first saying all those things about shithole countries, he openly wished for more (white) immigrants from Norway. (As Swedish actor Joel Kinnaman explained to Stephen Colbert around that time, Trump was shit out of luck, because “we hate him” in Scandinavia.)
Trump continued yesterday:
Trump, asked if he would revoke the migrants’ Temporary Protected Status, said, “Absolutely. I’d revoke it, and I’d bring them back to their country.”
Here, via NewsNation’s Libbey Dean, is the greatest shithole abomination this country has ever seen, explaining how he will revoke Haitian immigrants’ legal status, because he’s a pigtrash racist: [video at the link]
Trump said, “Springfield is such a beautiful place, have you seen what’s happened to it? It’s been overrun, you can’t do that to people.”
To translate, he means Springfield was beautiful when it was more white, and what’s “happened” to it is that it’s been “overrun” by people who don’t have white skin. “You can’t do that to people,” says America’s Hitler, and when he says “to people,” he means white people.
So again, he moves the goalposts. They’re here legally? Well, he’ll just revoke their legal status so they’re not legal anymore.
How far are MAGA Nazis ultimately willing to move the goalposts of “legally” to achieve their dream of Making America White Again (For The First Time, Actually)?
Americans must never allow them to show us the answer.
How Gross, Weird, And Stupid Are Today’s Republican Candidates? Consider Virginia’s Hung Cao!
There was a Senate debate in Virginia last night.
Here is your daily reminder that the average Republican candidate for political office these days is gross, sick, and weird. And then after that, your daily reminder that the average Republican candidate for political office these days, lordy there are just not words for how brazenly stupid they are.
This is Hung Cao, who is running against Senator Tim Kaine in Virginia. Robyn told you a bit about him this summer when he said that one of his biggest priorities as senator would be to free Virginia of all these witches.
Last night, Cao and Kaine had a debate.
We’ll start with gross, sick, and weird, like we said. Because Hung Cao has thoughts on LGBTQ+ people in the military, specifically drag queens: [video at the link]
That quote was:
“When you’re using a, you know, drag queen to recruit for the Navy, that’s not the people we want,” Cao said. “What we need is alpha males and alpha females who are going to rip out their own guts, eat them and ask for seconds. Those are young men and women that are going to win wars.”
Wow, there is a lot in those two sentences. Not only does he not want the drag queens, he apparently doesn’t want people who might see an ad with a drag queen and be encouraged to enlist. […] We instead need people who are alphas — you know, the conservative male obsession directly related to their insecurity over their own masculinity — to … *checks transcript* … rip out their own guts, eat them, and then ask for some more.
Question: Are young men and women who just ate their own guts actually likely to win wars?
Question again: Wouldn’t that by definition make them gutless? Haha, shut up, we don’t make stupid puns, YOU do.
Reached for comment about the debate remarks, Cao’s campaign responded with a statement from him saying, “I just said what everyone believes as fact.”
Sure, man.
He then reiterated his response from the debate and added that men and women who “rip out their own guts” are the ones who “are going to win wars. Not drag queens.”
Right.
Kaine responded that he “didn’t understand my opponent’s argument.”
[…] OK, now your clip about how stupid Hung Cao is!
Hung Cao has thoughts about “economy.” Hung Cao thinks Zillow has for more to do with “economy” than it really does. […] [video at the link]
Cao said some batshit about how we should make housing more affordable by medevac-ing Hurricane Helene victims to the hotels where we’re giving illegal immigrants lobsters and bon bons — you know, typical racist Republican conspiracy theory shit. He literally said we should be giving them “room service,” instead of “giving it to illegal aliens.”
AND ALSO?
Well, Hung Cao is scared that Kamala Harris wants to tax unrealized gains, and he said:
“If my house goes up in Zillow, you know, it’s just go up in Zillow, but then I don’t have that money in my pocket and she wants to tax that.”
Ooooooooooo-kay.
Couple things here: Firstly, even if Congress went for Kamala Harris’s proposal to tax unrealized capital gains — nah, LOL — it would apply to people worth $100 million or more, which is not you, and is not Hung Cao, unless either you or Hung Cao are some of the fewer than 10,000 people in that category.
Secondly, that is … not how Zillow works. It just isn’t. There is no scenario where “If my house goes up in Zillow […”] and then Hung Cao will have to pay taxes on “it’s just go up in Zillow.”
[…] Have fun re-electing your current senator Tim Kaine, Virginia! Cook has it at “solid D,” it’ll be fine. […]
WASHINGTON (CN) — The Biden administration’s crackdown on ghost guns is under fire as the Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments next week over whether the federal government stretched the definition of “firearm” too thin to achieve a policy goal.
In 2022, the Biden administration sought to stem the flood of untraceable weapons in the market by classifying easy-to-assemble gun parts kits as firearms under the Gun Control Act. The edit forces parts kit manufacturers to follow regulations any other weapon is subjected to, including performing background checks and providing serial numbers.
Unlike in the justices’ review of prohibitions on gun ownership for domestic abusers, the Supreme Court will be opening a dictionary — not a history book — to decide the case….
In the Gun Control Act of 1968, lawmakers defined firearms as weapons that may readily be converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive. The Biden administration’s rule says firearms include readily completed weapons parts kits aimed at expelling a projectile by explosive.
The difference between the two will determine whether the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives can keep its rule on the books. Between January 2019 and May 2021, criminal incidents involving a ghost gun rose 408%, according to the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which represents police executives in 70 cities. There was a 240% increase in ghost gun use by people otherwise barred from gun ownership and a 285% increase in use by people under 21.
In 2019, two students at Saugus High School were killed by a 16-year-old with a ghost gun….
Eric Tirschwell, the executive director at Everytown Law, said ghost guns became popular for teenagers and criminals because they didn’t require these checks.
“They couldn’t otherwise walk into a gun store and buy a pistol, but they could go online and order these gun-building kits,” Tirschwell said in an interview….
…Kevin Tobia, a professor of law and philosophy at Georgetown, joined a friend-of-the-court brief with a linguistic analysis of the case.
Tobia and his colleagues broke down the word “firearms” beyond the dictionary definition.
“They should think carefully about what type of term they’re analyzing,” Tobia said in an interview. “Firearm is what linguists would call an artifact kind, a human-made creation, which is different from natural kinds like water.”
“If you buy a table from Ikea, it comes to you unassembled,” Tobia said. “We nevertheless are completely comfortable to call that a table, even though it requires some assembly, right? In the same way that a gun parts kit you buy unassembled, doesn’t mean it’s not a firearm. It’s just an unassembled firearm.”…
“In other contexts, we’re comfortable calling unsharpened pencils that you buy from the store pencils, even though you have to also buy a pencil sharpener and manually sharpen the pencil,” Tobia said.
Cody Wilson, the director of Defense Distributed, a defense contractor serving the general public, saw the law is an attempt to expand government regulations to private people. Defense Distributed is an intervenor plaintiff in the lawsuit against the government.
“A lot of these guns began to be made by private people, and that had never been regulated,” Wilson said in an interview. “So, it was also an attempt to regulate a new channel of activity by private persons, and ATF had to stretch to do that because ATF can only regulate — especially as a federal agency — can only regulate interstate commerce or regulated businesses.”
U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar rejects that characterization, stating that the rule targets gun manufacturers selling parts kits. The government says the question is whether manufacturers can avoid regulations by selling firearms as easy-to-assemble kits or frames and receivers that require a few minutes of work to be made functional.
“Congress adopted the act’s background-check, recordkeeping, and serialization requirements because it was concerned that felons, juveniles, and those seeking guns for criminal purposes could easily acquire them by mail,” Prelogar wrote. “The Fifth Circuit’s reading would re-create the same problem, allowing prohibited persons to bypass the act’s core regulations and obtain firearms that anyone with novice skills and common tools can make functional in a matter of minutes.”….
Last term, the justices heard a similar appeal on the government’s ban on bump stocks — add-on devices for semi-automatic weapons. The government said bump stocks simulated automatic fire, turning a semiautomatic weapon into a machine gun. The conservative majority disagreed, discarding the ban.
The justices will hear arguments in Garland v. VanDerStok on Tuesday.
First, there’s a summary of the evidence of private, not presidential criminal efforts against January 6 from that treasonous bag of slop.
Next, Jack Smith lays out how the democracy haters at the Supreme Court decided that Trump should have the presumption of Holy God Emperor-style special boy executive immunity for whatever crap he pulled as president.
Then, an explanation of how the presumption of immunity does not apply to Trump here, because evidence like his rage-Tweeting lies, hounding Mike Pence to break the law, and egging on his troglodyte supporters to riot on his behalf were done in Trump’s capacity as a bitter-loser candidate, not as President.
And finally, Smith makes the ask for Judge Chutkan to rule that Trump doesn’t get any “official acts” treatment here for this superseding indictment, so can we just put him on fucking trial, already? You know he’ll whine to the appeals court later anyway. Thanks!
The evidence section of the motion details how Trump had never planned to concede when/if he lost, and was already publicly saying in July of 2020 that he might not accept the results if he lost, and was argleblargling about mail-in votes being INACCURATE, Tweeting, “Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???” Making him king for life would really be a favor to you, America! Funny how he was suddenly concerned about the danger of the plague he failed to control. That 2020, what a year!
Then, after losing the election in November, Trump was told over and over again by everyone from lawyers, governors, judges, secretaries of states and the fly in Mike Pence’s hair that he was a losing loser who lost the election, losingly. And while he could sue about it, he was just going to lose some more in court, plus get kicked out with a boot print on his ass while everyone laughed, because there was no evidence of fraud. Not in a box, not with a fox, not in a tree, so stop, do not hop on pop, etc. From Harrisburg to Madison to Atlanta to Phoenix, he got told that overturning the election was not fucking happening. By Republicans, who were the only ones he called. And he was strangely not concerned about the accuracy of the count of any races but his own.
Pence wrote in his book, So Help Me God, that he “tried to encourage” Trump, “as a friend” to “recognize the process was over,” and that maybe Trump should gather up whatever was left of his dignity and run again in 2024. But “2024 is so far off,” Trump whined, incapable of delaying gratification. […]
Also damning to Trump’s whole “executive branch immunity” argument, White House lawyers didn’t want to touch Trump’s rigged election lies with an eleventy-foot pole either. So he excluded them from meetings, and swapped them out with his personal crack team of whacko goobers, with Rudy Giuliani supervising lawyers Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing, with the help of freelancing fascists like Steve Bannon, and people who worked on the Trump campaign and for the RNC, and not for the White House. (The names are redacted, but, context clues. See how many you can figure out!)
The motion is laced throughout with evidence that his motley fake-elector crew knew all along that what they were doing was ill-fucking-egal. Like when now-recommended-for-disbarment John Eastman, aka “P58,” emailed Mike Pence to beg him to consider “one more relatively minor violation” of the Electoral Count Act and “adjourn for 10 days to allow the legislatures to finish their investigations.” Or how the fake electors who Team Treason tried to solicit in Pennsylvania insisted on having conditional language on their fake certificates saying they weren’t the actual duly-appointed electors, and what they were signing was For Entertainment Purposes only unless Trump actually won his LOLsuit. One co-conspirator fussed to another, “if it gets out we changed the language for PA it could snowball.” Then there’s how co-conspirators were straight-out calling the fake electors “fake,” with what sounds like dipshit Ken Cheseboro emailing bluntly, “the votes aren’t legal under federal law.”
FLASHBACKS!
A lot of the details in the motion were out there already, from the January 6 committee and various indictments, disbarment hearings and so on. One new detail, though: how while the Capitol was under siege Trump sat around his dining room watching Fox News and doomscrolling Twitter for hours, and was interrupted by frantic phone calls that his Vice President was in mortal danger. Maybe Trump should get off his ass and do something to keep poor old Mike Pence from getting hanged? Trump’s response was, “so what?”
So, just fine with letting that man, his Vice President, the one he never would have won the evangelicals without, get torn limb from limb. Also police officers, and whoever else in Congress.
Guess we already knew that. But it’s still unsettling to think about how close the country got to who-knows-what that day. Who laid those pipe bombs? Who tore out panic buttons in Rep. Ayanna Pressley’s office? There’s still so much we don’t know, and may never find out.
But anyway, no, trying to pull off a coup was not very Presidential of Trump. Just as with everything else in his grifty life, all of his scheming and drama was to benefit no one but himself.
And there may be more untold tales of his and his lowlife buddies’ antics yet to drop before the month is over. The government’s filing came with an appendix that includes grand jury transcripts and witness interviews, and Trump’s lawyers have until October 10 to propose redactions. And then the last filing in the case is due by October 29.
It’s going to be a month full of spooktacular surprises!
They’ve been facing genocide but are peing pressured not to protest it. The people they see as leaders kileld but we dont want tem showing their flags nor faces.
NSW Police have reached an 11th-hour agreement with the organisers of pro-Palestinian events in Sydney’s CBD after negotiations continued in the background of a Supreme Court hearing. Thousands are expected to rally through the city this weekend to mark the one-year anniversary of the Israel-Gaza conflict, but organisers had also put in paperwork to NSW Police seeking to hold a vigil on Monday. At a hearing before Justice Jeremy Kirk on Thursday afternoon, organisers withdrew their application to police for Monday’s vigil to be an authorised event.
In Buncombe County, N.C., where an entire town disappeared beneath floodwaters, less than 1 percent of households had flood insurance. In Unicoi County, Tenn., where dozens of residents were stranded atop a hospital roof as waters rose, it was under 2 percent.
On average, just a tiny fraction of households in the inland counties hit hardest by Hurricane Helene had flood insurance, according to a Washington Post analysis of recent data from the National Flood Insurance Program. Across seven affected states, only 0.8 percent of homes in inland counties affected by the hurricane had flood insurance. By contrast, 21 percent of homes in coastal counties in those areas had coverage.
The Post estimated the share of homes with flood insurance by using policy counts as of Oct. 1 provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and housing unit counts from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Experts say that lack of insurance will prove deeply damaging for those households in the years to come. Available disaster assistance funds are largely intended to provide for temporary shelter, food and water — not to rebuild homes. And thanks to a combination of outdated policies and high prices, most people don’t know they should enroll in flood insurance — or can’t afford it.
Without insurance, people struck by floods have to rely on a network of complicated federal programs or aid from nonprofits to rebuild their lives. The Individual Assistance Program, run by FEMA, can help provide urgent resources, but is capped at around $42,500 for housing and $42,500 for other costs. Most recipients get far less. As of Thursday morning, FEMA listed 108 counties in five states where people are eligible for this aid.
“It’s something people don’t want to think about,” said Craig Landry, a professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Georgia, of the risk of catastrophic flooding. “People have an optimistic perception of disaster assistance,” he added. “And in reality, it’s not that generous.”
The Post’s analysis shows that many of the counties affected by Helene’s flooding have seen declining flood insurance rates in the past decade. In some cases, around half of flood insurance policies have been dropped. [Map with percentage information is available at the link.]
[…] The lion’s share of flood insurance in the United States comes through FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program. For homes that are in the 100-year-flood-plain, or that have a 1 percent or greater chance of flooding every year, this insurance is legally required to obtain a mortgage, and can pay out up to $250,000 for structures and $100,000 for contents.
But experts say that the flood maps used by the national program are outdated, leaving many areas that should have flood insurance without it. […]
People may still end up rebuilding in flood-prone areas, Landry said, because the real estate market has a short memory. While housing prices often drop following major flood events — as buyers account for the cost of flood insurance — research shows that effect disappears after five or six years.
The assistance program from FEMA for individuals is “intentionally not designed to make people financially whole after a disaster,” said Carolyn Kousky, an expert in flood insurance and associate vice president for economics and policy at the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group.
Most people tend to get only a few thousand dollars from individual assistance, she added.
Samantha Montano, a professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy, says that survivors must navigate a web of complicated red tape to even get that amount of funding. Some disaster victims will submit five or six appeals after being denied the first time. “People will describe it as the second disaster, just because of how difficult it is to navigate,” she said.
[…] Many experts say that the country needs to impose much more sweeping requirements for flood insurance. “Congress needs to require everybody to have flood insurance, much like we require everybody to have car insurance,” Montano said. “And in my opinion, they need to raise the amount of money FEMA is able to give people for individual assistance.” […]
For now, people who can’t afford flood insurance are shit out of luck.
StevoRsays
Global Overheating Changing the world. Even European borders :
But for countries that share borders of snow-capped peaks and glaciers, melting ice can change the very foundation of the Earth, including how national borders are drawn.
Last week, the Swiss government announced it had mutually agreed with Italy to redraw sections of the Swiss-Italian border to compensate for how the Alps are changing, thanks to climate change.
It’s part of a growing number of nations impacted by shifting landmasses as global temperatures continue to rise.
@5
the reason signs say ‘Trump-Vance’ and not ‘Trump-Pence’
I had not noticed before how efficient the substitution is. All you need is some white-out, and to change two letters, and you can reuse the same old campaign signs.
Reginald Selkirksays
@11:
… over whether the federal government stretched the definition of “firearm” too thin to achieve a policy goal.
It sounds like they got distracted somewhere along the way. Here is the full text of the second amendment
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Note that the specification “firearms” does not appear. The right is to keep and bear all arms. That should include switchblades, crossbows, flamethrowers, chemical and bio-weapons, and nukes if one wants to be strict about the text.
whheydtsays
Re: Reginald Selkirk @ #19…
Any idea where I can pickup an inexpensive, war surplus Oerlikon? Or how about a Krupp 88 to deal with pesky drones? If I had a leftover PT boat, I’d be looking for a set of torpedoes…
tomhsays
@ #19
The word “firearm” appears in the Gun Control Act of 1968, which is the point under debate. It is one point among several and there is a detailed preview of the case at this link which examines the issues, for anyone interested.
Btw, the 2nd Amendment does not say “all” arms and there is no debate on whether arms can be restricted, as they have been since the Founding era, only on what the restrictions may include.
Reginald Selkirksays
@21
As I read it, the restrictions may not include a requirement that weapons be decorated with fringe.
“shall not be enfringed.”
If you’ve watched Netflix’s 3 Body Problem, or read the novels, the following might make you a tad nervous: NASA has discovered a distant trio of celestial objects locked in a complex orbital dance.
Thankfully, there doesn’t appear to be any genocidal aliens present; this system isn’t likely to foster intelligent life, or any life for that matter. Notably, however, the outermost of the three has shattered an astronomy record that stood for nearly 70 years.
An international group of astronomers, including NASA and a pair of citizen scientists, discovered the star system, designated TIC 290061484. In its findings published in The Astrophysical Journal, the team described the system as consisting of two inner stars that orbit each other every 1.8 days. The third star takes a while longer to circle the pair, completing an orbit once every 24.5 days. The previous record holder for an outer orbital period in a three-star system was discovered in 1956, with the star taking 33.03 days to complete an orbit…
Donald Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, have made news for spread the dehumanizing yet entirely false claim that Haitian immigrants have been stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. Now, the Haitian group that filed charges against the pair last month have added felony to the list.
The original charges, which were filed in Clark County Municipal Court by Guerline Joseph on behalf of the national nonprofit, included disrupting public service, making false alarms, committing telecommunications harassment, committing aggravated menacing in violation, committing aggravated menacing and violating the prohibition against complicity.
The new requested charge is inducing panic, as reported by the Springfield News-Sun. It hails from Trump and Vance making up lies about Haitians immigrants “with full knowledge the claims were false,” per the amended affidavit.
It also says that the men knew their words “were calculated to stir alarm and emotional distress in the community.”
The Haitian Bridge Alliance also requested that the court find probable cause for the charges and issue arrest warrants for Trump and Vance. The update filing explains that Trump and Vance cannot use free speech as a defense, since their behavior severely disrupted public service…
This week, three more women have reportedly come forward claiming to have maintained a romantic relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in 2024. I mean…would we be shocked? Certainly not.
According to a new report published by Mediaite, the three women—who have not been named—reportedly met Kennedy through their work at his anti-vaccine group, Children’s Health Defense…
In early September, Melania Trump did something she’s rarely done since her husband became a politician: She publicly said more than two sentences. In a black-and-white trailer released on her Twitter account, Melania used 47 words to announce she would be releasing a memoir, saying, “As a private person who’s often been the subject of public scrutiny and misrepresentation, I feel a responsibility to clarify the facts,” as a montage of her travels flashed by, including footage of her in front of the pyramids and holding hands with small Black children.
The memoir comes out Tuesday, but the Guardian got an advance copy and, among the memoir’s big reveals, it turns out, Mrs. Trump is pro-choice.
“It is imperative to guarantee that women have autonomy in deciding their preference of having children, based on their own convictions, free from any intervention or pressure from the government,” she “writes” in Melania, according to the outlet. “Why should anyone other than the woman herself have the power to determine what she does with her own body? A woman’s fundamental right of individual liberty, to her own life, grants her the authority to terminate her pregnancy if she wishes.”
…
A study published in Nature has found that conservative social media users were more likely to face sanctions, but attributes this to their higher propensity to share low-quality news rather than political bias. Researchers analyzed 9,000 Twitter users during the 2020 U.S. election, finding pro-Trump users were 4.4 times more likely to be suspended than pro-Biden users.
However, they also shared significantly more links from sites rated as untrustworthy by both politically balanced groups and Republican-only panels. Similar patterns were observed across multiple datasets spanning 16 countries from 2016 to 2023. The study concludes that asymmetric enforcement can result from neutral policies when behavior differs between groups.
JMsays
@19 Reginald Selkirk: The whole idea of tracing weapons will need reworked soon as plastic and metal printing will let people make weapons at home without any traceable parts. It can already be done but is hard and the weapons awkward. It’s only a matter of time before the technology gets there.
The only solution will be steps to sideline people before they resort to shooting, such as national mental health.
@20 whheydt: You could buy an Oerlikon second hand in a military black market in Africa or some areas of the middle east and Asia. Updated designs are still used for cheap anti-air and mounted on small boats. They are useless against jets but are handy for driving off helicopters and 3rd world armies sometimes use prop planes. On ships they fill the gap between machine guns and autocannons mounted in powered turrets.
Nobody has made barrel’s for 88s in a long time, even if you can get your hands on one I wouldn’t recommend firing it. Torpedoes would be hard, most uses have been replaced with missiles and the remaining uses are tightly controlled.
Tesla’s 2024 Cybertrucks have been on the road for less than a year and they’ve already been recalled five times, as of Thursday.
This time, it’s because the rearview camera image may be delayed by two seconds after shifting into reverse, and the display may appear blank for up to eight seconds when the vehicle is in reverse, according to a report Tesla shared with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Around 27,185 Cybertrucks are potentially impacted. Tesla has already released an over-the-air software update to Cybertruck owners…
The technology promises to be a game changer: a torpedo-seeking torpedo fired by surface vessels for head-on intercepts, missile-defense style.
Yet after more than a decade of research, lead nations Germany and the Netherlands are still years away from fitting their navies with a hard-kill torpedo countermeasure.
Germany’s navy has been toying with a product called SeaSpider, developed by Atlas Elektronik, for several years. Work on the sole technology option under consideration in Europe goes back even further, with engineers studying it for at least 15 years, according to the firm’s website.
But while Atlas has tried to market the system as ready for combat, no navy has yet taken the bait, and the Dutch Ministry of Defence has repeatedly pushed back the start of a formal purchasing program based on SeaSpider…
There’s no shortage of local election officials who bought into Donald Trump’s lies about his 2020 election defeat, but by any fair measure, Tina Peters is a special case. Indeed, as NBC News reported, the Colorado Republican is now headed to prison.
A former Colorado county clerk who promoted 2020 election conspiracy theories was sentenced Thursday to 9 years behind bars for charges including official misconduct in connection with a security breach of Mesa County’s voting system. Tina Peters was convicted of four felony and three misdemeanor charges in August for using another person’s security badge to allow someone associated with MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, a prominent election denier and ally of former President Donald Trump, access to county election equipment.
As a local prosecutor explained, Peters was “a fox guarding the henhouse,” adding, “It was her job to protect the election equipment, and she turned on it and used her power for her own advantage.”
It’s been more than two years since the GOP conspiracy theorist was first indicted after she used her office to help leak election machinery data in pursuit of a conspiratorial plot that apparently never existed in reality.
As part of her efforts, Peters was celebrated by the likes of Steve Bannon — he argued that she was targeted because of her fight against “this globalist apparatus” — though a Colorado jury came to a different conclusion, convicting the election denier in early August, finding her guilty of three counts of attempting to influence a public servant, one count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty and failing to comply with the secretary of state.
Ahead of sentencing, Peters showed no remorse.
As the notorious election denier begins her sentence, there are a couple of broader angles to this that are worth keeping in mind. The first is the election-season message this sends to other right-wing conspiracy theorists elsewhere.
“Today’s verdict is a warning to others that they will face serious consequences if they attempt to illegally tamper with our voting processes or election systems,” Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said in a statement after Peters’ conviction.
It’s not exactly a secret that there are plenty of conspiratorial election officials considering provocative and legally dubious steps this fall. Whether the developments in Colorado get their attention remains to be seen.
But I’m also struck by the broader partisan circumstances: Trump lied, and Peters took those lies seriously. Nearly four years later, she’s headed to a prison cell, while there’s a decent chance that he’s headed back to the Oval Office.
The US Department of Justice and Microsoft have seized 107 websites used by Russian cyberspies in a phishing campaign to steal sensitive information from US government agencies, think tanks, and other victims.
Court orders targeted domains belonging to Russia’s Callisto Group (aka Star Blizzard and Coldriver), a hacking unit of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) that has been attacking defense, intelligence, political orgs, and academia since at least 2017.
“The Russian government ran this scheme to steal Americans’ sensitive information, using seemingly legitimate email accounts to trick victims into revealing account credentials,” US Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a statement today announcing the FSB infrastructure disruption.
According to the DOJ’s warrant [PDF], the 41 seized domains “were used or intended to be used by members of the Callisto Group in an ongoing and sophisticated spear phishing campaign with the goal of gaining unauthorized access to the computers and email accounts of victims, to then steal valuable information and sensitive United States government intelligence.”…
It’s not uncommon for Democrats to note that Donald Trump left the White House with the worst record on job creation since the Great Depression, with a net loss of over 2 million jobs over four years. Technically, that’s true, but I’ve never been altogether comfortable with the talking point because it lacks context. [I agree.]
To be sure, if we simply tally up all of the monthly job totals from January 2017 (the month of Trump’s inauguration) to January 2021 (the month he grudgingly stepped down), the results look dreadful: The Republican was the only president since Herbert Hoover to leave office with the United States having fewer jobs than when he came in.
But the context matters: To arrive at this conclusion, one has to include the Covid-era data, when the pandemic sparked a sudden and sharp recession. To hold Trump directly responsible for the fact that the U.S. economy lost over 20 million jobs in April 2020 has never struck me as altogether fair.
A better assessment, I’ve long argued, is to focus on the first three years of Trump’s term, which have never been as amazing as he’s claimed.
The GOP candidate, however, has apparently concluded that my approach is all wrong — and that there’s no reason to exclude the 2020 data. Trump sat down with personal-finance author and radio host Dave Ramsey this week and boasted:
“I had the country going, just prior to Covid coming in, at a level that nobody had ever seen. And even if you go all four years, it was so good that even with that terrible interruption that destroyed the world, we had the greatest four years. The economy was so great. The job numbers were the best ever, et cetera.”
None of this is true. Not even a little. [video at the link]
If we exclude 2020, and focus just on the former president’s first three years, Trump’s economic record appears fine, but underwhelming. Job growth during the Republican’s first three years, for example, not only fell short of his pre-election promises, they were also lower than the job growth from Barack Obama’s final three years in office.
How has Trump explained why job growth slowed down after he took office? So far, he hasn’t. Instead, he claims the job numbers “were the best ever,” which is demonstrably wrong.
Meanwhile, economic growth during the Trump era — again, before the Covid crisis — wasn’t bad, but it failed to reach 3% GDP growth, it fell short of the kind of growth we saw under other modern presidents, and it didn’t come close to the growth the Republican promised to deliver during his 2016 campaign.
But in light of his latest comments, if we take the former president’s advice, “go all four years,” and include the 2020 data, all of the data looks even worse.
I’m mindful of the fact that Trump might very well win a second term, largely because Americans have been told ad nauseum that his economic record is amazing. But reality tells a very different story.
Embedded links that lead to additional sources are available at the main link.
The former GOP congresswoman will join Harris at an event in Ripon, Wis., as the campaign works to win over Republicans who have grown weary of Trump.
Liz Cheney, a former Republican congresswoman and daughter of a former Republican vice president, will join Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday [today] at a campaign event in Ripon, Wisconsin, the city commonly recognized as the birthplace of the Republican Party.
[…] Cheney, who voted to impeach Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection and led the committee that would ultimately refer Trump to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution, endorsed Harris last month in North Carolina.
“As a conservative, as someone who believes in and cares about the Constitution, I have thought deeply about this. And because of the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but I will be voting for Kamala Harris,” Cheney said at Duke University in Durham at the time.
Days later, Cheney’s father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, said he planned to vote for Harris, as well.
“In our nation’s 248 year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our Republic than Donald Trump,” he said in a statement. “As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump lashed out at the Cheneys on Truth Social following the endorsements, calling Dick Cheney “an irrelevant RINO,” or “Republican in name only,” and saying his daughter should be “prosecuted” for her role investigating the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. [Meaningless blather from Trump.]
Ripon was the site of at least two meetings in 1854 that laid the foundation for the creation and naming of the Republican Party.
At her campaign event there Thursday, Harris plans to play into that symbolism by recognizing the founding principles of the Republican Party and pledging to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law, a senior campaign official said.
Harris regularly criticizes Trump for what she has characterized as his disregard for the Constitution in his effort to overturn the 2020 election.
“Let us be very clear: Someone who suggests we should terminate the Constitution of the United States should never again stand behind the seal of the president of the United States,” Harris said at a campaign event in Madison, Wisconsin, last month.
In a 2022 Truth Social post, Trump called for the “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” as he continued to falsely assert there was “massive fraud” in the 2020 election. [Oh how much of Trump’s bonkers statements have I forgotten?]
The Harris campaign continues to win the support of several high-profile Republicans, including former Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who served with Cheney on the House Jan. 6 committee; Jimmy McCain, the son of the late Sen. John McCain of Arizona; and most recently, former Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona.
“I believe that we don’t have to agree on every issue or policy, but that we should use the political process created by our Founders to debate and persuade, not disparage and demonize,” Flake said in his endorsement on X. “I’ll be supporting Kamala Harris for President and Tim Walz for Vice President.”
Ahead of the event, the Harris campaign announced the launch of Wisconsin Republicans for Harris-Walz, an effort led by 24 conservatives from across the state, including a former Republican county chair, and several state elected officials.
“Donald Trump does not align with Wisconsin values. To ensure our democracy and our economy remain strong for another four years, we must elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to the White House,” the Republicans wrote in an letter released Thursday.
In August, the campaign launched its broader Republicans for Harris-Walz coalition group. Since then, the ticket has gotten the support of more than 200 former staffers for former President George W. Bush and for McCain and Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, two previous Republican presidential nominees.
A federal judge will let expire a temporary restraining order against the Biden administration’s sweeping new student loan forgiveness plan, which could deliver relief to tens of millions of Americans.
The ruling means President Joe Biden may move forward with his administration’s forgiveness plan, just weeks before the November election.
[…] The plan could benefit as many as three in every four federal student loan holders, when combined with the administration’s previous efforts, according to an estimate by the Center for American Progress.
U.S. District Judge Randal Hall in Georgia, appointed by Republican former President George W. Bush, delivered the win for the Biden administration late on Wednesday.
[…] The development stems from a lawsuit against the aid package brought by seven GOP-led states. The states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, North Dakota and Ohio — said the U.S. Department of Education’s new debt cancellation effort is illegal. […]
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Education said it appreciated the judge’s ruling that Georgia had “no legal basis” to bring the case, but slammed the GOP movement to stop the relief.
“The fact remains that this lawsuit reflects an ongoing effort by Republican elected officials who want to prevent millions of their own constituents from getting breathing room on their student loans,” they said.
“We will not stop fighting to fix the broken student loan system and provide support and relief to borrowers across the country.”
Biden’s plan would forgive student debt for four groups of borrowers: those who owe more than they originally took out; people who’ve been in repayment already for decades; students from schools with a low financial value; and those who qualify for loan forgiveness under an existing program, but haven’t applied for it yet.
[…] a review of Trump’s record by POLITICO’s E&E News and interviews with two former Trump White House officials show that the former president was flagrantly partisan at times in response to disasters and on at least three occasions hesitated to give disaster aid to areas he considered politically hostile or ordered special treatment for pro-Trump states.
Mark Harvey, who was Trump’s senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council staff, told E&E News on Wednesday that Trump initially refused to approve disaster aid for California after deadly wildfires in 2018 because of the state’s Democratic leanings.
But Harvey said Trump changed his mind after Harvey pulled voting results to show him that heavily damaged Orange County, California, had more Trump supporters than the entire state of Iowa.
“We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas … to show him these are people who voted for you,” said Harvey, who recently endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris alongside more than 100 other Republican former national security officials.
The exchange — not previously reported — drew a dumbfounded response on social media Thursday from President Joe Biden, who summed up Trump’s attitude as: “You can’t only help those in need if they voted for you.”
“It’s the most basic part of being president, and this guy knows nothing about it,” Biden posted on X, reacting to a tweet about an earlier version of this article.
Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom piled on, calling the episode “a glimpse into the future if we elect” Trump.
[…] Both Harvey and Olivia Troye, a former Trump White House homeland security adviser who backed up Harvey’s claim, say Trump is approaching Hurricane Helene with a similar mindset. They say he is politicizing a disaster that has killed more than 170 people in six states. And Troye, who has endorsed Harris for president, accused Trump of trying to divert attention from his own political liabilities on disaster responses.
She said if Trump wins the White House again, he will view disasters through a political lens that values personal loyalty over damage considerations.
[…] Troye, who played a lead role in federal disaster response, said local political leaders regularly called her office begging for help because Trump refused to sign documents approving aid. Troye said she had to repeatedly enlist former Vice President Mike Pence to apply pressure.
Added Harvey: “There’s no empathy for the survivors. It is all about getting your photo-op, right? Disaster theater to make him look good.”
[…] On Monday, Trump turned a visit to flood-damaged Valdosta, Georgia, into a partisan attack. He falsely claimed the Biden administration — and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) — were “going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas” and that GOP governors couldn’t get the president on the phone. [Projection, Trump style.]
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, both Republicans, confirmed that wasn’t true and praised the federal response. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) also applauded the Biden administration’s response to Helene, which damaged the southeastern part of the state.
While Trump is alone among political leaders in accusing President Joe Biden of ignoring the Republican victims of Hurricane Helene, his four years in the White House show that at times he played favorites with disaster response.
[…]
Wednesday brought new allegations from the Department of Justice on Donald Trump’s attempts to subvert the 2020 election, and Thursday’s print edition of The New York Times wedged its story on them into one skinny column that appeared mostly below the fold. This stands in stark contrast with the paper’s treatment of Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016.
On Wednesday, a federal court filing from special counsel Jack Smith’s team was unsealed. In the document, the Justice Department alleges that Trump “used deceit to target every stage of the electoral process” in 2020. […]
The document also lays out evidence bolstering the charge that Trump knew his claims of election fraud were false, even as his campaign pushed to undermine vote counts.
But The New York Times’ front-page story, headlined “Judge Unseals New Evidence In Jan. 6 Case,” was placed below a photo of hurricane rescue efforts and two stories about the ongoing war in the Middle East. [Image of today’s front page of The New York Times.]
In the paper’s Oct. 29, 2016, print edition, the lead photo was of Clinton and aide Huma Abedin, and the lead all-caps headline of the day read “New Emails Jolt Clinton Campaign In Race’s Last Days.”
In fact, all three above-the-fold stories were concerned with the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server. [Image of New York Times front page on October 29, 2016]
The New York Times, frequently described as the “newspaper of record” for the United States, has come under criticism for the tone of its election coverage.
According to a study published in June by Media Matters for America, the Times published 32 articles about the ages of Trump and President Joe Biden, but 78% of those stories focused on Biden’s age alone, while only 6% (two articles) focused on just Trump.
The paper has also underplayed June’s positive inflation report, which was released as the Trump campaign attacked the Biden administration over the issue. The Times also provided scant coverage of a policy proposal by Trump that experts have said would raise food costs.
In his Sept. 10 presidential debate against Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, Trump pushed the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which falsely claims that immigrants are being brought to the U.S. to replace white people. In a fact-check of Trump’s statement, the Times merely noted that his claim “lacks evidence” and did not connect it to its roots in the white supremacist movement.
There are also issues with the Times’ coverage of Ohio Sen. JD Vance, Trump’s running mate. The paper reported on Vance’s false claim that Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, left military service because his unit had been ordered into service in Iraq, but it did not inform readers that this was a lie.
In a July 15 report on Vance’s stance on abortion, the paper edited a quote from the candidate to make it appear as if he opposes a federal abortion ban. However, the full context makes clear Vance backs a “minimum national standard” on the issue—which is a ban.
The Times’ influential reporting has historically had a significant effect on world events. Possibly the most negative episode of this occurred in the case of the paper’s amplification of false claims by the George W. Bush administration that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark was a near-unanimous pick for WNBA Rookie of the Year, the league announced Thursday.
Clark, the No. 1 draft pick in April, got 66 of 67 votes from a national media panel. The other vote went to the Chicago Sky’s Angel Reese, who was the No. 7 pick in the draft…
[…] Smith also uses the motion to preemptively undercut any Trump assertion that he was acting in his official capacity to protect election integrity. First, in reaching out to various officials in swing states Biden won, Trump only contacted Republicans. A genuine inquiry into the election would have required him to talk to, for example, the secretary of state in Michigan, who oversees elections. However, that person is a Democrat, so Trump instead talked to Republican members of the state legislature. Next, despite his sweeping assertions of fraud, Trump only focused on his own race rather than raising any general concerns about voting issues.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that he was not allowed to present evidence of this vast voter fraud conspiracy in the dozens of post-election cases he brought. But Smith’s motion shows that Trump and his assorted hangers-on didn’t even attempt to provide that evidence to other Republicans who would have, presumably, been more than happy to find a way forward for Trump.
When Trump raised claims of election fraud with then-Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, Ducey asked Trump to send him evidence. Trump declared, “We’re packaging it up,” but never sent anything. Trump tweeted that he would show “massive and unprecedented fraud” in Michigan, only to have the campaign decline to pursue a state-wide recount. As late as Nov. 30, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani was still shopping voter fraud in Arizona, admitting that “[w]e don’t have the evidence, but we have lots of theories.”
Smith also highlights that Trump and his co-conspirators knew they were lying because they kept changing the numbers of allegedly fraudulent votes. In Arizona, Trump and friends first alleged that 36,000 noncitizens voted in the state. Five days later, it was suddenly a few hundred thousand, then back down to a “bare minimum” of 40 or 50,000, then back up to 250,000, plummeting to 32,000, only to return to the original, never verified, 36,000.
Trump attorney John Eastman sounded even more unhinged when trying to explain how the ostensible fraud worked: “They put those ballots in a secret folder in the machines sitting there waiting, until they know how many they need. And then the machine after the close of polls, we now know who’s voted. And we know who hasn’t. And I can now in that machine match those unvoted ballots with an unvoted voter and put them together in the machine.”
Finally, Smith describes multiple Republican allies telling Trump that he would likely lose the election, that he had indeed lost the election, and that his fraud claims were false. Trump simply didn’t care.
At least 215 people are known to have died as a result of the destruction wrought by Hurricane Helene since it made landfall in Florida a week ago.
More than half of the deaths were in North Carolina, where entire communities were destroyed by several feet of fast-moving water. At least 98 people in North Carolina have died of storm-related causes, but Cooper said the death toll is expected to rise as recovery efforts continue.
Hundreds are still missing and officials have reported difficulties in identifying some of the dead.
[…] “I think the cotton crop will be almost a complete loss, a lot of the pecan crop will be a complete loss, or at least a complete loss for the affected counties there,” Georgia Governor Kemp said. “So it’s going to be significant, not to mention the structures that have been damaged.”
[…] The National Hurricane Center is tracking several storms and disturbances currently brewing, including an area of interest in the Gulf of Mexico that has only a 30% chance of developing into a tropical depression but is still expected to dump several inches of rain across the Gulf Coast and parts of Florida in the coming days.
The area of showers and thunderstorms will likely move slowly, posing a rainfall risk in southern and central Florida next week, regions that are still reeling from Hurricane Helene.
Heavy rainfall from this system is not expected to affect parts of North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia that were hit hard by Helene, according to the latest forecasts.
Meanwhile, both Hurricane Kirk and Tropical Storm Leslie in the Atlantic do not pose a direct threat to land, according to the NHC. Kirk is, however, expected to strengthen into a Category 4 storm, and could generate swells that reach the East Coast of the United States on Sunday, causing dangerous rip current conditions. […]
When I heard that Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s longtime leader, had been killed last Friday in an Israeli air strike, in south Beirut, my thoughts returned to a scene that has lingered in my mind for more than a decade. In 2012, in a village called Sohmor, in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, I attended an open-air ceremony for two young Hezbollah fighters who had been killed in Syria, where the civil war was under way. Portraits of Nasrallah and Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, were plastered on placards. Hundreds of Hezbollah fighters, wearing black uniforms, entered in formation, while a brass band played a march that could have come from a college football game. Young Hezbollah recruits, nine and ten years old—called Mahdi Scouts—served coffee to the attendees. The scene was festive, like a tailgate party before kickoff.
At the time, Hezbollah’s intervention in Syria—designed to save the teetering regime of Bashar al-Assad—was still secret. The public account put out by Hezbollah was that its two fighters had been killed in an accident in Lebanon. But secrets are hard to keep in a village. Portraits of the fallen fighters, Ali Hussein al-Khishen and Ali Mustafa Alaeddine, showed two men who looked hardly old enough to be out of high school. Their bodies had been so badly disfigured that their families had not been allowed to see them.
[…] Hashem Safieddine, the head of Hezbollah’s executive council, walked onto the stage. He had a gray beard and wore a black turban, the latter signifying that he was a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. Safieddine is Nasrallah’s cousin. […]
This week, according to some press reports, Safieddine was expected to be named the new secretary-general of Hezbollah, replacing his cousin Nasrallah. During the thirty-two years that he ran Hezbollah, Nasrallah made it the world’s most powerful militia, stronger than both Lebanon’s Army and the state. Hezbollah was created by Iran, and is funded, armed, and sustained by Iran—Lebanese in name but Iranian in loyalty, with the declared purpose of destroying Israel. […]
After Nasrallah’s death, though, the entire Middle East is changed. On Monday, Israel launched an invasion of Lebanon; on Tuesday, Iran fired nearly two hundred ballistic missiles toward Israel […]
The current conflict on the Lebanese border began last October 8th—the day after Hamas militants from Gaza massacred twelve hundred people in southern Israel and took a couple of hundred more hostage—when Hezbollah began firing rockets into the northern part of the country.
As recently as last week, at the United Nations, President Joe Biden, with President Emmanuel Macron, of France, and other allies, pressured Israel to accept a ceasefire in Lebanon. The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, ignored them and pressed the attack. In a series of air strikes throughout the past several months, culminating in Nasrallah’s killing, Hezbollah has been severely degraded, with as many of its senior leaders dead as alive, including Ibrahim Aqil, Fuad Shukr, Ali Karaki, and several others. Safieddine, judging from his speeches, appears every bit as committed to the militant cause as his cousin was. Still, if Safieddine has been given the top job, it’s hard to imagine that he accepted it with much enthusiasm. […]
In a very real sense, Hezbollah holds Lebanon hostage. […]
Israel’s previous ventures into Lebanon have proved difficult and even disastrous. In 1982, Israeli troops invaded Lebanon for what was initially intended to be a temporary operation, and they stayed for eighteen years, bogged down in a quagmire. That invasion and subsequent occupation gave rise to Hezbollah, whose fighters were drawn mostly from Shiite towns in the south. “They forced the Israelis out of Lebanon under fire,” Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. operative in Lebanon, told me earlier this year. “No one had ever done that.” In 2006, when the Israelis invaded again, Hezbollah fought them to a draw, and the Israelis departed after little more than a month. A big Israeli invading force is exactly what Hezbollah has spent the past eighteen years preparing to fight. […]
When I was in Lebanon earlier this year, senior Hezbollah commanders told me that the tunnel networks are now larger and stronger. “We have tunnels for cars, tunnels for trucks, tunnels for railroad cars,” one said. […]
Few of the American and Israeli officials I have spoken with believe that Israel, acting alone, could destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, especially the underground nuclear-enrichment site at Fordow, south of Tehran. The only air force capable of destroying that reactor is that of the United States. […]
Israel’s success against Hezbollah could encourage the Israelis to undertake more aggressive action against the Iranian regime, including encouraging dissent within the country or even attacking it directly. What might such a campaign look like? Possibly strikes against Iran’s leaders, or its oil-export facilities, or its military bases. In a three-minute video addressed to the Iranian people, released on Monday, Netanyahu suggested that such activities may be about to begin. “When Iran is finally free—and that moment will come a lot sooner than people think—everything will be different,’’ he said.
More at the link.
I still do not trust Netanyahu at all. I think he is power-hungry, somewhat delusional, and desperate to avoid the Israeli justice system’s rulings.
In the weeks before Election Day, a loose-knit group of women are organizing online to blanket their communities with pro-Kamala Harris messages — not on yard signs or fliers, but on sticky notes.
The idea is simple: Take a pad of sticky notes, write messages and post them wherever women may see them — bathroom stalls, the backs of tampon boxes, bathroom mirrors, the gym.
The messages vary slightly, but a typical one reads something like: “Woman to woman: No one sees your vote at the polls. Vote Harris/Walz.” …
A Harris campaign spokesperson denied that the campaign is involved in the initiative…
The world’s longest treasure hunt appears to have come to an end, after an announcement in France that a buried statuette of a golden owl has finally been unearthed – after 31 years.
“We confirm that the replica of the golden owl was dug up last night, and that simultaneously a solution has been sent on the online verification system,” reads a post published on Thursday morning on the hunt’s official chatline…
Tens of thousands of people have taken part in the search, which has spawned a huge secondary literature in books, pamphlets and Internet sites.
They have all been following 11 complicated puzzles set out in the first book by its creator, Max Valentin. When he died in 2009, Mr Becker took over the operation.
The complex clues were supposed to lead to a precise point somewhere in France, where a bronze replica of the actual golden owl would be found under the ground. The winner would get the precious gold original…
The huge asteroid that hit Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago was not alone, scientists have confirmed.
A second, smaller space rock smashed into the sea off the coast of West Africa creating a large crater during the same era.
It would have been a “catastrophic event”, the scientists say, causing a tsunami at least 800m high to tear across the Atlantic ocean.
Dr Uisdean Nicholson from Heriot-Watt University first found the Nadir crater in 2022, but a cloud of uncertainty hung over how it was really formed.
Now Dr Nicholson and his colleagues are sure that the 9km depression was caused by an asteroid hurtling into the seabed.
They cannot date the event exactly, or say whether it came before or after the asteroid which left the 180km-wide Chicxulub crater in Mexico. That one ended the reign of the dinosaurs.
But they say the smaller rock also came at the end of the Cretaceous period when they went extinct. As it crashed into Earth’s atmosphere, it would have formed a fireball…
The asteroid that created the Nadir crater measured around 450-500m wide, and scientists think it hit Earth at about 72,000km/h…
Dozens of tigers have died in zoos in south Vietnam after a bird flu outbreak, according to state media.
Three lions and a panther were also reported to have died of the virus alongside 47 tigers since August.
The H5N1 outbreak hit the Vuon Xoai zoo near Ho Chi Minh City and the My Quynh safari park in neighbouring Long An province.
An official told Reuters news agency that the animals had likely fallen ill after being fed meat from chickens which had been infected.
The Vietnamese ministry of health said two samples taken from dead tigers tested positive for bird flu, and officials are “tracking the source of the chicken to determine the cause”…
Kate Barr is 100 per cent certain she’s not going to win her state Senate race in North Carolina, but she isn’t about to let that slow her down.
Barr — the self-declared “losing candidate for state Senate District 37” — is running for the Democrats in a district that’s all but guaranteed to elect a Republican.
Despite that, she’s out there every day, knocking on doors, handing out swag, doing speeches and chatting up voters in the district of North Carolina Piedmont.
“If I’m going to lose, I might as well do it spectacularly,” she told As It Happens host Nil Kӧksal.
For Barr, losing is the whole point.
She rocks campaign shirts with slogans like “Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Win,” or simply “LOSER” in all caps. Her campaign website is called KateBarrCantWin.com.
Her goal, she says, is to bring attention to the issue of gerrymandering, the process of manipulating electoral boundaries to favour a particular party, candidate or demographic.
Republican gerrymandering in North Carolina, she says, has left many voters disenfranchised, because they know their vote won’t make a difference. In essence, she says, politicians are choosing their voters instead of voters choosing their politicians…
“One of my neighbour’s daughters was asking her mom why I was running and saying I couldn’t win. She thought it was, like, that I didn’t believe in myself or I wasn’t trying hard. And so her mom taught her about gerrymandering,” she said.
The fifth-grader was so horrified by what she learned that Barr says she spent weeks getting people to sign her petition calling for an end to gerrymandering.
“And, like, that’s the mission, right?” Barr said. “Honestly, I have already won.”
Virtually all of the world’s supply of a mineral that is critical to semiconductor production comes from one tiny town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains that has been devastated by Hurricane Helene.
Spruce Pine, North Carolina has no running water or electricity, more than a week after Helene ripped through the town of 2,200. Roads and railways in and out of the area are severely damaged, according to local officials.
Mines in Spruce Pine produce the world’s purest form of quartz, which plays a central role in chip manufacturing.
Now, the town’s exceedingly valuable supply of high-purity quartz is at risk, threatening to cripple the $600 billion global semiconductor industry.
The natural disaster unfolding in Spruce Pine also highlights the continued instability of global supply chains, more than four years after Covid-19 drove home to Americans how dependent they had become on imported goods.
Two companies, Sibelco and The Quartz Corp., extract the high-purity quartz in Spruce Pine, refine it and export it to manufacturing facilities based primarily in China and other parts of Asia.
Much of the refined, high-purity quartz is then used to create a vessel called a crucible, which holds silicon as it is melted and transformed into the wafers on which semiconductors are made.
But mining, refining and shipping are all on hold, for now.
The union representing tens of thousands of dockworkers across the US has agreed to suspend its strike while negotiations continue.
Members of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) walked out on Tuesday at 14 major ports along the east and Gulf coats, halting container traffic from Maine to Texas.
The union says it has reached a tentative agreement on wages and will go back to work on Friday as talks continue until 15 January.
The action marked the first such shutdown in almost 50 years and threatened to wreak chaos amid the busy holiday shopping season and forthcoming presidential election.
Bet the Harris campaign is heaving a huge sigh of relief…
Lynna@Iforget: that a crime had a second victim is not a mitigation; rather, it means it was even worse.
Reginald Selkirk@45: So, like Deep Impact except nobody was able to blow up the bigger one.
Probably was a single larger body that was ripped apart by tidal forces on approach, like Shoemaker-Levy 9. There could well be additional impactors besides the two we now know about.
StevoRsays
The BBC has interviewed a Hamas leader :
Al-Hayya is the most senior man in Hamas after the leader, Yahya Sinwar, who is believed to be in Gaza.
The interview took place in Doha, where most of the political leadership of Hamas is based. Iran attacked Israel with ballistic missiles around an hour after the interview was recorded.
On Oct. 3, the sun released the most powerful solar flare this solar cycle, a colossal X9.05 eruption… That incoming CME is expected to hit Earth between Oct. 3 and Oct. 5, possibly triggering widespread auroras.
[An Idaho] “Meet your candidates” forum […] answered questions submitted by audience members. When asked if discrimination existed in Idaho, conservative Sen. Dan Foreman said no.
[…]
[House] Democratic candidate […] and member of the Nez Perce tribe Trish Carter-Goodheart said she pushed back on that idea when it was her turn to speak, pointing to her own experience and […] “I highlighted our weak hate crime laws and mentioned the presence of the Aryan Nations in northern Idaho as undeniable evidence of this reality.”
Foreman stood up and angrily interjected, using an expletive […] told her she should go back to where she came from, and heatedly stormed off. […] Foreman has a history of angrily confronting people in public, and shouting profanities.
[…]
Indigenous people, including the Nez Perce tribe, have lived in the Columbia River Basin for thousands of years. Foreman was born in Lake Forest, Illinois.
Liz Cheney, one of Donald Trump’s fiercest Republican antagonists, rallied with Kamala Harris on Thursday at the site in Wisconsin where the modern Republican Party was born, as the Democratic vice president aimed to win over moderate voters […]
The daughter of former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney, former Rep. Liz Cheney was the top GOP lawmaker on the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, earning Trump’s disdain and effectively exiling herself from her own party.
“Violence does not and must never determine who rules us. Voters do,” Cheney told the crowd as she recounted Trump refusing to act as he watched the violent attack on television. Someone in the crowd yelled “coward!” Others booed.
“He praised the rioters. He did not condemn them. That’s who Donald Trump is,” Cheney said.
She lost her Wyoming seat to a Trump-endorsed candidate two years ago and she endorsed Harris, the Democratic nominee, last month. The two women appeared together in Ripon, home to a white schoolhouse where a series of meetings held in 1854 to oppose slavery’s expansion led to the start of the Republican Party.
“I know that she loves our country, and I know she will be a president for all Americans” Cheney said of Harris. Noting that she herself remains conservative, Cheney said she was “honored to join her in this urgent cause.”
Instead of her usual “Harris-Walz” campaign signs, the stage was decorated with large signs that said “Country Over Party,” along with plenty of red, white and blue bunting.
[…] Jan. 6 was a turning point for Liz Cheney and her family. Both Cheneys are backing Harris, part of a cadre of current and former Republican officials who have broken with the vast majority of their party, which remains in Trump’s corner. Harris wants to portray her candidacy as a patriotic choice for independent and conservative voters who were disturbed by Trump’s unwillingness to cede power. Trump continues to deny his defeat with false claims of voter fraud.
[…] Harris on Thursday also was endorsed by Cassidy Hutchinson, who was a young White House aide during Trump’s presidency and described during a hearing of Cheney’s Jan. 6 congressional committee how she grew disgusted by Trump’s refusal to stop the rioters that day. Harris’ campaign also began airing ads targeting Republicans, independents and former Trump voters in battleground states.
Cheney’s presence prompted some dissonance for Harris supporters in the audience, especially those that remember her father’s role as a Republican headliner.
Victor Romero, 46, said it was “a little weird” to be at an event with her.
“I still don’t like Liz Cheney’s politics. But I’m glad that she understands the Republican Party that currently exists is just for Trump.”
But for younger voters, they know Cheney primarily for standing up to Trump.
“She stuck to her morals,” said Kynaeda Gray, 22. […]
Fox News stars are running cover for Donald Trump after special counsel Jack Smith provided extensive new revelations about the former president’s scheme to use lies about fraud to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, culminating with a mob of his supporters storming the U.S. Capitol. The network has spent four years supporting Trump’s subversion plot, covering up his attempt to steal that election, and paving the way for him to try again next month.
“With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results,” states Smith’s filing, which the judge overseeing Trump’s federal criminal prosecution for his 2020 election conspiracy unsealed in partially redacted form on Wednesday. “The through line of these efforts was deceit: the defendant’s and co-conspirators’ knowingly false claims of election fraud.”
The filing includes previously unreported details about Trump’s activities leading up to and on January 6, 2021.[…]
Some at Fox recognized the gravity of this moment.
“It was in this newly unsealed court paper we’re learning that former President Trump resorted to crime in a bid to cling to power after the 2020 election,” Fox anchor Neil Cavuto said shortly after the document became public, apparently paraphrasing Smith’s argument.
But Fox’s biggest stars […] either presented Smith’s revelations as old news or ignored them altogether.
[…] Fox host Laura Ingraham, a sometime Trump adviser during his presidency, texted then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows amid the insurrection: “Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.”
But on Wednesday night, she presented the filing as part of a Democratic conspiracy to move the public discussion away from the vice presidential debate between Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Ohio Sen. JD Vance. “Fewer than 24 hours since Vance wiped the floor with Walz, and with Trump closing in on Kamala in the swing states, Democrats needed to change the subject and fast,” Ingraham claimed. “So they hit the rewind button to January 6. […]
Fox prime-time host Sean Hannity, who is one of Trump’s closest allies and functioned as an extension of his White House during his presidency, is well aware of the danger posed by Trump’s plot. He privately warned Meadows about how Trump’s planned appearance at a rally of supporters on January 6, 2021, could go wrong, even as he publicly promoted it. After the riot began, he pleaded with Meadows to get Trump to stop it, though he made excuses for the mob on his show that night. The next day, he told then-White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany that the “key” was “no more crazy people” having access to Trump, and urged an end to “stolen election talk.”
But on Wednesday, he did not cover Smith’s filing at all.
[…] Fox, having seen the disastrous consequences of indulging Trump’s election fraud conspiracy theories, is fully in his corner, preparing the way for another coup attempt. The network’s airwaves are once again filled with baseless demagoguery about potential election fraud.
“JD Vance lies with such ease, so smoothly that even when you’re paying attention and you know the score, sometimes you don’t even know you’re being lied to,” says Chris Hayes. “It drives me insane.” The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer joins to discuss.
“JD Vance caught lying dozens of times.”
Some even crazier stuff Trump said today:
They stole the FEMA money just like they stole it from a bank so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season.
That part is covered in the second Chris Hayes segment, available at the same YouTube link.
Scientists found that a protein derived from a species of intestinal parasitic roundworm can speed up wound healing and prevent scarring, at least in mice…
Researchers at Rutgers University and the University of Glasgow in Scotland think that they’ve found one such candidate, and it’s all thanks to a parasitic roundworm known as Heligmosomoides polygyrus. These worms naturally infest the guts of rodents, which has already made them useful to study as a model for human worm infections. To survive in the gut, intestinal worms produce proteins that interact with the host’s immune system, with the net goal being to dampen certain types of immune response.
In recent years, scientists have discovered that H. polygyrus worms make one particular protein that could have surprising benefits for wound healing in people, called TGF-beta mimic, or TGM. Early studies have suggested that the protein can accelerate the skin’s healing process, while also suppressing the kinds of immune activity that lead to scar formation, such as inflammation. To further test this hypothesis, the researchers applied daily doses of TGM to the injured skin of lab mice…
…
The tentative deal will need to be ratified by the union members and the deal, also reported by the Associated Press, only suspends the strike until January 15. The union reached the temporary agreement with the United States Maritime Alliance, which represents the shipping companies, terminal operators, and the port authorities.
The agreement will allow people to get back to work while a longer six-year contract is negotiated and includes a temporary wage hike of 62%, according to Reuters. The union had asked for a 77% increase and the Maritime Alliance offered a 50% increase…
U.S. stock futures rallied on Friday after the all-important jobs data came in much stronger than economists expected.
Futures tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 264 points, or 0.6%. S&P 500 futures and Nasdaq 100 futures climbed 0.9% and 1.2%, respectively.
Nonfarm payrolls grew by 254,000 jobs in September, far outpacing the forecasted gain of 150,000 from economists polled by Dow Jones. The unemployment rate ticked down to 4.1% despite expectations for it to hold steady at 4.2%…
In mid-August, Donald Trump spoke briefly to CBS News, which asked the former president a good question. “You will release your medical records to the public?” correspondent Caitlin Huey-Burns asked the Republican.
“Oh sure,” Trump replied. “I would do that very gladly, sure.”
At that point, the GOP candidate proceeded to talk about his “perfect score” on a cognitive test — a subject he’s long struggled to understand — and his belief that every candidate should take one.
Nearly seven weeks later, The New York Times reported that the elusive medical records remain under wraps.
[J]ust over a month from an election that could make Mr. Trump, 78, the oldest person ever to serve as president (82 years, 7 months and 6 days when his term would end in January 2029), he is refusing to release even the most basic information about his health. If he wins, Mr. Trump could enter the Oval Office with an array of potentially worrisome issues, medical experts say: cardiac risk factors, possible aftereffects from the July assassination attempt and the cognitive decline that naturally comes with age, among others.
Well, sure, if you put it that way, it sounds bad.
It’s true that Election Day 2024 is still 32 days away, and it’s at least possible that the Republican nominee will follow through on his earlier promises related to transparency. But I wouldn’t count on it: As regular readers know, Trump has long adopted a rather untraditional approach to sharing medical information.
It started before he took office. In late 2015, during the race for the Republican presidential nomination, Team Trump released an unintentionally hilarious, four-paragraph letter from the late Dr. Harold Bornstein, asserting that Trump’s “physical strength and stamina are extraordinary” and that his lab tests results were “astonishingly excellent.” The doctor added at the time, “If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”
We learned several months later that Bornstein wrote the letter in five minutes while a limo, dispatched by Trump, waited for the document.
In the years that followed, disclosures did not improve — even when the then-president was hospitalized with a Covid infection.
Last fall, Trump released the first updated report on his health in more than three years, but it came by way of a statement issued by one of his golf club customers, and it omitted basic details such as his blood pressure and medications.
More recently, the former president and his team also ignored calls for basic medical details after he was shot in the ear.
It’s against this backdrop that Trump said nearly seven weeks ago that he’d “very gladly” release his medical records, which will probably reach the public right around the time he releases his tax returns.
Special Counsel Jack Smith laid out his most detailed case yet in a filing unsealed Wednesday for why Trump can still be prosecuted in spite of the Supreme Court’s capacious immunity decision.
[…] Smith gave a more precise and detailed account of key moments in which Trump allegedly violated the law.
Critically, Smith provided tighter evidence in three specific areas:
– Trump allegedly knew that he had lost the 2020 election and chose to fight anyway.
– The aim of the attempt to delay certification of the election on January 6 was for leverage to “negotiate” a Trump victory, diverging from the way in which the U.S. has picked a President for more than two centuries. [Amazing, but also true to form. Trump thought he could force a negotiation!]
– Trump and those around him saw and used violence as a means of winning the post-election fight.
Staying in the Fight
Both before and after the election, Smith alleges, Trump was determined to declare victory regardless of the outcome.
[…] But Smith refines this in the filing with new details that suggest Trump’s view of the results was blithe disregard. As the former President allegedly told family members after the election, “it doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.”
Before votes were being cast, Smith wrote, Trump told advisers that “he would simply declare victory before all the ballots were counted and any winner was projected.”
There are a few moments in which Smith alleges that Trump boosted information that he knew to be false. Smith had earlier alleged that various public officials and Trump associates told the former President that claims of voter fraud were bogus. But the filing unsealed on Wednesday puts a finer point on it by showing, in at least one instance, that Trump reacted to nonsensical claims in the way that much of the country did: by calling them “crazy.”
That episode centers on Sidney Powell, the attorney who accused Hugo Chavez of stealing the election at an infamous mid-November press conference. The next day, Smith said, Trump put Powell on speakerphone during a call. He then muted it, and proceeded to call her claims “crazy” and make a “Star Trek” reference to what she was saying.
Trump later boosted lawsuits that Powell filed based on the same claims. Other officials around Trump were in the odd position of pushing back against claims that Trump may have understood were false.
At one point, Smith said, Trump demanded that RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel push an allegation that Michigan voting machines had been hacked. The speaker of the Michigan state house had already told McDaniel that the allegation was “fucking nuts.”
Negotiating a Victory
Smith also further defined what Trump attorneys envisioned as the purpose of convening slates of false electors and using them to delay the count.
In one example, attorney Ken Chesebro suggested to Rudy Giulani that Pence’s delay could be used as a means to “negotiate a solution to defeat Biden.” The idea would be to use the delay as a means of pressure, demonstrating that Congress was incapable of acting and thereby inviting the Supreme Court to step in and rule, theoretically, in Trump’s favor.
Nothing like this happened. But for Smith, it helps demonstrate that Trump went through a cascading series of plans for how to snatch victory from the jaws of an already-certain defeat. […]
The Brooks Brothers Riot, Forever
Smith described the result of that failed pressure campaign [against V.P. Pence] as a “tinderbox” that ignited on January 6.
But he takes a broader view of Trump and violence in the filing.
To Smith, violence was always an option for Trump and those around him, something that could be used to force a victory if other options failed.
At the outset, Smith recounts an event that took place during vote-counting at Detroit’s TCF Center. There, an unidentified person told a Trump campaign staffer that a batch of votes was leaning heavily in Biden’s favor, and that the count was accurate.
“[F]ind a reason it isnt,” the campaign staffer purportedly replied, adding: “give me options to file litigation” and “even if itbis [sic].”
It’s Trump’s stop the steal campaign in miniature. At first, the staffer allegedly considers mendacity and legal options as means to victory. But when that fails, the next move is violence.
The unidentified person then suggested to the staffer that there might be violence similar to the 2000 Brooks Brothers riot. The staffer allegedly replied: “Make them riot” and “Do it!!!”
[…] During the speech on the Ellipse, Smith said, Trump knew that “he had only one last hope to prevent Biden’s certification as President: the large and angry crowd standing in front of him.”
Trump then sent his supporters, Smith said, to the Capitol in an effort to stop the electoral vote count. […]
‘Trump Bible’ one of few that meet Walters’ criteria for Oklahoma classrooms.
Superintendent Ryan Walters isn’t just talking about buying Bibles for schools.
Bids opened Monday for a contract to supply the state Department of Education with 55,000 Bibles. According to the bid documents, vendors must meet certain specifications: Bibles must be the King James Version; must contain the Old and New Testaments; must include copies of the Pledge of Allegiance, Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights; and must be bound in leather or leather-like material.
A salesperson at Mardel Christian & Education searched, and though they carry 2,900 Bibles, none fit the parameters.
But one Bible fits perfectly: Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the U.S.A. Bible, endorsed by former President Donald Trump and commonly referred to as the Trump Bible. They cost $60 each online, with Trump receiving fees for his endorsement.
Mardel doesn’t carry the God Bless the U.S.A. Bible or another Bible that could meet the specifications, the We The People Bible, which was also endorsed by Trump. It sells for $90.
“The RFP on its face seems fair, but with additional scrutiny, we can see there are very few Bibles on the market that would meet these criteria, and all of them have been endorsed by former President Donald Trump,” Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice Executive Director Colleen McCarty said.
Former Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson said the request for proposals might violate state law.
“It appears to me that this bid is anything but competitive,” Edmondson said. “It adds to the basic specification other requirements that have nothing to do with the text. The special binding and inclusion of government documents will exclude almost all bidders. If the bid specs exclude most bidders unnecessarily, I could consider that a violation.”
Separation of church and state concerns aside, much less expensive Bibles are readily available. Paperback versions of the New King James Version are available online for $2.99 each, less than 5% of what the Trump-endorsed Bible would cost. There are many free Bible apps, too.
Though Walters has frequently said he wants Bibles in every classroom, he has also clarified publicly that he wants them in classes where the Bible might apply to academic standards, such as history or literature. The request for 55,000 copies doesn’t fit either scenario; there are only 43,000 classroom teachers in the state, and many fewer teaching just history or literature.
If the Bibles cost $60 each, and the state buys 55,000, that’s $3.3 million. […]
A federal judge in Missouri put a temporary hold on President Joe Biden’s latest student loan cancellation plan on Thursday, slamming the door on hope it would move forward after another judge allowed a pause to expire.
Just as it briefly appeared the Biden administration would have a window to push its plan forward, U.S. District Judge Matthew Schelp in Missouri granted an injunction blocking any widespread cancellation.
Six Republican-led states requested the injunction hours earlier, after a federal judge in Georgia decided not to extend a separate order blocking the plan. […]
Biden’s plan has been on hold since September, when the states filed a lawsuit in Georgia arguing Biden had overstepped his legal authority. But on Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge J. Randal Hall decided not to extend the pause after finding that Georgia doesn’t have the legal right to sue in this case.
Hall dismissed Georgia from the case and transferred it to Missouri, which Hall said has “clear standing” to challenge Biden’s plan.
Proponents of student loan cancellation briefly had a glimmer of hope the plan would move forward—Hall’s order was set to expire after Thursday, allowing the Education Department to finalize the rule. But Schelp’s order put the question to rest. […]
Biden’s plan would cancel at least some student loan debt for an estimated 30 million borrowers.
It would erase up to $20,000 in interest for those who have seen their original balances increase because of runaway interest. It would also provide relief to those who have been repaying their loans for 20 or 25 years, and those who went to college programs that leave graduates with high debt compared to their incomes.
Biden told the Education Department to pursue cancellation through a federal rulemaking process after the Supreme Court rejected an earlier plan using a different legal justification. That plan would have eliminated up to $20,000 for 43 million Americans.
The Supreme Court rejected Biden’s first proposal in a case brought by Republican states, including Missouri.
In his order Wednesday, Hall said Georgia failed to prove it was significantly harmed by Biden’s new plan. He rejected an argument that the policy would hurt the state’s income tax revenue, but he found that Missouri has a strong case.
Missouri is suing on behalf of MOHELA, a student loan servicer that was created by the state and is hired by the federal government to help collect student loans. In the suit, Missouri argues that cancellation would hurt MOHELA’s revenue because it’s paid based on the number of borrowers it serves.
In their lawsuit, the Republican states argue that the Education Department had quietly been telling loan servicers to prepare for loan cancellation as early as Sept. 9, bypassing a typical 60-day waiting period for new federal rules to take effect.
Also joining the suit are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, North Dakota, and Ohio.
The White House on Friday bashed Republicans for what it argues are lies about the Hurricane Helene federal response effort.
The White House focused on the claim that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is out of funding.
Senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates sent a memo arguing that Republicans are “peddling bald faced lies” about the hurricane cleanup, and noted that GOP leaders in some of the affected states, such as Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, have thanked the Biden administration for their speedy response.
“But some Republican leaders – and their partners in rightwing media – are using Hurricane Helene to lie and divide us,” Bates said. “Their latest missive: baselessly claiming that FEMA is out of money to respond to Hurricane Helene – because of an existing program that supports cities and towns that are sheltering migrants.”
[…] Trump said at a rally in Michigan on Thursday that disaster relief funding was all spent on migrants while criticizing the administration’s response effort.
“There’s nobody that’s handled a hurricane or storm worse than what they’re doing right now,” Trump said. “Kamala spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants. Many of whom should not be in our country.”
In Bates’ memo, he shared a headline about the former president’s accusation against the Biden administration.
“No disaster relief funding at all was used to support migrants housing and services. None. At. All,” Bates said. “In fact, the funding for communities to support migrants is directly appropriated by Congress to [Customs & Border Protection], and is merely administered by FEMA. The funding is in no way related to FEMA’s response and recovery efforts.”
He outlined that FEMA has already provided over $45 million in direct financial assistance to individuals and families affected by the hurricane, including over $17 million to North Carolina.
He also warned about the consequences of spreading falsehoods when people are in need.
“Unfortunately, our country has seen the dangerous consequences of peddling falsehoods. In fact, disinformation of this kind can discourage people from seeking critical assistance when they need it most. It is paramount that every leader, whatever their political beliefs, stops spreading this poison,” Bates said.
FEMA on Friday released a fact-check page, outlining that “no money has been diverted” and that “FEMA has enough money right now for immediate response and recovery needs.”
President Biden has called on Congress to return from recess to pass additional funding to assist with the recovery efforts, while both chambers aren’t slated to return until Nov. 12.
The Biden administration has deployed more than 4,800 federal officials to support response efforts, and the president directed the deployment of up to 1,000 troops to assist in North Carolina’s recovery. Biden visited North Carolina on Wednesday and Florida and Georgia on Thursday to survey the damage and meet with local officials.
Vice President Harris traveled to Georgia on Wednesday and is scheduled to travel to North Carolina on Saturday.
Someone Started Hurricane Helene With A Weather Machine, And Marjorie Taylor Greene Is ON IT.
Gather ‘round, children, and listen to the tale of “Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Amazing Weather Machine.” […]
Yes, in the horrific wake of Hurricane Helene, North Georgia’s finest mind was on the Website Formerly Known as Twitter suggesting that some mysterious cabal had purposely sent the hurricane spinning across the South, killing a couple of hundred people, wiping out small towns, and causing billions upon billions of dollars in damages. For what purpose? Well, to steal the election, obviously.
That’s the implication, anyway.
First, Greene started off by tweeting out this map, whatever the hell this is: [Tweet and map available at the link]
There is no map key, so we can’t be sure exactly what she thinks we’re really looking at here. But she appears to have taken a map showing the number of customers without power in individual states after Helene passed through, and then overlaid a map showing concentrations of conservative and liberal voters in those states. We guess the blue splotches are the Democratic areas and everywhere else is Republican. And the hurricane passed west of the largest blue splotches in Virginia and the Carolinas, maybe thereby helping those states elect Democrats five weeks from now, we guess?
In the abstract, the scenarios of how the hurricane might affect voting could actually be interesting! Voters have been displaced, polling places have been washed away and authorities will have to scramble to set up new ones. People in rural areas who requested mail-in ballots may not get them if postal delivery is more difficult, if not impossible. […]
In two swing states with very narrow margins, those problems could theoretically make the difference in the presidential race or which party controls Congress next year. Or in North Carolina, maybe it could wreck the gubernatorial election and help put masturbating Black Nazi Mark Robinson in the governor’s mansion.
For political scientists and campaign strategists and election modelers, these could be interesting and important questions. In the hands of Marjorie Taylor Greene, however, they are simply hilarious. A few hours after she tweeted the map, she followed up with this:
Yes, they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.
We have so many questions for Marge. First, who is the “they” to whom she is referring? Democrats? Jews? SPECTRE? […]
Second, how do “they” control the weather? Is there some sort of weather machine that “they” have built? Where is this mysterious weather machine located? How does it work? Space lasers? Microwaves? Somehow forcing God to stand in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico and twirl as fast as he can until all the water starts spinning in the same direction?
Third, why would “they” want to wreck Asheville, the most liberal area in North Carolina, since the city’s voters could put Democrats over the top in that state? […]
Or is she accusing members of her own party of carrying out this dastardly terrorist attack? And if she knew about the weather machine, why did she recently vote against funding FEMA, the governmental agency responsible for coordinating rescue and recovery efforts in the wake of hurricanes? Wouldn’t that have really screwed up “their” plans if FEMA rescued all the voters the weather machine meant to kill and helped all those areas recover quickly?
[…] We hope some reporter asks her about this new theory soon, so she can tell them to fuck off like she did the lady who asked her about the space lasers.
Maybe one of these days Greene could stop with the anti-semitic conspiracy theories and put the blame for extreme weather events wrecking America on abortionists and gaysexuals like a normal Republican.
Buck Shlegeris, CEO at Redwood Research, a nonprofit that explores the risks posed by AI, recently learned an amusing but hard lesson in automation when he asked his LLM-powered agent to open a secure connection from his laptop to his desktop machine.
“I expected the model would scan the network and find the desktop computer, then stop,” Shlegeris explained to The Register via email.
“I was surprised that after it found the computer, it decided to continue taking actions, first examining the system and then deciding to do a software update, which it then botched.”
I think it goes without saying that allowing an experimental AI access to a sysadmin account is a bad idea. This is the sort of thing you do in a lab with a local net isolated from other networks.
Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) remains on the hook for an approximately $400,000 fine after failing to respond to an Australia eSafety Commission 2023 inquiry, which largely sought to probe measures X is currently taking to combat an alleged proliferation of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on its platform.
To void the fine, X tried to persuade Australian Judge Michael Wheelahan that X had no obligation to comply with an Online Safety Act notice issued to Twitter because Twitter “ceased to exist” a few weeks after receiving the notice—when Musk merged the app into his company X Corp.
Wheelahan summarized X’s argument as saying that “X Corp was not obliged to prepare any report in Twitter Inc’s place, as X Corp was not the same person as the provider to whom the notice was issued.”
But Wheelahan ruled Friday that the fine should be upheld, rejecting the “bare premise” that X assumed no legal responsibility to respond to the notice after Twitter ceased to exist.
X’s argument failed because Wheelahan found that under Nevada law, merging Twitter into X turned Twitter into a “constituent entity,” which then transferred all of Twitter’s legal consequences to X Corp.
In his order, Wheelahan devoted a decent chunk of time to calling out testimony from X’s expert on commercial business law, Scott Bogatz, as “molded to support the conclusions he expressed in his report.”
Particularly “superficial” and requiring “leaps of logic,” Wheelahan wrote, was Bogatz’s attempts to persuade the court that the meaning of “liabilities” in Nevada merger law strictly applied to financial liabilities.
“It is clear under Nevada Law that the term ‘liability’ refers to monetary obligations,” Bogatz had argued in court, but Wheelahan did not find this persuasive.
“I cannot accept this evidence without a much better explanation of Mr. Bogatz’s path of reasoning,” Wheelahan wrote.
Wheelahan emphasized that the Nevada merger law specifically stipulated that “all debts, liabilities, obligations and duties of the Company shall thenceforth remain with or be attached to, as the case may be, the Acquiror and may be enforced against it to the same extent as if it had incurred or contracted all such debts, liabilities, obligations, and duties.” And Bogatz’s testimony failed to “grapple with the significance” of this, Wheelahan said…
If you were planning to go to the Shell Shock II music festival in Orlando and you like Kyle Rittenhouse … well, you are in luck.
But if you were hoping to see a handful of the bands — including the headliner, Evergreen Terrace — there, well … they apparently don’t want to be on the same card as Kyle Rittenhouse.
So, instead, the new headliner for Shell Shock II, per Loudwire, will be a Slipknot cover band.
You read that right, the festival is now, apparently, down to a cover band as its headliner after announcing that Rittenhouse would attend…
“Evergreen Terrace has always supported and continues to support philanthropic events for veterans, PTSD awareness, child poverty, and many more, but we will not align with an even promoting murderers such as Kyle Rittenhouse capitalizing off of their pseudo celebrity. Unfortunately, we did not do our due diligence with this particular event. Even after they offered to pull Kyle from the event, we discovered several associated entities that we simply do not agree with. As advocates for free speech we are respectfully cancelling the Shell Shock festival. We will be personally contributing to a veterans charity and urge you to do the same. The promoters have been nothing less than understand. ‘Lines we draw in the sand … depend on where we stand.’” …
Loudwire reported that several other bands — Southpaw, Let Me Bleed and American Hollow — followed suit and dropped out of the festival…
Asked about one of Donald Trump’s worst economic ideas, Senator Tim Scott said the former president “talks in the abstract.” This sparked laughter
For the convenience of readers, here are a few links back to the previous set of 500 comments on The Infinite Thread.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/07/06/infinite-thread-xxxii/comment-page-9/#comment-2238163
Vance’s views on the 2020 race matter, whether he likes it or not
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/07/06/infinite-thread-xxxii/comment-page-9/#comment-2238158
Bank of America is down: Users report their accounts showing empty balance during widespread outage
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/07/06/infinite-thread-xxxii/comment-page-9/#comment-2238142
The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/07/06/infinite-thread-xxxii/comment-page-9/#comment-2238114
Robert Reich – Donald Trump is gaining on Kamala Harris in the polls. I have some theories why
For Trump, Jack Smith’s new filing doesn’t just pose legal troubles
Many Americans have forgotten about Jan. 6 and Donald Trump’s plot against the 2020 election. They’re now getting a timely reminder from the special counsel.
A timely warning:
Link to Talking Points Memo’s “Morning Memo Newsletter.”
Link
Cartoon: Tom the Dancing Bug says, “Hey, ladies! Trump will be your protector!”
Cartoon: Stylistic differences
The profit-obsessed monster destroying American emergency rooms
Private equity decimated emergency care in the United States — without you even noticing.
Much more at the link.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/americas-hitler-cant-wait-to-revoke
America’s Hitler Can’t Wait To Revoke Haitian Migrants’ Legal Status, Make America White Again
He says they’re not here legally IN HIS OPINION. Is it because he’s a white supremacist? (Yes.)
https://www.wonkette.com/p/how-gross-weird-and-stupid-are-todays
How Gross, Weird, And Stupid Are Today’s Republican Candidates? Consider Virginia’s Hung Cao!
There was a Senate debate in Virginia last night.
Courthouse News Service:
Supreme Court swaps its history book for a dictionary to review regulations on ghost guns
The high court threw out the government’s ban on bump stocks last term. Now the feds are fighting to uphold rules to curb firearms without serial numbers.
Kelsey Reichmann / October 2, 2024
Followup to comment 3.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/october-surprise-jack-smiths-january
They’ve been facing genocide but are peing pressured not to protest it. The people they see as leaders kileld but we dont want tem showing their flags nor faces.
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-03/sydney-candlelight-pro-palestinian-vigil-october-7/104426544
Human beings all too human, all nowhere near humane enough to each other. Allindiiduals (I’m not -MPFC-LoB.)
All too hypocritical and messed up and whole situation ..no words even if I had a right or place to say ém. Silence better? Worse? I just..
People are peopel . World is bad enough fullof toomcuh painand cruelty already. Think and be kind all.
Being not peeing. Tho’guees to be is toneed to pee sometimes..
Nearly all homes in counties hardest hit by Helene lack national flood insurance.
Washington Post link
For now, people who can’t afford flood insurance are shit out of luck.
Global Overheating Changing the world. Even European borders :
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-03/switzerland-borders-changing-thanks-to-climate-change/104427704
Apologies if someone else has beaten me to sharing this,
I haven’t seen this comet yet. I really hope I get to do so.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-03/astrophotographers-capture-comet-australian-skies/104418652
I had not noticed before how efficient the substitution is. All you need is some white-out, and to change two letters, and you can reuse the same old campaign signs.
It sounds like they got distracted somewhere along the way. Here is the full text of
the second amendment
Note that the specification “firearms” does not appear. The right is to keep and bear all arms. That should include switchblades, crossbows, flamethrowers, chemical and bio-weapons, and nukes if one wants to be strict about the text.
Re: Reginald Selkirk @ #19…
Any idea where I can pickup an inexpensive, war surplus Oerlikon? Or how about a Krupp 88 to deal with pesky drones? If I had a leftover PT boat, I’d be looking for a set of torpedoes…
@ #19
The word “firearm” appears in the Gun Control Act of 1968, which is the point under debate. It is one point among several and there is a detailed preview of the case at this link which examines the issues, for anyone interested.
Btw, the 2nd Amendment does not say “all” arms and there is no debate on whether arms can be restricted, as they have been since the Founding era, only on what the restrictions may include.
@21
As I read it, the restrictions may not include a requirement that weapons be decorated with fringe.
“shall not be enfringed.”
Agatha All Along Bravely Asks, ‘What If the Partridge Family Fought Demons?’
Three-Star System Shatters Astronomy Record
Trump and J.D. Vance Were Just Hit With Criminal Charges. Here’s What We Know
3 More Women Claim They, Too, Had a Relationship With RFK. Jr. in 2024
Now We Know Why Melania Trump ‘Wrote’ a Memoir
Social Media Sanctions Hit Conservatives More, But Due to Content Sharing, Study Says
@19 Reginald Selkirk: The whole idea of tracing weapons will need reworked soon as plastic and metal printing will let people make weapons at home without any traceable parts. It can already be done but is hard and the weapons awkward. It’s only a matter of time before the technology gets there.
The only solution will be steps to sideline people before they resort to shooting, such as national mental health.
@20 whheydt: You could buy an Oerlikon second hand in a military black market in Africa or some areas of the middle east and Asia. Updated designs are still used for cheap anti-air and mounted on small boats. They are useless against jets but are handy for driving off helicopters and 3rd world armies sometimes use prop planes. On ships they fill the gap between machine guns and autocannons mounted in powered turrets.
Nobody has made barrel’s for 88s in a long time, even if you can get your hands on one I wouldn’t recommend firing it. Torpedoes would be hard, most uses have been replaced with missiles and the remaining uses are tightly controlled.
Tesla’s Cybertruck racks up fifth recall in under a year
@20, 29
Torpedo development continues.
European navies chase the white whale of torpedo-busting torpedoes
Plenty of election officials who bought into Donald Trump’s election lies, but Colorado’s Tina Peters, who’s headed to prison, is a special case.
DOJ, Microsoft seize 107 domains used in Russia’s Star Blizzard phishing attacks
Donald Trump says he’s responsible for creating the best economy ever — even if we include data from 2020. That’s demonstrably ridiculous.
Embedded links that lead to additional sources are available at the main link.
Liz Cheney hits the trail for Harris in the birthplace of the Republican Party
The former GOP congresswoman will join Harris at an event in Ripon, Wis., as the campaign works to win over Republicans who have grown weary of Trump.
Biden administration can move forward with student loan forgiveness, federal judge rules
Link
Lot’s more details are available at the link.
Trump double standard on full display in New York Times’ latest coverage
Caitlin Clark wins WNBA Rookie of the Year honors
Followup to comments 3 and 12.
Link
Hurricane Helene update:
Link
Excerpts from : In the span of a week—with the death of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, and Iran’s ballistic-missile strike on Israel—the entire Middle East is changed, a New Yorker article by Dexter Filkins
More at the link.
I still do not trust Netanyahu at all. I think he is power-hungry, somewhat delusional, and desperate to avoid the Israeli justice system’s rulings.
Pro-Harris sticky notes pop up in women’s restrooms and gyms and on tampon boxes
Treasure hunter finally finds Golden Owl after decades
The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs was not alone
Dozens of tigers dead after bird flu hits Vietnam zoos
@ 44
Was Sam Spade involved?
She’s a loser, baby. Why this Democrat is running a race she knows she can’t win
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/tiny-town-hit-helene-upend-global-semiconductor-chip-industry-rcna173933
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn8jxnn76qwo
Bet the Harris campaign is heaving a huge sigh of relief…
Polls/Kamala’s Favorability Shift: Game Changer for 2024?
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=cI-43O-qkE4
Comedian Jeff Wittek Says He Saw “Live Sex” at Diddy’s Party
Well, I guess it’s better than necrophila…
Lynna@Iforget: that a crime had a second victim is not a mitigation; rather, it means it was even worse.
Reginald Selkirk@45: So, like Deep Impact except nobody was able to blow up the bigger one.
Probably was a single larger body that was ripped apart by tidal forces on approach, like Shoemaker-Levy 9. There could well be additional impactors besides the two we now know about.
The BBC has interviewed a Hamas leader :
See here : https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cdd4rpv5jp0o
Source : https://www.space.com/most-powerful-solar-flare-this-solar-cycle-x-9-earth-firing-line
Senator tells Native American candidate to go back to where she came from, storms out of public event
Harris joined by former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney at Wisconsin Rally, by Associated Press
https://www.msnbc.com/all
First video segment on the menu is
It’s a great presentation by Chris Hayes. 7:04 minutes long.
Link
Followup to comment 58.
YouTube link to the Chris Hayes segment.
“JD Vance caught lying dozens of times.”
Some even crazier stuff Trump said today:
That part is covered in the second Chris Hayes segment, available at the same YouTube link.
Scar-Free Healing? A Parasitic Worm Could Be the Key
@50
U.S. Dockworkers End Strike Over Automation in Temporary Agreement
Dow futures jump 200 points after blockbuster jobs report signals economy on solid ground
The 78-year-old former president said nearly seven weeks ago that he’d “very gladly” release his medical records. Has he kept that promise? Of course not.
The Striking Details That Jack Smith Used To Tighten His January 6 Case Against Trump
Link to The Oklahoman
‘Trump Bible’ one of few that meet Walters’ criteria for Oklahoma classrooms.
More at the link.
Followup to comment 36.
Sheesh. Signs of exasperation.
Link
Followup to comment 60.
White House bashes GOP ‘lies’ about FEMA funds
https://www.wonkette.com/p/someone-started-hurricane-helene
Someone Started Hurricane Helene With A Weather Machine, And Marjorie Taylor Greene Is ON IT.
Register: AI agent promotes itself to sysadmin, trashes boot sequence
I think it goes without saying that allowing an experimental AI access to a sysadmin account is a bad idea. This is the sort of thing you do in a lab with a local net isolated from other networks.
X fails to avoid Australia child safety fine by arguing Twitter doesn’t exist
Their legal strategy was “New phone, who dat?”
Metal music festival loses headliner, multiple bands after announcing Kyle Rittenhouse as guest