In Indiana 85% of the time, when children were sent to foster care, parents weren’t accused of physical/sexual abuse. 40% of the time, not even drugs. Far more commonly family poverty is confused with neglect.
Indiana took children at a rate 65% above the national average. Black kids taken at 50% above IN’s rate. 4-in-5 Black Hoosier kids endure a child abuse investigation.
The federal government reimburses county courts to hire more family defense lawyers. 1-in-5 counties don’t bother to apply for it.
One of the most effective [reforms] is high-quality family defense. Under this model, families get a lawyer with a reasonable caseload, their own social worker, and sometimes a parent advocate who’s been through the system
[…]
One can only wonder how anyone can […] turn down federal aid […] claiming, as [one court admin] does: “[T]he system we have works well.”
Oh, Lynna, thanks, again, for your work here. However, personally, as a terrible play on words, thinking about most of the topics posted here, it makes me want to roll over in agony.
If you don’t mind my expressing it, our take on things today is our video at theartsinarizona.org
The hosts of “Fox & Friends” praised Donald Trump for allowing the hosts of their rival morning news program, MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” to come to Mar-a-Lago and curry favor with him ahead of his presidency.
Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski announced on Monday that they had visited Trump to reopen a line of communication between the network and the bigoted incoming president.
“That is probably the most magnanimous thing any individual in America has done in a long time [bullshit],” “Fox & Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade declared. His co-host Ainsley Earhardt agreed, arguing that Trump should be applauded for welcoming the MSNBC hosts after years of criticism of his behavior.
“It just shows you that he does want—you know—to smooth things over, maybe he is going to unite our country,” Earhardt added, ignoring everything Trump has ever said since becoming a political figure. [laughable]
None of the Fox hosts bothered to suggest that the obsequious behavior of the MSNBC hosts follows a pattern of major media figures—including Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos—bowing to the notoriously media-hostile Trump.
For his part, Trump also appears to have enjoyed Scarborough and Brzezinski’s groveling. In a separate interview with Fox News, Trump said the meeting was “very cordial,” adding, “In many ways, it’s too bad that it wasn’t done long ago.”
Trump also claimed the MSNBC hosts “congratulated me on running a ‘great and flawless campaign, one for the history books.’” [Oh FFS] Based on Trump’s well-documented history of lying about his interactions with people, there is little reason to believe his version of events is completely accurate.
Trump told Fox it is “vital” for the United States to have a “free, fair and open media,” [gaslighting] a sentiment completely at odds with his history and rhetoric.
In fact, Trump is currently suing CBS News and The New York Times as retribution for accurate reporting on him and his campaign. He has also previously called for broadcast outlets to lose their licenses for reporting factual, negative things about him. […]
Civil-liberties lawyers alarmed by President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to launch mass deportations of undocumented immigrants sued the federal government Monday for information about how authorities might quickly remove people from the United States.
The federal lawsuit alleges that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has failed to respond to requests for basic information about its existing contracts with private airline companies that make up “ICE Air,” as well as ground transportation services, airfields and policies governing deportation flights, including those carrying children.
Lawyers said the information is urgent because of Trump’s election victory this month and his upcoming inauguration on Jan. 20. Advocates for immigrants have accused ICE and its contractors of treating migrants harshly and holding them in inhumane conditions.
“Despite the critical role these flights play in the removal system—in many instances, serving as the mechanism for deportation—ICE Air remains shrouded in secrecy,” said the lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles by the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Southern California. “This secrecy has masked responsibility for serious abuses and danger on ICE Air flights.” […]
Dental care supplier Henry Schein advanced in Monday trading as investors bet that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Health and Human Services secretary, could recommend removing fluoride from the U.S. water system, a move that would lead to a boom in dental visits.
Shares of Henry Schein shares jumped nearly 5%, on track for its best day since July. Fellow dental product makers Dentsply Sirona and Envista also edged higher in the session.
Monday’s moves come as investors ready for public health changes under a second Trump administration. Kennedy posted on X before the presidential election this month that a “Trump White House will advise all U.S. water systems to remove fluoride from public water.”
Fluoride has long been shown as an effective method for fighting cavities. But the mineral has found itself at the center of a nationwide fight that’s led some local communities to end programs centered on its insertion into public water.
While Kennedy will need to win Senate approval to take the job, market participants are already zeroing in on a group of stocks that make dental hygiene products as potential beneficiaries of his policies. That’s because taking fluoride out of water would actually put the tooth cleaning industry in higher demand as consumers look elsewhere to fight cavities, according to firm Gordon Haskett. […]
While the market appears to be moving on Kennedy’s nomination, Bilson said that regulatory changes would likely take years to come into effect. He also noted that drinking water should fall more under the Environmental Protection Agency than Health and Human Services.
lumipunasays
Hello.
Two international data cables in the Baltic Sea have mysteriously broken. It’s that time of year, I guess.
Analysts attribute continually-decreasing battery prices to two main factors. One is technological advancements, specifically larger cells and cell-to-pack tech that lower the number of battery modules or eliminate them completely. This could help not only lower costs, but achieve up to 30% higher energy density that could keep battery-pack size in check, analysts believe. Tesla has moved to produce its own large-format 4680 cells, but has had trouble keeping manufacturing costs of those cells down.
The other factor is a downturn in the prices of raw materials like lithium and cobalt. Higher raw-material prices contributed to soaring EV battery costs in 2022, but that’s declining and will continue to decline through at least 2030, representing about 40% of anticipated battery cost reductions, according to Goldman Sachs…
birgerjohanssonsays
Dr. Pekka Jahunen explains concepts for exploring space.
.
“How The Moon’s Bumpy Gravitational Field Can Help Launch Things From Its Surface ”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=VP4fn0_cb24
There is also a discussion about extracting ammonia salt from Ceres for its nitrogen.
Ceres rotates fast enough (and has an orbital velocity low enough) to make a space elevator feasible. You could even build a megasatellite around it with a frame holding multiple Oneill cylinders.
Modern chips are manufactured on slabs of silicon less than a millimeter thick. But semiconductor companies try to slice these silicon wafers thinner and thinner to squeeze more performance out of existing designs.
Infineon Technologies recently revealed what it called the thinnest silicon power wafers ever mass-produced in a bid to boost the power efficiency, power density, and reliability of its power-conversion solutions, specifically DC-DC converters that feed the AI chips in data centers. The newly produced power wafer is 20 µm thick, which is half as thick as current state-of-the-art wafers for power semiconductors that typically measure 40 to 60 µm…
Infosys founder Narayana Murthy has tripled down on his previous statements that 70-hour work weeks are what’s needed in India and revealed he also thinks weekends were a mistake. From a report:
…
Look, I can’t help the fact that team D is coping hard with having anointed a monumentally shitty presidential candidate, or that you’ve chosen to cope with a campaign of fear and by turning the Orange Man Bad dial up to 11. That’s your problem, not mine. I am going to vote third party in November like I did in 2012, 2016, and 2020, and this time I won’t vote for any congressional candidates who support funding for Israel. There are at least a few hundred thousand people who think the way I do and we live in all fifty states — I’m just letting you know ahead of time that you’re going to lose, and it will be across the board in downballot races too. It may not be the conviction at the Hague that Biden and his cronies deserve, but a decisive defeat for the Democratic Party in November is at least a little bit of justice.
People like Vicar, myself, and very few others are the only credible political commentators on here. If you’re looking for ways to move forward from your devastating and complete defeat, I have ideas.
Polynesian explorers settled on a group of freezing sub-Antarctic islands in the 13th century after a “mind-blowing” voyage across the Southern Pacific Ocean, archaeologists have discovered.
Scientists found stone tools, waste mounds and dog bones on the small island of Enderby in the uninhabited Auckland archipelago, one of the most remote and forbidding spots on the planet…
Analysis with carbon dating revealed that the settlement dates to some time between AD 1250 and 1320.
“Radiocarbon ages across the site indicate a single continuous settlement, probably of some decades,” the scientists wrote.
“The site was about as far south as prehistoric habitation could be sustained and was probably vacated at the onset of the Little Ice Age in the late 14th century.” …
whheydtsays
Re: beholder @ #15…
Current vote counts (which are still continuing) have Harris slightly ahead in the popular vote, so hardly a “devastating and complete defeat”.
Jeansays
beholder:
You’re proud of your predictions and how you voted?! You talk about a campaign of fear and turning the dial up to 11 but after the nominations up to now that was not even close; it’s even worse than anything foreseen and that’s just the preview. If you think Biden was bad (and he is on many fronts), it’s going to be so much worse on all fronts (unless you’re rooting for dictators and fascism). And there’s not going to be any guard rails like there would have been with the democrats.
So enjoy your smugness while the world burns around you and people die and suffer. Unless you end up amongst the casualties.
[Other family]: [This] husband and father was a DACA recipient until this summer when he got a green card, his sister and brother-in-law are DACA recipients, his sister-in-law is a green card holder, and the rest of his family here [11 of them including his wife] are US citizens, some who are not present are undocumented.
[…]
[Wife]: I cried a lot. […] Half of my family—if they’re gonna be here or they’re not […] and how do you tell all of our kids, my nephews?
[…]
[Husband]: [Of Latinos] There’s still a lot of machismo. There’s still a lot of misogyny. And something that we need to say aloud is there’s a lot of anti-blackness.
——
[Titular Fool]: [Supported Trump] For the economy, yes. I’m not supporting the anti-immigrant action. No, it’s not human. I’m not afraid [of deportation]. I’m not afraid. […] Democrats forget their promises […] I wouldn’t regret being deported. I want better for my children.
Akira MacKenziesays
@ 18
Take your advice, roll it up, and use it to fuck your puckered asshole until you bleed out and die.
Akira MacKenziesays
Whoops, that was meant to be hurled at 15.
Bekenstein Boundsays
I wouldn’t regret being deported. I want better for my children.
You think having to grow up without a father would be better?
[Supported Trump]
Oh, wait. Yeah, they’d definitely be better off without this particular father serving as a role model. Nevermind.
beholdersays
@17 whheydt
Current vote counts (which are still continuing) have Harris slightly ahead in the popular vote
Fake news. Are you even trying anymore?
@20 Akira
You first. If it works, I’ll consider it.
Akira MacKenziesays
@ 23
You’re welcome try.
StevoRsays
One thousand days today since Putin decided to invade Ukraine. The consequences have been catastrophic for both Ukraine and Russia.
The death toll disputed estimated at around 120- 174,000 Russian troops, 57,000 Ukranian troops & 39,000 civilians but probly really higher.
You should not fantasize about violence when posting in The Infinite Thread, nor should you propose that others do violence. The rule holds even if you are speaking metaphorically or jokingly.
That wording is courtesy of CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain. I approve that wording. The reminder was directed to birgerjohansson @480, 481, from the previous set of 500 comments in The Infinite Thread.
Akira, you already know this. You should not have to be reminded.
StevoRsays
Ukrainian refugee who opened cafe in London reflects on 1,000 days of Russia’s war in Ukraine
“I thought it would be over very, very soon,” Ms Tataryna tells the ABC as Ukraine marks a grim milestone — 1,000 days since the war began.She remains a refugee, one of more than 6 million people forced to flee Ukraine. “I don’t remember how it is not to be a refugee, how it is to not be worried about your family,” she says.
…(snip)…
The war in Ukraine is the deadliest in Europe since World War II but neither Russia or Ukraine release official casualty statistics. At the end of August, the United Nations estimated that at least 11,743 civilians had been killed and 24,614 wounded in Ukraine since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Ukrainian prosecutors say 589 Ukrainian children had been killed.
Ukrainian officials have said the figures are likely much higher, with verifying deaths and injuries difficult in areas like Mariupol, which was under Russian control.
Western estimates put the number of dead and wounded soldiers in the hundreds of thousands on both sides but believe that Russia is suffering worse loses.The UK chief of defence staff Sir Tony Radakin told the BBC this month that Russia was approaching 700,000 casualties since the invasion began and lost 1,500 soldiers a day on average in October.
As the last votes continue to get tallied across the country, one thing is clear: Donald Trump’s victory on Nov. 5 is nowhere near the “mandate” Republicans are claiming.
On Monday, CNN data reporter Harry Enten broke down Trump’s incredibly weak popular vote victory.
“Look, if you look historically speaking, Donald Trump is now under 50% in the national popular vote, barely under 50%,” Enten told CNN anchor John Berman. “Compare his popular vote victory to those, historically speaking, over the last 200 years. His popular vote victory ranks 44th out of 51. That ain’t exactly strong,” he explained.
Indeed, Trump has the shakiest popular vote win since George W. Bush was reelected in 2004, and the latest popular vote margin is the leanest since Al Gore’s win over Bush in 2000 (Bush won by a single Electoral College vote, while Gore won the popular vote by 543,895).
Americans also did not show much confidence in Republicans downballot.
“In fact, I went all the way back to the history books, and this is the most Senate races that the winner’s party lost in states the president won since 2004,” Enten said. Democratic Senate candidates have officially won four states that Trump also won, and the Pennsylvania Senate race between incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Casey and Republican challenger Dave McCormick is not yet called.
As for the House?
“You’d have to go all the way back before there were 50 states in the union to find a smaller majority for the incoming House majority” based on the current election count projections, giving Republicans a paper-thin 221 to 214 majority.
Enten notes that some of those GOP House members are set to leave their seats to join the Trump administration, making the already thin Republican majority even smaller.
“We are talking about a very wide win for Donald Trump. But the depth, it’s not particularly deep,” Enten said. “It’s actually quite shallow, historically speaking.” [video at the link]
Posted by readers of the article:
I can see that an actual landslide would give the winner more of a mandate than a squeaker election. Trump does not have that landslide win—he’s a legend in his own mind.
———————–
He won the electoral college. He has a man date with Vlad Putin.
——————————-
***Non voting adult US citizens who have not been legally disfranchised: 97 million (40%)***
Trump got 2 million fewer votes than he got in 2020.
—————————–
Trump won by a smaller popular-vote margin than Biden.
—————————–
The extent of a mandate is measurable in how well the president’s actions are received or how much pushback they get. Trump is setting up for a lot of overreach.
———————————
DJT bragging that he has a mandate is gaslighting, posturing, shaping the narrative, etc.
[…] Brzezinski [Mika Brzezinski, co-host of “Morning Joe” on MSNBC] added of the meeting:
“In this meeting, President Trump [Ed. Note: not yet!] was cheerful and upbeat, and he seemed interested in finding common ground with Democrats on some of the most divisive issues.”
Holy hell, these two [Mika and Joe] have the memories of concussed goldfish. Trump has never been interested in finding “common ground” with Democrats. He blew up more attempts by Democrats to approach him in his first term than we can count. He spent his four years out of office convincing Republicans in Congress to do all they could to obstruct any Democratic effort at forging a compromise on anything. Even when, like the immigration bill he got the GOP to kill, the policies were the sorts his party had been trying to pass for years.
Said Joe Scarborough:
“Of 150 million votes cast, Donald Trump got about 50%. Kamala Harris got about 49%. So I don’t know. It seems to make sense for leaders of both parties to seek common ground.”
In 2016, out of nearly 140 million votes cast, Hillary Clinton got about 48 percent and Trump got about 46 percent. We do not recall Trump spending the next four years trying to seek common ground with leaders of the other party. If anything, he went out of his way to antagonize them. Antagonizing people is his entire personality! There is zero reason to even pretend to believe that he has suddenly changed his tune at the age of 78.
[…] Trump also told Fox that the world’s two most credulous dipshits also “congratulated me on running a ‘great and flawless campaign, one for the history books,’” and also that he worked “longer and harder than any presidential candidate in history.”
And it wouldn’t be a Trump interview if he didn’t end it right back where we started:
Trump added, “I expect this will take place with others in the media, even those that have been extremely hostile.”
The president-elect said he feels he has “an obligation to the American public, and to our country itself, to be open and available to the press.”
“If not treated fairly, however, that will end,” Trump said. “The media is very important to the long-term success of the United States of America.”
Yeah, he’s turned over a new leaf, all right. This is Trump’s version of magnanimity: Be nice to me and maybe I’ll consider not putting you or your news organization under criminal investigation for the offense of being mean and nasty to Trump.
[…] We can also say we give it until Christmas before Trump proudly announces on TruthSocial that Scarborough and Brzezinski have committed the unforgivable sin of not sucking up to him lavishly enough, so now he hates them again.
So you’re taking beholder’s side, eh? After all he’s said and done here?
KGsays
People like Vicar, myself, and very few others are the only credible political commentators on here. If you’re looking for ways to move forward from your devastating and complete defeat, I have ideas. – beholder@15
I’m sure you and your fellow fascist stooges will go on helping Trump all you can, while he turns up the dial on enabling Israeli genocide in Palestine to 11, abandons the Ukrainians to the mercies of your chum Putin, and gets on with imposing fascism at home. But you won’t find much help here.
Kyle Kulinski demolishes the uber-smug Bill Maher’s bulldust here – just under 15 minutes long
@15. Beholder : Talking of the infuriatringly , unhelpfully uber-smug and utterly wrong. Fuck off you vile hypocritical, worse than useless Trump enabling, genocide assisting troll! You got Trump who is the person you * ACTUALLY fucking voted for elected. YOU inflicted him on the retsof our planet with your purity disunity bullshit. You have hurt the entire planet and at least doubled if not tripled or quintupled the amount of genocide we will see you willfully ignorant, fanatically, blinkered piece of exrement.
StevoRsays
.* You and Vicar and every fucking douchebag extremist unelectable third party spoiler voter and counter-productive fool who did anything other than vote for Kamala Harris and encourage and support people to vote for Kamala Harris. Turns out it was close – closer now than it first appeared – and you could have made a difference for good instead of evil. But refuse dto do so because good wasn’t good enough for you even when the ONLY alternative was, again, evil. Which for the umpteenth time are relative fucking terms and you’ll never get the perfect unicorn that farts rainbows you demand as your minimum ideal candidate. Its politics its life, its how your shitty Amercian system works – or used to pre-Trump’s fascist Christian Suypremacist Dictatorship which, again, is on you.
The South Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology has forced one of its robo-dogs to run a marathon.
The Boston Dynamics-esque quadrupedal walking robot became the first of its kind to complete a full-course marathon in an official event, according to a Sunday announcement from the Institute.
The race was the 22nd Sangju Dried-Persimmon Marathon, which Raibo2 finished in four hours, 19 minutes and 52 seconds. The (human) first place winner finished in two hours, 36 minutes, and 32 seconds…
Do you remember that chat we had about the protective effects of the Earth’s magnetic fields not long ago? This would be outside the protection of those fields, which no previous nor existing space station has been.
lumipunasays
Re 29 and 31,
Apparently, Trump won the popular vote by a smaller margin than he lost it in 2016. He must be still one of the least mandated presidents in United states history, on average. Barely mandated, if you consider just his second term.
That’s the concept behind Hippos Exoskeleton, a startup created by former basketball hopeful Kylin Shaw after he heard “a sickening pop from my knee while landing from a dunk,” according to TechCrunch.
The expanding “knee sleeve” uses predictive AI to detect risky movements and inflates in 30 milliseconds. The idea is to help prevent ACL tears and other injuries in athletes, construction workers, and older adults.
birgerjohanssonsays
Seen on a t shirt :
Crows before bros.
Support your local murder.
Chapter Four: The Problem of Anti-SLAPP Statutes In Federal Court
Ken White
November 18, 2024
…
Reginald Selkirksays
@ 29, 38
The right is so anti-gay I am surprised they are touting a man-date.
lumipunasays
Reginald Selkirk at 16 – That’s interesting. I looked up Enderby Island on Google Maps. It’s one of the smaller islands in the Auckland group, but seems to have an excellent natural harbor.
The Polynesian (proto-Maori) settlers there must have lived off seabirds, seals and fish. I suspect the settlement was abandoned largely because the local game populations collapsed after some decades of overexploitation. Similar collapse happened on the NZ main islands, and the early Maori then became increasingly agricultural people. That wasn’t an option in the frigid south, particularly since the Polynesians only had crops that required a tropical or at least warm temperate climate.
The proto-Maori also settled Chatham Islands (which are slightly warmer and larger than Auckland Islands, but about equally remote from mainland, and still too cold for Polynesian farming) shortly after settling the NZ mainland. A small population lived there for centuries on hunting, fishing and gathering, and evolved into a people called Moriori. They practically lost all contact with Maori, since both cultures became less interested in seafaring, and the Moriori din’t really even have resources for maintaining open sea canoes and navigation skills.
Shortly after European contact in the early 19th century, the Maori were eager to adopt new technology (particularly guns) and became heavily involved in colonial-industrial sealing and whaling. They rekindled their old tradition of settling remote islands, including the Chatham and Auckland, and genocided the Moriori in the process. Not that an isolated population that small would’ve been sustainable over a timescale of millennia, anyway. The Maori settlement on Auckland Islands farmed sheep and introduced useful plants. Eventually, the settlement was again abandoned, I presume because mainland communities increasingly offered a modern standard of living, which was more attractive than hardscrabble survival.
Note to Akira, and to all who comment here. I am not taking beholder’s side. I am not taking anyone’s side. I am trying to keep discussions relatively civil. Dial back the personal insults. Stick to the facts as much as possible. Do not promote violence. Do not fantasize about doing violence to other human beings. Do not indulge in imagining random violence befalling other human beings. Steer clear of even “joking” about violence, including metaphorical violence. Thank you.
In other news:
Three things to know about Todd Blanche, Trump’s pick for deputy attorney general
Trump’s defense attorney is known for his practicality, his loyalty and the copious cash he made representing him. He’s poised to take on a leading role at the DOJ next.
In the small pond that is the New York legal community, Todd Blanche — a former federal prosecutor turned lead Donald Trump defense lawyer — was well known and much liked before he made his debut for Trump roughly 18 months ago. And unlike many of those who came before him (Joe Tacopina, Jim Trusty, Tim Parlatore and Evan Corcoran among them), Blanche not only survived his time in the Trump trenches, he thrived.
That’s not only because of Blanche’s obvious rapport with Trump, but also because, despite the adverse verdict in the Manhattan hush money trial, Blanche was pivotal in delaying, curtailing and/or outright dismissing three of Trump’s four criminal cases, including the federal election interference case that gave rise to the Supreme Court’s landmark presidential immunity ruling in July.
And now, assuming the Senate confirms him, Blanche is set to become the deputy attorney general for the United States. […] three things about his selection as the Justice Department’s No. 2 official aren’t garnering as much attention as they should.
It doesn’t seem to be about the Benjamins
First, at least one person has asked me whether Trump chose Blanche as deputy attorney general (known within the DOJ as “DAG”) as compensation for unpaid legal bills. Although it’s unclear whether Blanche has been paid in full for his services, Blanche’s firm received more than $8 million between April 2023 and early October 2024 from Save America, Trump’s leadership PAC, according to Federal Election Commission records. So for those seeking to understand why Trump chose Blanche, actual indebtedness seems an unlikely reason. (Blanche declined to comment.)
A future acting attorney general?
It’s more likely that Trump picked Blanche because he possesses two qualities the transition team reportedly holds dear: demonstrated competence and proven loyalty. Yes, Blanche was occasionally hyperbolic and insufficiently in command of the details in his defense of Trump at trial. And yes, at least one former Southern District of New York prosecutor I know is worried that Blanche’s Trumpian turn could have a nasty spillover effect on SDNY’s otherwise sterling reputation and historic independence — and by extension, taint any lawyer associated with the office.
But ask others who served with him in the storied SDNY about his record as a prosecutor, and even those baffled by his fidelity to Trump praise him as practical, tactical, ethical and someone with high emotional intelligence. Those are qualities that will come in handy should, as some expect, Blanche have to serve as acting attorney general at some point.
[…] Should that happen, Blanche would be legally entitled to “exercise all the duties” of the attorney general. Moreover, even though acting secretaries are usually limited to 210 days in those positions under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, some argue an acting attorney general is not subject to any time limit because the law specific to the DOJ does not mention one.
With or without Gaetz, a direct line to Trump
Whether Blanche eventually steps into the shoes of the attorney general or is merely confirmed as the deputy, he will be uniquely positioned to effectuate Trump’s litigation priorities at the DOJ. Under current DOJ policy, initial communications between the department and the White House “concerning pending or contemplated law enforcement investigations or cases” cannot involve officials beyond the attorney general or the DAG (on behalf of the DOJ) or anyone other than the White House counsel, deputy counsel, president or vice president on the other side.
So who’s Trump going to call if he decides it’s time to investigate or indict various prosecutors, journalists or his political adversaries? Or if he needs the department to weigh in with a statement of interest in the ongoing Jan. 6 civil cases against him? Or if he wants to provide members of Congress with access to those special counsel materials they want to reveal without compromising others? […]
A state judge on Monday struck down Wyoming’s overall ban on abortion and its first-in-the-nation explicit prohibition on the use of medication to end pregnancy[…]
Since 2022, Teton County District Judge Melissa Owens has ruled consistently three times to block the laws while they were disputed in court.
The decision marks another victory for abortion rights advocates after voters in seven states passed measures in support of access.
One Wyoming law that Owens said violated women’s rights under the state constitution bans abortion except to protect to a pregnant woman’s life or in cases involving rape and incest. The other made Wyoming the only state to explicitly ban abortion pills, though other states have instituted de facto bans on the medication by broadly prohibiting abortion.
The laws were challenged by four women, including two obstetricians, and two nonprofit organizations. One of the groups, Wellspring Health Access, opened as the state’s first full-service abortion clinic in years in April 2023 following an arson attack in 2022.
[…] The recent elections saw voters in Missouri clear the way to undo one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion bans in a series of victories for abortion rights advocates. Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota, meanwhile, defeated similar constitutional amendments, leaving bans in place.
Abortion rights amendments also passed in Arizona, Colorado, Maryland and Montana. Nevada voters also approved an amendment in support of abortion rights, but they’ll need to pass it again it 2026 for it to take effect. Another that bans discrimination on the basis of “pregnancy outcomes” prevailed in New York.
[…] Currently, 13 states are enforcing bans on abortion at all stages of pregnancy, with limited exceptions, and four have bans that kick in at or about six weeks into pregnancy — often before women realize they’re pregnant.
Nearly every ban has been challenged with a lawsuit. Courts have blocked enforcement of some restrictions, including bans throughout pregnancy in Utah and Wyoming. Judges struck down bans in Georgia and North Dakota in September 2024. Georgia’s Supreme Court ruled the next month that the ban there can be enforced while it considers the case.
In the Wyoming case, the women and nonprofits who challenged the laws argued that the bans stood to harm their health, well-being and livelihoods, claims disputed by attorneys for the state. They also argued the bans violated a 2012 state constitutional amendment saying competent Wyoming residents have a right to make their own health care decisions.
As she had done with previous rulings, Owens found merit in both arguments. The abortion bans “will undermine the integrity of the medical profession by hamstringing the ability of physicians to provide evidence-based medicine to their patients,” Owens ruled. […]
RFK Jr. Fixing To Screw Up His One Not-Crappy Goal
Medical professionals are worried he’ll set back years of work on treating diabetes and obesity.
Amidst all his decidedly wrong and occasionally deadly yammer about vaccines, raw milk, antidepressants, hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, chelating, fluoridated water, autism, peptides, nutritional supplements, vitamins, chemtrails, mental health, ADD, drug addiction, proper disposal of bear and whale corpses, COVID being engineered to spare Jewish people, and Lord only knows what other nuggets of bad science and misinformed opinions rolling around in his skull like marbles in an earthquake, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has one goal that — dare we say it — we actually agree with.
Bobby Chemtrails would like to reduce the rates of obesity and diabetes in America by getting Americans to eat healthier and exercise more. This is a laudable goal! So laudable that we agreed with Michelle Obama when she made the same goal her major policy focus […] Of course we remember how that went over with Republicans back then, but times have changed. For one thing, the GOP is in power now. For another … wait, no, that’s it.
The problem with RFK Jr.’s interest here is that, as with every other goddamn thing he ever talks about, he sounds like such a lunatic and is so confidently wrong in his pronouncements that medical professionals and public health officials are worried about his plans […]
CNN has a story about RFK Jr.’s thoughts about popular weight loss drugs like Ozempic and his strident opposition to using them, despite all evidence indicating they are safe and effective. […]:
Kennedy claimed that Novo Nordisk, which makes Ozempic, doesn’t market the medicine in its home country of Denmark, where “they do not recommend it for diabetes or obesity; they recommend dietary and behavioral changes.”
In fact, Denmark does use Ozempic, so much so that the Danish Medicines Agency said in May that it would restrict its use until after people had tried less expensive medications to treat diabetes.
[Good fact check.]
We love this guy, he’s like if the buzzer they hit when you get an answer wrong on “Family Feud” became sentient.
Kennedy also claimed that the European Union is monitoring Ozempic to see if it causes “suicidal ideation,” when in fact the EU decided seven months ago that it does not. Our own Food and Drug Administration, which he will oversee, came to the same conclusion. [Yep. Proof that RFK Jr. is wrong, and that he doesn’t pay attention to details.]
[…] Kennedy claimed in the same Fox segment that if the US spent a fraction of what it would cost to treat every overweight person in the US with Ozempic — not something anyone’s suggesting, as GLP-1 drugs aren’t approved for everyone who’s overweight — on “giving good food, three meals a day to every man, woman and child in our country, we could solve the obesity and diabetes epidemic overnight.”
Giving food to people? That sounds suspiciously like socialism to us, and we know how the Republicans with whom Bobby Chemtrails has cast his lot feel about socialism. We also assume, in addition to everything else stupid and unworkable about this idea, that it will run headlong into the Trump administration’s plan to screw up SNAP benefits in order to balance out the huge tax cuts it plans on giving wealthy people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Just in case RFK Jr. can’t do it overnight, Trump has given our future HHS Secretary two years to show “measurable improvements” in obesity and diabetes rates, so he better get cracking.
Meanwhile, doctors are very, very annoyed at RFK Jr. for his flip assertions that all he has to do to cure the obesity crisis is make sure all Americans are eating plenty of salad. As anyone who has struggled with their weight knows, it can be more complicated than simply changing your diet and your exercise habits. Which is why health professionals have spent years trying to find other complementary ways to address the issue:
“We’ve been trying to bust that stigma a lot of years,” Fitch told CNN. “What we’ve heard a lot of in his rhetoric is, ‘I want people to just eat less and exercise more.’ And what we know is, that doesn’t work.”
Still, some people who should know better want us to give this nutball a chance. People like Colorado Governor Jared Polis, who already stepped into one controversy when he praised Trump’s selection of RFK Jr. and lauded how he helped Colorado “defeat vaccine mandates,” and then decided the way out was to double down like a champ: [Social media post is available at the link.]
“His (sometimes bizarre) personal opinions”? What do you mean, “sometimes”? All of his personal opinions are bizarre! The one Polis likes about better diet and exercise for Americans is the only not-bizarre RFK Jr. opinion we have rolled across.
Kennedy may also have shot whatever tiny shards of credibility he had on this issue when someone posted a picture over the weekend of him gorging on McDonald’s with Trump, his oldest failson, and Elon Musk over the weekend: [photo at the link]
Man, the expression on RFK Jr.’s face. During Trump’s first run for president, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo came up with the concept of the “dignity wraith.” Essentially this was the idea that no matter how noble the cause for which someone would bend the knee to Trump, doing so would wreck their credibility and reputation.
Getting such a proclaimed healthy-living guy to chow down on a McDonald’s cholesterol bomb? That picture is RFK Jr.’s dignity wraith moment.
Two women interviewed by the House Ethics Committee about former GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be attorney general, testified that Gaetz paid them directly and repeatedly in Venmo transactions “for sex,” and that those transactions were obtained by the committee, an attorney for the women told CBS News. The attorney, Joel Leppard, also said the women testified that Gaetz inquired in text messages about “party favors” and “vitamins” at upcoming parties, which was understood to be code for drugs.
Leppard, who is based in Orlando, said his clients testified that they attended parties from 2017 to January 2019 where Gaetz was present and sex and drug use took place. In an interview Monday with CBS News chief Washington correspondent Major Garrett, Leppard said one of his clients testified before the House Ethics Committee that she witnessed Gaetz having sex with a 17-year-old girl against a game table at a July 2017 party. Gaetz was sworn into Congress in January 2017, so all of the events the women allege took place while he was a member of the House.
Gaetz has denied all wrongdoing, including having sex with a minor. After CBS News published its initial story and it aired on “CBS Evening News,” Trump transition spokesman Alex Pfeiffer said in a statement, “Matt Gaetz will be the next Attorney General. He’s the right man for the job and will end the weaponization of our justice system. These are baseless allegations intended to derail the second Trump administration.”
“The Biden Justice Department investigated Gaetz for years and cleared him of wrongdoing,” Pfeiffer added, “The only people who went to prison over these allegations were those lying about Matt Gaetz.” Federal prosecutors did investigate Gaetz but ended the probe in 2023 without filing charges.
[…] Leppard said his clients want the public to know they are telling the truth.
One of his clients said in a text to Leppard, “‘Regardless of how many times he tries to distract from the truth, the public deserves to know that what we all experienced was real and actually happened.'”
“My clients are not political; they didn’t vote in the last two elections — they don’t care one way or another,” Leppard told Garrett. “But they do want the public to know that they are not lying. They did not come forward willingly — they have never spoken to anyone without a force of a legal subpoena.”
He continued, “And if the American people would know, then they could decide if that’s the person they want to be the next attorney general.”
One of Leppard’s clients is among at least four women who have told the committee they were paid to attend parties with drugs and sex where Gaetz was present, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. Her account corroborates the testimony of the then-minor, who told the committee that she had sex with Gaetz when she was 17 years old.
At the July 2017 party where his client alleges this occurred, Leppard said she and others were “at the party in order to provide entertainment, to be happy, to be lively and provide sexual favors for the gentlemen that were present.”
“The expectation was that they would have sexual intercourse,” Leppard said his clients testified about these parties. “They testified to the House that — and the House actually had their Venmo transactions, PayPal transactions, of Representative Gaetz.”
Leppard said the House panel asked the women about Gaetz’s PayPal and Venmo transactions.
“‘What was this for? What was this for,'” Leppard said his clients were asked.
“‘This was for sex,'” he said they responded. “‘This was for sex. This was for sex.'”
Leppard said the payments were typically between $200 and $500 at a time.
He said his clients also testified that sometimes, someone other than Gaetz would make a payment on his behalf. On at least one occasion, according to Leppard, that was Nestor Galban, a Cuban immigrant who is close to Gaetz and whom Gaetz has referred to as his “son.” He said other payments on Gaetz’s behalf were made by Gaetz associate Joel Greenberg, who was convicted in 2022 of sex trafficking of a minor and other crimes.
[Gaetz laundered the payments through other people’s PayPal and Venmo accounts, including the account of the young man Gaetz called his son!]
[…] Leppard said one of his clients provided more than 100 texts involving Gaetz to the committee. Frequently, Leppard said, the texts his client provided showed Gaetz would have to be reminded to pay.
“There was a lot of texts requesting payment, like, ‘Hey, when are you going to pay me?'” Leppard said. “Or, ‘I don’t want to be that girl, but can you please go ahead and pay me what we agreed upon?’ Text messages along those lines. The texts the House was more interested in was the ones where Representative Gaetz was seemingly requesting that drugs be present.”
“So, in my line of work as a criminal defense attorney, no one ever requests, ‘Can you give me some drugs, please?'” Leppard said. “They usually use code words. And so Representative Gaetz would use terms like, ‘Can you make sure that there are party favors present?’ Or, ‘Who’s in charge of party favors?’ He used the term ‘party favor mecca’ when he was referring to another individual who was bringing party favors. He also used the term ‘vitamins,’ I believe.”
[…] Leppard said his clients have “been through heck” and are worried that if they testify before the Senate or anywhere else publicly, “they might not be safe in their jobs.”
The House Ethics Committee had planned to vote Friday, Nov. 15, on releasing its report, but the meeting was canceled after Trump announced his intention Wednesday to nominate Gaetz, and then a few hours later, the Florida Republican abruptly resigned from Congress. The panel is now set to meet Wednesday […]
President Vladimir Putin approved changes to Russia’s nuclear doctrine Tuesday, expanding conditions under which nuclear weapons could be used, including in cases of attacks by non-nuclear states supported by nuclear powers.
The updates follow reports that U.S. President Joe Biden has authorized Kyiv to use long-range missiles to strike targets inside Russia, a move the Kremlin warned could lead to “a significant new round of escalation.”
Nuclear saber rattling but it is a dangerous move. Putin is authorizing himself to use nuclear weapons widely enough that he will always be able to find a reason. Any non-trivial attack would be grounds for using nuclear weapons and some non-attacks are now considered grounds for nuclear weapons, such as preparing defenses against Russia.
The changes were proposed some time ago and it’s surely not a coincidence that they were signed at the same time as Ukraine made it’s first long range missile strikes into Russia.
The president-elect had been scheduled to be sentenced later this month after being convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
New York prosecutors told the judge who presided over Donald Trump’s hush money trial on Tuesday that his sentencing should be postponed while the president-elect’s lawyers file further legal arguments asking the case be dismissed. [video at the link]
The proposal Tuesday from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office would need to be signed off on by Judge Juan Merchan to become official. Merchan has agreed to previous requests from prosecutors seeking delays.
Merchan was tentatively scheduled to sentence Trump later this month on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, but that outcome was thrown into doubt last week after the DA’s office asked the judge to temporarily stay the proceedings while it considered the impact of Trump’s election victory on the case.
Prosecutor Matthew Colangelo said they were making the request following “a number of arguments” from Trump’s legal team that it would be improper for the case to move ahead.
“The People agree that these are unprecedented circumstances and that the arguments raised by defense counsel in correspondence to the People on Friday require careful consideration to ensure that any further steps in this proceeding appropriately balance the competing interests of (1) a jury verdict of guilt following trial that has the presumption of regularity; and (2) the Office of the President,” Colangelo wrote in a Nov. 10 letter to the judge.
The letter came two days before Merchan was set to issue his ruling on whether the verdict should be overturned based on the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity earlier this year. A ruling against Trump on the issue would have paved the way for the judge to proceed with his sentencing, which was tentatively scheduled for Nov. 26.
The judge, however, signed off on both parties request for a stay, and gave the DA’s office until Tuesday to submit a filing on its “view of appropriate steps going forward.”
The case was the only one of the four criminal cases brought against Trump after he left office in 2021 to go to trial, and the jury verdict marked the first time a former president had ever been convicted of a crime.
Trump was charged last year with having falsified business records to cover up his reimbursement of a hush money payment his then-lawyer Michael Cohen paid to porn star Stormy Daniels in the closing days of the 2016 election.
Failed Republican presidential candidate Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina has written a letter demanding that President Joe Biden cease doing his job as president, even though Donald Trump is not scheduled to be sworn into office for another two months.
In a letter to Biden, Scott wrote, “To ensure an orderly transition, federal financial and housing regulators should suspend any rulemaking and nomination related activities.” The senator went on to say that federal agencies should stop making federal rules and that nominations should cease right away.
Scott’s demand that Biden stop doing the job that over 81.2 million Americans hired him for in 2020 is out of whack with how business has historically functioned in the U.S. government.
In fact, after Trump lost the 2020 election to Biden, Republicans in the Senate continued to confirm federal judges nominated by Trump—even as it was clear the public had indicated they no longer wanted to pursue Trump’s approach to running the government.
Among those given the go-ahead by the Republican Senate majority at the time was Judge Aileen Cannon, the federal judge who ultimately threw out the case against Trump for illegally keeping classified documents. Cannon was confirmed on Nov. 12, 2020, and among those who voted to confirm her was Scott. This was, of course, after Biden had been declared the victor.
In fact, at least 19 federal judges nominated by Trump were confirmed by Senate Republicans after Trump lost the election on Nov. 3, 2020, and before Biden was sworn in on Jan. 20, 2021.
During his presidency, Biden has used federal rulemaking authority to improve the quality of life for millions of Americans. Federal rules have been put in place to limit water supplies from being polluted by copper and lead pipes, to impose vehicle emission standards to cut down on pollution, to expand health care access, to provide poor families with food, and to strengthen worker’s rights among many other changes made over four years.
As a backer of Trump who will likely upend many of these rules and instead focus the government on servicing the needs of a wealthy elite, like he did in his first term, it’s clear why Scott would want Biden’s actions to stop.
For their part, Senate Democrats do not appear to be taking Scott’s letter too seriously. On Monday, they continued to process the nominations of judges appointed by Biden, fully aware that Trump does not yet hold the presidency.
Donald Trump on Monday nominated former MTV “Real World” contestant, current Fox News host, and congressional quitter Sean Duffy as transportation secretary.
Duffy has zero qualifications for the job. He has no experience in the transportation field, which he’d be tasked with regulating and improving as head of the DOT. Maybe Trump picked him because he won both “Road Rules: All Stars” and “Real World/Road Rules: Battle of the Seasons,” both of which have “road” in the title.
[…] Over the course of his eight-year tenure, Duffy had just two bills he sponsored signed into law, one of which was the renaming of a post office.
However, when he was in Congress, he did complain that his $174,000 annual salary was too low, saying he had to drive a—gasp—“used minivan.”
“With six kids, I still pay off my student loans. I still pay my mortgage. I drive a used minivan. If you think I’m living high off the hog, I’ve got one paycheck,” Duffy told an angry constituent at a town hall meeting.
[…] Of course, Duffy’s salary was far higher than the $43,000 average annual salary the rest of Americans earned in 2011, the year Duffy made the comment.
Speaking of salaries—Duffy criticized teachers during an 2022 appearance on Fox News, saying they don’t deserve pay raises, even though the national average starting teacher salary this year is $44,530, according to the National Education Association.
After leaving Capitol Hill, Duffy and his unnaturally white teeth became a Fox News contributor and co-host of the Fox Business show “The Bottom Line.”
While working for the right-wing propaganda networks, he’s peddled wild lies and conspiracy theories.
He falsely claimed Disney was trying to “sexualize our children,” that white people are now living under a new “Jim Crow,” that Democrats are trying to ban cows, and that former Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin was associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.
In 2018, Duffy blamed the mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, on abortion, saying the shooter may have carried out his killing spree because “[w]e dehumanize life in those video games, in those movies, and with abortion.”
Duffy also made an insanely racist comment in 2021 about Native Americans, saying that “they burned villages, raped women, seized children, took their—took the people they defeated, took their lands, scalped people.” Of course, he made no mention of the horrible injustices Native Americans have faced since Europeans colonized their land.
Duffy’s wife, fellow Real World contestant Rachel Campos-Duffy, is also a Fox News contributor, so she will be able to keep up the Duffys’ presence on the right-wing propaganda network.
Trump, a frequent Fox viewer, even mentioned that in his statement nominating Duffy. […]
Jennifer Berry Hawes and Mollie Simon of ProPublica report that so-called “segregation academies” are alive and well and raking in the public dollars.
Private schools across the South that were established for white children during desegregation are now benefiting from tens of millions in taxpayer dollars flowing from rapidly expanding voucher-style programs, a ProPublica analysis found.
In North Carolina alone, we identified 39 of these likely “segregation academies” that are still operating and that have received voucher money. Of these, 20 schools reported student bodies that were at least 85% white in a 2021-22 federal survey of private schools, the most recent data available.
Those 20 academies, all founded in the 1960s and 1970s, brought in more than $20 million from the state in the past three years alone. None reflected the demographics of their communities. Few even came close. […]
Segregation academies that remain vastly white continue to play an integral role in perpetuating school segregation — and, as a result, racial separation in the surrounding communities. We found these academies benefiting from public money in Southern states beyond North Carolina. But because North Carolina collects and releases more complete data than many other states, it offers an especially telling window into what is happening across this once legally segregated region where legislatures are rapidly expanding and adopting controversial voucher-style programs.
Link. That link leads to a news roundup that includes other, unrelated reports.
Excerpt from an article by John Cassidy of The New Yorker:
[…] Between Trump’s victory on November 5th and the close of trading on Friday, Tesla’s stock price went from $251.50 to $320.72. According to Tesla’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Musk owns about 715 million shares, so based on that figure the value of his stake has risen by almost fifty billion dollars. This vast sum dwarfs the millions he spent on Trump’s behalf, and even the forty-four billion dollars that he and a group of investors paid for Twitter in 2022, an acquisition that greatly increased his ability to influence the political process. […]
The run-up in Tesla’s stock reflects investors’ conviction that the policies of a second Trump Administration will be favorable to the carmaker. But the presence of Trump in the White House could also have important implications for Musk’s other companies, many of which are subject to oversight by federal agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission, or which have big contracts with government departments.
Same link as in comment 53.
Musk is in it for the money. And for potential deregulation that will allow him to be even more free to do whatever he wants to do.
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow on Monday called on Senate Democrats “to make it as hard as possible” for Donald Trump to appoint his Cabinet without Senate confirmation, known as recess appointments.
“Trump is the one who made it weird by making this demand that the Senate not confirm any of his appointees,” Maddow said of Trump and the GOP’s plans to use recess appointments to sneak through potentially dangerous government appointments.
“Democrats should take him at his word and do the hearings now,” she added, warning that skipping the important background checks and confirmation hearings for Trump’s Cabinet nominees, such as Fox News dirtbag Pete Hegseth and Florida dirtbag Matt Gaetz, is simply the first step in an authoritarian movement away from democracy.
“Right now, for these next few weeks before he’s in power, it’s actually in Democrats’ power,” Maddow reminds the audience. “It is in Democrats’ hands in the Senate to show what the Congress can do, to show what it’s for, to do the job, and to make it as hard as possible for them to get away with the worst things they’re trying to do, even before they take over.” [Video at the link.]
As Maddow points out, regardless of the hype and rhetoric, Donald Trump and the Republicans did not win a blanket mandate this election. Americans, by and large, still desire a democracy.
[…] Nearly 100 House Democrats also signed a letter urging the Ethics Committee to release the report [the Ethics Committee report on Matt Gaetz].
From the letter:
We are aware that traditionally, the Ethics Committee stops investigations into alleged misconduct when a member of Congress resigns. However, there is precedent for the House and Senate ethics committees to continue their investigations and release findings after a member has resigned in a scandal. For example, the Committee continued investigating Rep. Eric Massa for inappropriate sexual behavior even after his resignation. Similarly, in 2011, the Senate Ethics Committee publicly released its report on Sen. John Ensign in the days following his resignation and forwarded the report to the Department of Justice and the Federal Election Commission.
We strongly believe that this situation meets or exceeds those standards. This is not a partisan issue. In a statement to reporters on November 14th, Republican Senator of Texas John Cornyn, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, noted, “I think that there should not be any limitations on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s investigation including whatever the House Ethics Committee has generated.”
Given the seriousness of the charges against Representative Gaetz, withholding the findings of your investigation may jeopardize the Senate’s ability to provide fully informed, constitutionally required advice and consent regarding this nomination. Representative Gaetz’s abrupt resignation from Congress should not circumvent the Senate’s ability to fulfill its constitutional responsibilities.
We urge you to immediately release the Ethics Committee’s report into allegations of serious misconduct by former Congressman Matt Gaetz.
Meanwhile, Gaetz’s former House colleagues have been trashing Gaetz publicly.
Republican Rep. Max Miller of Ohio said that Gaetz is “literally worse than gum on the bottom of my shoe.”
“I’m looking at him as a member of Congress and the job that he has done here, and it has been abhorrent,” Miller told CNN. “I’m not the only one who thinks this way. I just say the quiet part out loud, and I wish other of my colleagues would have the same courage to do so.” […]
The file that was hacked Monday included the testimony of the woman who alleges she had sex with Gaetz when she was 17 in 2017, and the testimony of a second woman who said she witnessed the encounter, a source told NBC News. [Video at the link.]
A hacker on Monday gained access to a file containing the sworn depositions of two women involved in the investigation into Matt Gaetz, the former Florida congressman who is President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Justice Department, a source familiar with the matter told NBC News.
That file included the testimony of the woman who alleges she had sex with Gaetz when she was 17 years old in 2017, as well as the testimony of a second woman who said she witnessed the encounter, and the information is unredacted, according to the source.
Attorney John Clune, who represents the woman alleging she had sex with Gaetz when she was 17, told NBC News: “We were informed last night by another law firm that an unauthorized user accessed a shared file with a number of confidential documents.”
Gaetz was investigated by the Justice Department in a case involving the alleged sex trafficking of a 17-year-old girl. Gaetz has always denied those allegations and has never been criminally charged.
That probe effectively ended last week when Gaetz resigned from Congress after president-elect Donald Trump picked him to be his nominee for Attorney General.
The file was downloaded from a secure link by a person using the name Altam Breezley, according to the source.
The file includes other related documentation that’s under seal and the hacker accessed hundreds of pages, the source said.
The news of the hacking was first reported by the New York Times. NBC News is not reporting the names of the women who are accusing Gaetz.
It’s not immediately clear if any of the hacked information has been made public or if law enforcement is investigating the matter. A representative for Gaetz did not immediately respond to an NBC News request for comment.
A source familiar with the contents of the files accessed characterized the contents as very detailed and damaging to Gaetz.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
Followup to 332 and 437 from the previous set of 500 comments.
outside New Zealand’s Parliament […] 42,000 people demonstrated on Tuesday, calling for lawmakers to reject the Treaty Principles Bill, which was introduced earlier this month by the libertarian ACT New Zealand party. While the legislation, proposed by the junior partner in the centre-right coalition government, lacks the support needed to pass, critics worry that it threatens to divide society.
Tuesday’s protest was preceded by a nine-day march—or hikoi in the Maori language—that began in the country’s far north, with thousands joining rallies in towns and cities as marchers travelled south on foot and in cars to Wellington.
Some in the crowd were dressed in traditional attire with feathered headgear and cloaks and carried traditional Maori weapons. Others wore T-shirts emblazoned with Toitu te Tiriti (Honour the Treaty). Hundreds carried the Maori national flag.
6-hour Facebook video. A mix of English and Māori languages. No subtitles. Justice for Palestine makes a speech at 4:25:52.
She called for the Māori in the crowd to switch to the Māori electoral roll. “If every single Māori person registered on the Māori roll, we would have 20 automatic Māori seats in Parliament.” Currently, there are only seven Māori seats in the House of Representatives.
More people have now signed the Stop The Treaty Principles Bill petition on ActionStation (252k+) than voted for the ACT Party in the last election (246k).
“We need our mojo back. […] Schools are a very appetizing opportunity. […] the opening of schools may only cost us 2 to 3%, in terms of total mortality.”
University of Rochester physicist Ranga Dias made headlines with his controversial claims of high-temperature superconductivity—and made headlines again when the two papers reporting the breakthroughs were later retracted under suspicion of scientific misconduct, although Dias denied any wrongdoing. The university conducted a formal investigation over the past year and has now terminated Dias’ employment, The Wall Street Journal reported…
British automaker Jaguar is changing its branding for “a new era” as it prepares to fulfill its plan to go all-electric for its lineup, with the first new model slated to launch in 2026. The automaker has revealed a new logo that changes the font, spaces out the letters, and uses a mix of upper and lowercase letters…
Youtube: 20 Nov: BRUTAL DEFEAT. Russians ARREST ALL GENERALS. Siversk Offensive Ended
After repeated failures the army attacking Siversk was out of options. They launched a final attack before the season ended. This also failed and the situation was so bad that the Russian command arrested the general in charge and a bunch of other officers.
The Russians now have a problem with officers lying about their success. The war is going so badly the officers must succeed or be recalled to Moscow. Facing that the officers are declaring victory and hoping they can fix the situation with follow up forces before the high command notices. This has happened in both the Siversk offensive and the Kursk offensive.
This is very bad for the Russians in a bunch of ways. As word gets out it makes the war and the commanders in charge unpopular. It makes the planning and operations by the central command impossible to do well because they don’t know how far things are from the front or what areas actually need reinforcement. And worst for Putin, it makes the government look like it isn’t in control, one thing Putin can’t tolerate because if it gets out of hand it can bring down his government.
And worst for Putin, it makes the government look like it isn’t in control, one thing Putin can’t tolerate because if it gets out of hand it can bring down his government.
Putin brought that on himself.
Related news, as posted by NEXTA on X/Twitter:
Lavrov commented on the Ukrainian strike with ATACMS missiles and thanked Scholz
“The strikes on the Bryansk region with ATACMS missiles are a signal that the West wants escalation,” Lavrov said.
At the same time, the Russian foreign minister noted that “there has been no official confirmation on the US decision to strike deep into the Russian Federation yet, and the information comes from the media.”
Lavrov also thanked Scholz for the fact that Germany does not transfer long-range Taurus missiles to Ukraine and prohibits strikes on Russia, calling it a “responsible position.”
If Lavrov is praising Scholz, then Scholz should conclude that he did something wrong.
As posted, with a photo, by WarTranslated (Dmitri):
Here’s a twist! Neo-Nazi and mass murderer Anders Breivik backs Russia, even going so far as to put the letter Z on his bald, empty head. The pieces are falling into place.
Strong circumstantial evidence that 🇨🇳Chinese-flagged cargo ship Yi Peng was responsible for breaking two underwater telecoms cables in the Baltic Sea (17-18th November).
CLion1 connecting 🇫🇮Finland and 🇩🇪Germany and BSC connecting 🇸🇪Sweden and 🇱🇹Lithuania severed.
What The Hell Is It That Nancy Mace Is Doing In the Ladies’ Room?
Sarah McBride made history last week as the first transgender person (that we know of) elected to the United States Congress. That is a big, wonderful, joyful deal in an otherwise unpleasant time.
But then came Congressional Mean Girl Nancy Mace, who filed a resolution on Monday to bar “[m]embers, officers, and employees of the House from using single-sex facilities other than those corresponding to their biological sex,” for the explicit purposes of barring McBride from using the congressional women’s restroom.
McBride has handled it gracefully, posting on social media that “Every day Americans go to work with people who have life journeys different than their own and engage with them respectfully, I hope members of Congress can muster that same kindness,” and adding, “This is a blatant attempt from far right-wing extremists to distract from the fact that they have no real solutions to what Americans are facing. We should be focused on bringing down the cost of housing, health care, and child care, not manufacturing culture wars.”
Asked by a social media user if she meant to target McBride with her legislation, Mace responded, “Yes and then some. Biological men do not have any rights to women’s private spaces. It’s perverted to think otherwise.”
Getting even more creepy about it, Mace also repeatedly told reporters that “Sarah McBride doesn’t get a say here,” and claimed to be “protecting” women and girls and the rights of women and girls. She also noted that she was the first woman to graduate from the Citadel and would be really mad if a “man in a skirt” came by and told her “No, that’s my achievement,” she would tell him it was not.
I don’t understand what the hell it is she does in the restroom that cannot be seen by eyes that were assigned male at birth.
Is Nancy Mace strutting around the ladies’ room naked? Does she go to the bathroom with the door open? Does she forget to flush? Is she masturbating? Is she changing outfits outside of the stall? Is she doing coke?
Is she like Anjelica Huston in The Witches and she has a whole ass face she has to take off?
If that is the case, it’s hard to see why she would want to do these things in front of cis women, either. I have managed to go my whole life without seeing a single fully naked person in a public bathroom and I have definitely lived a life far more conducive to that kind of thing than Nancy Mace has. Gender neutral bathrooms are the norm at the bars I go to in Chicago now, and it’s fine! Everything’s fine! Because there are doors on the stalls!
Is she afraid to look at Sarah McBride’s shoes? Or to see her washing her hands? Putting on lipstick? […]
Of course, we know that none of this is what Nancy Mace is talking about when she says that barring McBride from the women’s restroom is “common sense.” She’s suggesting that, at best, McBride might walk around the ladies’ room naked, and that at worst she is a potential sexual assailant.
So, because of this, Mace wants McBride to use the men’s room, which will be far more awkward and likely humiliating for her and for everyone else in the men’s room. Mace is a classic bully and she wants to make this woman feel as unwelcome as can be, because she doesn’t like the idea of a trans woman serving in Congress.
There is a little bit of irony in Mace mentioning that she was the first woman to graduate from The Citadel. You’ll note that she says “graduate” and not “be accepted into,” because that honor actually belongs to Shannon Faulkner. Faulkner was the first woman accepted into The Citadel, but because the men at the school (and many outside of it) felt that it was a “men’s space,” only five of them were “authorized” to talk to her — though many managed to harass and threaten her so badly that she left after a week. She would later reveal that the reason she left was because someone actually threatened to kill her parents if she didn’t.
Nancy Mace is not standing up for women, she is acting exactly like the male Citadel cadets who made her predecessor’s life hell, all because they didn’t think she belonged in “their space,” the same way that Nancy Mace thinks Sarah McBride doesn’t belong in hers.
Posted by a reader of the article:
As a woman who graduated in the first West Point class to include women, this is SPOT ON. She’s as much of a bully as the guys who tried to drive us out.
Bekenstein Boundsays
Asked by a social media user if she meant to target McBride with her legislation, Mace responded, “Yes
And that one word condemns that legislation, for it makes it a bill of attainder, and thus unconstitutional.
Or, it would condemn it if the Supreme Court could remotely be trusted anymore.
The big techs can’t build data centers fast enough. These also need power plants and networking. Where does the money come from? Investment bankers and private lenders who see a glorious new opportunity! All this planned infrastructure needs $1 trillion to $2 trillion of funding over the next five years.
[…]
Hedge funds also want in. Risky leveraged loans are backed by the data centers themselves—or the Nvidia cards in them. We’re sure phrases like “novel types of debt structures” won’t give you flashbacks to the 2008 financial crisis.
Remember that nobody has yet worked out how to make an actual profit from AI. So what if—God forbid—number stops going up? There’s a plan for that: large data center holders will go public as soon as possible and dump on retail investors, who will be left holding the bag when the bubble deflates. A bursting AI bubble will take down the Nasdaq and large swathes of the tech sector, not to mention systemic levels of losses and possible bank failures.
how […] would you leverage the data center loan against the NVIDIA cards? The only reason they’re valued as high as they are is… the AI bubble. What even.
Like if the AI bubble bursts, yes, they’ll still have value, but the market will be flooded with them and not nearly as many use cases and… God
–
yep. That’s also how subprime mortgages worked
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oh god. you’re right. god
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so basically, what history teaches us, is that the big tech firms will be given billions to avoid collapse, fire all their workers, then banks will slowly come in and lap up all the computing hardware and ensure no one can afford a computer ever again. got it.
–
Considering that NVidia is currently 12% of the US [GDP] “too big to fail” comes to mind, yes.
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I hate these people
According to reports in Eurasia Daily and Defence24, the Danish Navy has boarded and detained the Chinese Bulk Carrier Yi Peng 3 in the Danish Straits, near the exit of the Great Belt. The detention took place on the evening of November 18. According to Financial Times sources, Sweden authorities are “carefully studying the Chinese vessel.” …
The United States shut its embassy in Kyiv on Wednesday morning due to what it called the threat of a significant air attack, a day after Ukraine used American missiles to hit a target inside Russia in what Moscow described as an escalation in the war.
Later, after an air raid siren in the early afternoon jangled nerves in the capital, Ukraine’s military spy agency said Russia was trying to sow panic by circulating fake online messages about a massive looming missile and drone attack…
Donald Trump has nominated former WWE CEO Linda McMahon, who used to put on events like “Hell in a Cell” and “Wrestlemania,” to lead the Department of Education.
In a press release Tuesday night, Trump said McMahon would lead efforts to “send Education BACK TO THE STATES,” a longtime goal of Republicans who have sought to prevent the department from achieving national education goals and priorities.
McMahon also previously served as the head of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term. […]
McMahon follows in the tradition of Betsy DeVos, who served as education secretary in Trump’s first administration: They’re both billionaire Republican donors and not figures with serious education backgrounds. McMahon did, however, resign from a state education position after it was revealed that she falsely claimed to have a degree in education. [!!!]
McMahon’s primary background is as a wrestling mogul. While at WWE, she worked alongside Trump, who is a member of the WWE Hall of Fame. Trump was involved in a storyline called the “Battle of the Billionaires” that culminated in him shaving the head of Vince McMahon, the founder of WWE and Linda McMahon’s husband.
Under the McMahons, WWE has been involved in a series of high-profile scandals that could foreshadow her approach to educating millions of American children.
For instance, McMahon and her husband are currently the target of a civil lawsuit alleging that the couple were aware of systemic sexual abuse of underage boys working for WWE but failed to protect them. The company also reportedly had a culture of widespread drug abuse as wrestlers used steroids to build muscle.
WWE also has opposed efforts by wrestlers to unionize, and has been the subject of criticism over lax in-ring safety. In one instance, wrestler Owen Hart fell to his death right before a major pay-per-view event.
The nomination of McMahon fits in with Trump’s open hostility to public education and the federal department overseeing it. He and other Republicans have called for the Department of Education to be dismantled, with educational initiatives then falling to states where Republican leaders can infuse notions of white supremacy and pro-Christian advocacy in school curricula.
Trump has in the past backed efforts like the “1776 Report,” which advocated for removing curricula that taught children the role that slavery and racism has played in American history.
Under Trump, the guiding principle will be to put education in a chokehold, and McMahon’s role is clearly to force children to tap out.
North Carolina Republicans advanced extensive legislation Tuesday that would weaken the powers of the incoming governor, attorney general and schools superintendent — all Democrats who were elected two weeks ago — and shift election board appointments to the GOP state auditor.
The final 131-page measure, which also includes setting aside additional funds for Hurricane Helene relief, became public roughly an hour before the GOP-controlled House met to debate it during a lame-duck General Assembly session this week. The House voted largely along party lines Tuesday night for the measure, which the Republican-controlled Senate was expected to take up on Wednesday.
With Republicans likely to lose their veto-proof majority in the next two-year session following electoral losses in the House, this week could be the last best chance for them to enact legislation containing sharp partisan changes. Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper leaves office at year’s end and will be succeeded by Democrat Josh Stein.
Currently the State Board of Elections’ five members are appointed by the governor based on recommendations by the Democratic and Republican parties. The governor’s party always holds three of the seats. Republican legislators have tried for years to wrest away those appointment powers but have been thwarted by courts. Judges have blocked for now a 2023 law that would move board appointment authority from the governor to the General Assembly.
Even with litigation pending, Tuesday’s measure would move the independent state board to the State Auditor’s Office starting next summer. At that time the new auditor — Republican Dave Boliek, who was elected this month — would make appointments. These changes likely would mean Republican control of the board.
[…] The legislation also would immediately weaken the governor’s authority to fill vacancies on the state Court of Appeals and Supreme Court by limiting choices to three candidates offered by the political party of the outgoing justice or judge.
[…] And the bill also will prevent the superintendent of public instruction — a post that is switching party control in January, to Democrat Mo Green — would now be barred from appealing decisions by a state board that reviews charter school applications.
The Republican attempt to erode Democrats’ powers recalls similar measures passed in late 2016 that were designed to weaken Cooper, who was about to succeed Republican Gov. Pat McCrory. Those bills led to loud demonstrations in the Legislative Building and dozens of arrests.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, President-elect Donald Trump’s latest shocking addition to his junk drawer of a Cabinet, has a documented history of choosing Big Pharma dollars over the health of Americans.
Trump has nominated Oz to be administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. But the former daytime talk show host-turned-politician raised eyebrows in 2022 when he released his personal financial disclosure form ahead of the U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania.
In the form, Oz—known for peddling controversial health products on his show—reported a relationship with Usana Health Sciences, a Utah-based supplement company with a track record of contamination lawsuits and pyramid-scheme accusations.
According to The Associated Press, the former surgeon’s health-focused TV show accepted “at least $50 million” in advertising dollars from Usana to promote the company as a “trusted partner and sponsor.”
[…] In 2016, certain Usana products promoted on Oz’s talk show were flagged by a California watchdog group for “exceeding allowable levels” of lead. Usana ultimately settled the case outside of court.
The health supplement company also faced multiple accusations of operating as an illegal pyramid scheme, or multi-level marketing company.
Oz continued to take in money as a brand ambassador for the company up until his unsuccessful election bid in 2022.
[…] AP also found that he required former show staffers to sign nondisclosure agreements prohibiting them from discussing “the show’s arrangement with advertisers” and Oz’s “business or private life.”
While Trump claimed in his Tuesday press statement that the United States’ “broken” health care system “harms Americans every day,” the president-elect’s choice for CMS administrator has previously shilled for a company that, according to numerous lawsuits, has done just that. […]
Uh oh, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s mad and you’re not gonna like her when she’s mad. She’s absolutely furious that many people, even Republican senators and congressmen, think the Matt Gaetz ethics report about Matt Gaetz allegedly using his adopted “son’s” PayPal to pay for sex, and Matt Gaetz allegedly having sex with an underage girl in front of witnesses, should see the light of day before he’s allowed to become the top law enforcement official in Stupid Hitler’s administration.
And she’s not gonna take it anymore! She’s gonna assault a transgender woman! Wait no, that’s not the Marjorie Taylor Greene story that’s related to this. ([…] she’s threatening to assault incoming Democratic Rep. Sarah McBride if she tries to use the women’s restroom at the Capitol, because Greene is a worthless piece of human trash, but that’s not the story that’s related to this one.)
No, Greene says that if anybody leaks Matt Gaetz’s sex secrets all over everything, then Greene is going to release everybody ELSE’S sex secrets all over everything […] [Social media post is available at the link]
[I snipped details about other Republicans-and-religious-rightwing-nutjobs heaping scorn on each other.]
Who knows how long this is going to last with Gaetz? That ethics report could leak at any moment, and from everything we’re reading about it, it sounds explosive. Senate Republicans obviously do not want to be forced to vote on this […]
The New York Post published an editorial last night begging Trump to kick Gaetz (and Russia’s class project Tulsi Gabbard) to the curb. But not Pete Hegseth. ([…] But hey, one buffoon nominee at a time.)
Meanwhile, while Axios is reporting that Trump has been personally calling senators to beg them to confirm Junior Deputy Nestor’s Daddy and his boner pills as the attorney general, the New York Times reports that Trump totally knows Gaetz might be unconfirmable, but he’s fucking this chicken anyway. Why? Because it’s fun! And because he thinks there’s no way the Senate will reject ALL his most disgusting and rapey and un-American picks. (The Times specifically groups together Gaetz, Hegseth, Gabbard, and the guy who’s gonna take the fluoride out of the water and replace it with the semen of this blue whale he just found.)
In other words, he’s flooding the zone with shit, like he always does.
Simultaneously, Elon Musk, who thinks he’s a political strategist now, thought he was defending Gaetz yesterday when he posted this:
“Matt Gaetz has three critical assets that are needed for the AG role: a big brain, a spine of steel and an axe to grind,” he wrote in a post on X. “He is the Judge Dredd America needs to clean up a corrupt system and put powerful bad actors in prison.”
Again, he’s talking about Matt Gaetz. But whatever, Apartheid Ken! You’re totally nailing it, as usual. Those senators are totally listening to him, you betcha sure 100 percent.
NewsNation is also reporting that JD Vance […] will be escorting Gaetz and Hegseth to get to know the senators. We guess they’re under the impression that these two men are more impressive in person LOLOL we can’t even fucking type the end of this sentence without laughing, so this post is over.
Watch this interview last night with the lawyer for two of the Matt Gaetz witnesses. Was wild and crazy! Gaetz allegedly paid these two witnesses $10,000 or so for sex! The House Ethics Committee votes today on whether to release the report! Whee! [video at the link]
Austin in an exclusive interview with NBC News called women in the military a strong asset. Trump’s choice for Secretary of Defense [Pete Hegseth] has cast doubt on women in combat roles.
Women and racial diversity are vital to the strength of U.S. armed forces, outgoing Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in an exclusive interview with NBC News as he prepares to shortly exit the top military post after four years.
“I have spent 41 years in uniform, three long tours in Iraq, one in Afghanistan, and everywhere I went on a battlefield, there were women in our formation,” Austin said. “I would tell you that, you know, our women are the finest troops in the world. Quite frankly, some of the finest in the world.”
President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for Secretary of Defense is Pete Hegseth, a former Army National Guard major whose past comments about women in combat have raised questions and concerns.
Hegseth said during a podcast released this month that the military “should not have women in combat roles” and that “men in those positions are more capable.”
Women made up 17.5% of the U.S. military’s active duty force and 21.6% of the selected reserve in 2022, the Pentagon said in a November 2023 report.
“They do impact readiness. They make us better. They make us stronger. And again, what I’ve seen from our women is quite incredible, and I’m not — this is not hyperbole. This is fact,” Austin said.
Hegseth has also said he wants to see the military purged of “woke” officials who support diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
[…] “We’re a diverse nation, and we’re going to remain a diverse nation. Our military is going to remain a diverse military,” Austin said.
Hegseth must still be confirmed by Senate, which will be controlled by Republicans for the next two years, unless extraordinary circumstances like a recess appointment occur.
[…] Trump has also said that he could try to deploy the military to help with his plans to conduct mass deportations of people living in the United States without authorization. Asked in an April Time magazine interview if his plans included using the U.S. military, the president-elect responded that “it would.”
Austin would not comment on what Trump’s plans or intentions may be, but noted that the law is “well-defined” in terms of “how we employ our military, our armed forces.”
“And I have faith and confidence in our senior leaders that they will always make the right decisions and make the right recommendations to to their leadership,” Austin said. [video at the link]
[…] Austin said that as the war — which began when Russia launched a large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022 — has evolved, “Our approach to supporting them has also evolved over time.”
The defense secretary said the U.S. has known for weeks that Russia was “revamping” its policy on the use of nuclear weapons, but he added that he did not see a “change in their strategic force posture.”
“We’ll continue to remain vigilant in this regard. But at this point, no, I don’t see an indication that there’s an imminent intent to use nuclear weapons,” he said. [Important]
[…] “We believe that those North Korean troops will be embedded in Russian formations, and I have every reason to believe that we will see them in combat in the not-too-distant future,” Austin said. […]
Austin, a four-star general who was previously commander of U.S. Central Command, was appointed as Secretary of Defense by President Joe Biden and was sworn in on Jan. 22, 2021.
A Pacific storm system 300 miles off the coast of Washington — described as a “bomb cyclone”— is bringing high winds, rain and snow to the region.
Video and photos at the link.
More than 500,000 energy customers across the West Coast were without power early Wednesday and one person was killed by a falling tree as severe weather caused by back-to-back powerful storm systems began battering the Pacific Northwest.
[…] fire crews and energy companies worked through the night to clear debris and restore power after winds of up to 77 mph caused havoc. […]
A Pacific storm system 300 miles off the coast of Washington — described as a “bomb cyclone” for the sharp, quick drop in pressure adding to its power — is bringing high winds, rain and snow, bringing down trees and power lines and creating blizzard conditions across the Cascades.
More than 570,000 customers were without power at 8.30 a.m. including more than 100,000 in Seattle early Wednesday, the public electricity company Seattle City Light said on X.
[…] In some places, winds were strong enough to be classified as hurricane-strength.
[…] The entire city of North Bend, Washington, was without power, King 5 reported.
[…] Firefighters in Puget Sound, Washington, rescued two people who became trapped when a tree fell onto their trailer.
[…] Amtrak announced a revised schedule with fewer trains for Wednesday
These strong winds should die down across the region by midday, but the atmospheric river event already above California is set to bring “extreme rainfall totals” and will linger through the end of the week, the weather service said.
Between 10 and 15 inches of rain is due to hit the northern California coast and inland mountain ranges, which is “likely to increase the threat of life-threatening flash flooding, rock slides, and debris flows,” the agency said.
To make matters worse, a separate storm is set to develop and rapidly strengthen off the Northwest coast Friday, helping to amplify the atmospheric river effect.
[…] Canada has also faced strong winds, with gusts of 101 mph recorded Tuesday night at Vancouver Island, wind speeds associated with a Category 2 hurricane.
Experts have warned that climate change is worsening the atmospheric effect. A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, boosting the potential for warmer, wetter, and more intense atmospheric river storms with greater flood risks and higher costs
Reginald Selkirksays
@77 Lynna, OM
Uh oh, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s mad and you’re not gonna like her when she’s mad.
True! I don’t like her whether she’s mad or not.
No, Greene says that if anybody leaks Matt Gaetz’s sex secrets all over everything, then Greene is going to release everybody ELSE’S sex secrets all over everything […]
Senate Republicans aired frustrations Tuesday after Vice President-elect JD Vance and other party members skipped votes Monday, greasing the skids for Democratic-backed judicial nominees to be greenlighted as part of a final push to fill the bench with lifetime appointees before President-elect Trump takes office.
However, they were unable to stop them, as a handful of GOP members did not show up to the Capitol for votes, which stretched until close to midnight.
Headlining that group were Vance and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), President-elect Trump’s choice to lead the State Department, angering GOP members during their weekly Tuesday policy luncheon. [Aww. Schadenfreude moment.]
“If we don’t show up, we lose,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who was visibly frustrated by the lack of attendance and spoke out at lunch. […]
Republicans attempted to slow down an effort by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to advance more than a dozen judicial nominees Monday, hoping to prevent Democrats from completing one of their priorities before they cede power at year’s end.
[…] GOP members were incensed at the no-shows, which stretched into Tuesday as Vance did not show up for the morning vote.
Other senators, including Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), tagged along with Trump to the SpaceX Starship launch in Brownsville, Texas, further exacerbating the situation as Schumer prepared to hold another long night of nomination votes on Tuesday.
[…] Vance has missed almost every Senate vote since Trump chose him as his vice presidential running mate this summer.
[…] Vance can make it to Capitol Hill to shill for an accused sexual predator, but not to do his actual job that he is paid $174,000 a year of taxpayer money to do.
Of course, we really aren’t complaining that Vance is absent. One less obstructionist seeking to hamstring Biden isn’t a problem for us.
A Houston man the FBI arrested this month and charged with providing material support to ISIS allegedly created a portfolio of online propaganda for the terrorist group and researched how to build an explosive belt, according to new court filings.
Anas Said was arrested on November 8 after a years-long investigation during which the FBI interviewed him multiple times, executed a search warrant on his home and devices, and received information from Meta that allegedly showed he was behind 11 Facebook accounts that posted pro-ISIS material. According to a motion prosecutors recently filed in the case, which was first reported by Court Watch and 404 Media, the 28-year-old “repeatedly expressed his desire to travel overseas to fight for ISIS” and “has spent time planning and discussing the commission of violent attacks he desires to perpetrate, including in the Houston area.” …
A dolphin dubbed Delle appears to be talking to himself in the Baltic Sea’s Svendborgsund channel off the coast of Denmark. According to a team of researchers that recorded Delle, the solitary dolphin may be so desperate for social connection that he’s thinking out loud.
The researchers aren’t entirely sure why the animal produced “sounds typically considered communicative,” as they note in research published last month in Bioacoustics. But that makes Delle’s situation all the more compelling. Dolphins are very social animals, and chatter in a diverse array of clicks, squeaks, and other sounds. In lieu of other dolphins, Delle resorted to what the researchers call “self-talk.”
Delle was first spotted in the Baltic channel five years ago, and was noticeable because he was the sole dolphin in the area and didn’t belong to a pod. The researchers lowered a microphone into the water and recorded Delle’s sounds from December 2022 to February 2023—a total of 10,833 voicings. The noises included clicks, whistles, and bursts of sound often linked to aggressive interactions among dolphins…
@45 Lynna, OM wrote: I am trying to keep discussions relatively civil.
I reply, we are entering a New Dark Ages (yes, I’m wearing the phrase out). I very much agree that we should be civil here. However, I also feel so angry at so much of the outrageous hatred, bigotry, lies and violence in which we are immersed, it is difficult for me to exercise sufficient self-discipline to not explode with expletives.
Hey, people, let’s keep in mind that PZ starts his videos with the greeting “friends”. let’s all drop the temperature (I, too, will try to do that). stay sane and stay civil (at least here and toward each other), this should remain a haven for rational and decent for discussion.
birgerjohanssonsays
German satire program. The US election starts at 14.30
“Ampel-Aus, Neuwahlen, Trump triumphiert – die krasseste Woche des Jahres”
Heute-Show vom Nov. 8
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=Vscm7Db6OqI
birgerjohanssonsays
I find it difficult to follow the intricacies of day-to-day US economic events from over here in Sweden.
How deep is the negative reaction in US financial circles as it becomes evident that Trump really intends introducing tariffs, and appointing unqualified members of government?
Is this just a couple of bad days at the stock exchange or is it a stronger pessimism?
House Speaker Mike Johnson on Tuesday announced that the Capitol and House office buildings would officially segregate bathroom facilities by “biological sex.”
“All single-sex facilities in the Capitol and House Office Buildings—such as restrooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms—are reserved for individuals of that biological sex,” Johnson said.
The statement bars transgender House members, their staff, and others from using bathrooms of the gender they identify with.
[…] Johnson’s announcement arrived on the same day as Transgender Day of Remembrance, which honors trans people who have been killed and raises awareness of bigotry against transgender Americans.
In his statement, Johnson did not elaborate on how the new facility policy would be enforced. Johnson did not say whether the House sergeant-at-arms would be empowered to police Capitol bathrooms, whether officers would need to inspect genitals to ensure bathroom usage is confined to biological sex, or if officers would be empowered to make an arrest before, during, or after someone uses the bathroom in violation of his edict.
The policy came about after Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina introduced a resolution to segregate the Capitol’s bathrooms. Mace confirmed that the resolution was “absolutely” intended to target a single incoming House member, Sarah McBride from Delaware, who will become the first openly transgender person to serve in Congress once she is sworn in.
Mace’s action was praised by bigots.
Conservative pundit Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire, who previously called for “eradicating” transgender people, called it a “good day” and said that “we kind of brought this to the forefront” on his program.
[…] The effort to reinstate a form of segregation as official American government policy is the first major action by Republicans since their victory in the 2024 election. Based on the party’s clear support for attacking an oppressed minority group, more is sure to come.
Reginald Selkirksays
@88 birgerjohansson
Is this just a couple of bad days at the stock exchange or is it a stronger pessimism?
Well actually, the Dow-Jones is up a couple hundred points since the election.
MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” is seeing a ratings drop and facing criticism from multiple sources after the hosts of the show, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, traveled to Mar-a-Lago to pay homage to incoming president Donald Trump.
According to Nielsen television ratings, the audience for “Morning Joe” dropped 17% in the hour after Brzezinski relayed the details of the couple’s meeting with Trump. The audience decline was even more pronounced—down 38%—among the 25-54 demographic, a key metric for advertisers.
[…] The “Morning Joe” show turned off the ability to comment on its social media account, a move likely meant to avoid negative viewer feedback.
In on-air comments addressing the criticism, Scarborough claimed—as Trump has in the past—that anonymous supporters have praised his decision.
“Yesterday I saw for the first time what a massive disconnect there was between social media and the real world because we were flooded with phone calls from people all day, literally around the world, all very positive, very supportive,” the former Republican congressman explained. [Oh yeah? Look at the sources. See details below.]
Some sources of support have emerged. “The View” panelist Alyssa Farah Griffin, who served in the Trump administration and authored articles on anti-vaccination conspiracy theories for World Net Daily, said the hosts were right to court Trump.
“We need to stop demonizing people because they supported a man who just became president of the United States. We should hope good people are around him, and smart journalists are challenging him,” Griffin said.
Similarly, the hosts of “Morning Joe” rival “Fox & Friends” on Fox News were happy about the capitulation and praised Trump for welcoming the pair to his residence.
CNN has reported that the cave-in by Scarborough and Brzezinski was brought about by fears of retribution by Trump, who has a significant track record in threatening media outlets that report the truth about him and his inner circle.
But unlike most of the people who watch their program, the couple are extraordinarily wealthy and have financial resources numbering in the tens of millions that they could access if Trump pursued any action against them.
Based on their years of familiarity with Trump’s vendetta, the “Morning Joe” hosts could have renewed efforts to inform their viewers on aspects of Trump’s personal and political agenda. Instead, they chose to break bread with him, and this is the immediate result.
Criticism soon came in from multiple sources. Katie Phang, host of MSNBC’s “The Katie Phang Show,” wrote on X as the disclosure was made, “Normalizing Trump is a bad idea. Period.”
The House Ethics Committee met Wednesday but did not release its report on former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), resisting significant pressure to release its findings after President-elect Trump selected the controversial Florida Republican to be his attorney general.
“There is not an agreement by the committee to release the report,” Ethics Chair Michael Guest (R-Miss.) told reporters following a roughly two-hour meeting.
The panel, which met for roughly two hours behind closed doors, took multiple votes, a source familiar with the situation told The Hill, including one to release the report as-is, which failed.
The development caps off a week of speculation regarding the committee’s work, with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle pushing for its publication, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) vigorously advocating for it to remain a secret, and Trump’s team charging ahead with the selection of Gaetz despite the drama.
The committee is scheduled to meet again on Dec. 5 “to further consider this matter,” according to Rep. Susan Wild (Pa.), the top Democrat on the panel.
Shortly after Guest’s statement, Wild offered remarks on behalf of the Democrats, saying it would be “inaccurate” to take Guest’s statement to mean there was consensus on the committee, confirming that a vote was taken and suggesting that it broke along partisan lines.
“I will say that a vote was taken,” Wild said. “As many of you know, this committee is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans — five Dems, five Republicans — which means that in order to affirmatively move something forward, somebody has to cross party lines and vote with the other side — which happens a lot, by the way, and we often vote unanimously.”
Wild said that she made a separate public statement because Guest “betrayed the process by disclosing our deliberations within moments after walking out of the committee.
Details from the report could make their way to the public — or to senators considering Gaetz’s nomination — even if the Ethics panel never moves to release it.
Some of the evidence and testimony reportedly on file with the committee has been leaked to ABC News, and a lawyer for two women who he says spoke to the Ethics Committee has been publicly saying that they told the panel they saw Gaetz “having sex with a minor” at a party. […]
In other words, the Republicans on the committee obeyed Trump.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
Re: birgerjohansson:
How deep is the negative reaction in US financial circles
If you type “vti” into google on a desktop browser you’ll see a chart of Vanguard’s total market index fund, basically the S&P500 plus a bit of mid/small companies. You can click-drag across it to see the percent difference between two dates. There was a surge post election that fell days later, but zooming out, it’s not unusual for the stair step pattern.
Of course the whole point of diversifying across the whole market is to NOT react to daily chaos of any given sector. Reportedly there’ve been upticks in private prisons and Elon’s death traps, chasing dystopian fad investments.
NPR said the stock market reflects uncertainty, that companies had been holding back on decisions until they learned which administration they’d be dealing with, and now they carry on with a new normal.
In Triumphant Return, Meatball McPeenerToilet Named Ambassador To NATO
Oh look, Meatball McPeenerToilet is back, and he’s gonna be Ambassador to NATO!
It’s the lunkhead […] The scammer who ran a shady company called World Patent Marketing that bilked would-be inventors out of their life savings to promote the Masculine Toilet […]
Yep, just the crackpot for Trump to illegally name (acting) attorney general for three months way back in 2018, after Confederate Keebler elf Jeff Sessions got shoved out of his General-Attorneying tree for recusing himself and not helping a certain felon out of that Russia investigation hard enough.
Meatball was followed by Bill Barr, because he, Meatball, would never ever have gotten confirmed, being as how he was less qualified than a goat with scabies. Ah, 2018, what a sweet, innocent time.
But Meatball big, strong, build resume! Now he’s got three months handling high-stakes international legal issues, like locking up immigrant children and losing them, and doing everything he could to protect Russia’s boyfriend from nosy Robert Mueller. And most important, five years of experience going on Fox News to say NATO SUXXX and is RIPPING US OFF so they can pay for SOCIALIZED MEDICINE EXPERIMENTS!! TRUMP IS GENIUS! [video at the link]
And in between he went in front of the House Judiciary Committee to say TRUMP NO DO RUSSIA, ME EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGE, DRUGS, CRIME, BORDER, HILLARY’S EMAILS!
So now Meatball will get to go over to Europe and tell those Socialism-hugging cheese-eaters IT’S MEATBALL-THIRTY, MOTHEREFFERS! The US is pulling out of NATO, IN YOUR FACE!! BIG DICK MATT AND USA gonna yoink that 15 percent of your budget cuz we got kids to deport!! Good luck with Ukraine! MEATBALL OUT!
Previous descriptions from yr Wonkette’s Whitaker files include fake thug, […] The Senate shouldn’t confirm somebody so wildly unqualified, but, gestures around. Trump sure does love to rescue stray petty grifters out of the gutter, he likes his mediocre white people hungry and loyal!
Back in the halcyon days of yore, eight years ago, he was the very stupidest nut on Trump’s bench. Now compared to these other motherfuckers, the wrestling lady, dead whale guy, Fox News Christian Nationalist, naked-teenage-hula-hoop party man, and Dr. Colloidal Silver, he looks like Clarence fucking Darrow.
It’s that old Steve Bannon strategy, flood the zone with shit. Then rob the house while everybody’s distracted trying to find a plunger for the Big Dick toilet!
Four companies currently dominating a multibillion-dollar market in the United States are being accused of sharing detailed, sensitive inside information with each other as part of an alleged conspiracy to raise the price of their goods and make more money off consumers.
To be clear, this is a story about potatoes.
Two proposed class actions filed this week in U.S. District Court claim that four leading potato companies — McCain Foods, Cavendish Farms, Lamb Weston and J.R. Simplot — have privately swapped intel to inflate the price of frozen potato goods, like fries, hash browns and tater tots, over the last several years.
“Armed with the same access to each other’s data on pricing and other sensitive information, as well as with a direct line of communication to each other, the potato cartel moves prices skyward in lockstep — harming all purchasers of potatoes in the process,” one of the claims read…
The former German chancellor painted a scathing picture of the president-elect — and hinted at a playbook for dealing with him.
European politicians preparing for United States President-elect Donald Trump’s second term in the White House have so far made a point of not saying anything that could upset him.
But Angela Merkel, who was Germany’s chancellor for 16 years, until 2021 — since which she has largely stayed out of the public eye — has no need to play the flattery game.
In her upcoming memoir, excerpts of which have been published by German weekly Die Zeit, she details her interactions with Trump during his first four-year term, including her take on the former president’s relationship with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
“He judged everything from the perspective of the property entrepreneur he had been before politics,” she wrote of Trump. “Each property could only be allocated once. If he didn’t get it, someone else did. That was also how he looked at the world.”
“For him, all countries were in competition with each other, in which the success of one was the failure of the other; he did not believe that the prosperity of all could be increased through co-operation.”
Merkel’s comments are notable because of the high level of respect she commanded among European political leaders, even as her reign over Germany ended. Her thoughts on how best to treat with the ex-president will be of note to politicians preparing for a second Trump term.
[She] found the Trump relationship so challenging, she even sought advice from Pope Francis on how to deal with him.
“Without naming names, I asked him how he would deal with fundamentally differing opinions in a group of important personalities,” Merkel wrote, referring to a conversation around the time Trump was threatening to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement. “He understood me immediately and answered me straightforwardly: ‘Bend, bend, bend, but make sure it doesn’t break.’”
“I liked this image. I repeated it to him. ‘Bend, bend, bend, but make sure it doesn’t break.’ In this spirit, I would try to solve my problem with the Paris Agreement and Trump in Hamburg.”
Much of her writing about Trump concerns her meeting with him in the White House in March 2017.
“We spoke on two different levels. Trump on an emotional level, me on a factual one,” Merkel wrote of the meeting. “When he did pay attention to my arguments, it was usually only in order to construct new accusations from them.”
“When I flew home, I didn’t have a good feeling,” she said. “I concluded from my conversations: There would be no joint work for a networked world with Trump.”
Just a few months later, after Trump had thumbed his nose at Europe during a tour of the continent and a fractious G7 meeting in Italy, she famously declared, against the backdrop of Trump’s leadership and Brexit the year before, that Europe must to a greater extent than before stand on its own, unable to fully rely on others.
She also wrote that during the March 2017 meeting, Trump was keen to get her opinion on Putin.
“Donald Trump asked me a number of questions, including about my East German origins and my relationship with Putin.”
“He was obviously very fascinated by the Russian president,” she wrote. “In the years that followed, I had the impression that politicians with autocratic and dictatorial traits captivated him.“
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
Republicans tend to juice the economy in the short-term by deregulating unethical business practices, then leave the resulting disaster for Dems to clean up.
birgerjohanssonsays
There is actually a precedent for the House to release an investigation of a former member: There was a congressman named (I am not making this up) Bill Boner.
The Boner precedent makes it perfectly legit to release the investigation of Matt Gaetz.
Vought is a leading proponent of “Schedule F,” a plan to potentially fire thousands of federal civil servants and replace them with MAGA acolytes.
[…] Trump is planning to appoint Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist who has plotted to remake the federal workforce in MAGA’s image, to serve as his administration’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, according to CBS News. Vought held the same position during Trump’s first term. Since leaving office he has been a leading architect of Project 2025, a sprawling plan to provide staffing and policy options to the next Republican administration.
In his role at Project 2025, Vought was instrumental in ensuring that decimating the ranks of federal civil service became a conservative priority. He wrote the second chapter in Project 2025’s policy book — Mandate for Leadership — titled: “Executive Office of the President of the United States.” In it, he argued that “a President today assumes office to find a sprawling federal bureaucracy that all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences—or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country.”
As part of his anti-woke crusade, Vought has repeatedly defended and promoted Christian nationalism, at one point calling for an “army” of right-wing activists with “biblical worldview” to staff the next Republican administration. He wrote an op-ed for Newsweek in 2021 with the headline “Is There Anything Actually Wrong With ‘Christian Nationalism?’” More recently, Politico reported that a document from the Center for Renewing America — a MAGA-aligned think tank Vought founded — listed “Christian nationalism” as a top priority for a second Trump term.
While at the helm of the Center for Renewing America, Vought has been outspoken in his advocacy of Schedule F — a scheme to reclassify career civil servants as political appointees. Trump attempted to implement Schedule F in the waning days of his first term, but its effects were blunted by his loss in 2020. If his incoming administration moves forward with the plan, which seems all but inevitable, as many as 50,000 career staffers could be replaced with MAGA loyalists. (Some other estimates put the number closer to 20,000.)
Vought has championed the use of congressional rules to defund and remove individual government employees for punishment and deploying “ideological purity tests” to ensure federal workers are loyal to Trump.
During a recent interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Vought argued that the “whole notion of an independent agency should be thrown out.”
Following a broad backlash to Project 2025, Vought was caught on hidden video discussing his work at the initiative and how it might play if Trump returned to the White House.
“Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies, and we are working doggedly on that,” Vought said. “Whether it’s destroying agencies’ notion of independence, that they’re independent from the president.”
In the interview, Vought claimed that he’d been working on “about 350 different documents that are regulations and things of that nature” for a future Trump administration.
[…] This early preparation includes creating documents to facilitate the “largest deportation in history” and to deploy the military to “maintain law and order” against civilian protesters. Vought elaborated that the mass deportations were part of a plan to “end multiculturalism” in the country.
As a hardline conservative, Vought has pushed to implement harsh austerity measures throughout the country. The Washington Post reported that Vought advocates for eliminating trillions of dollars of reductions in “anti-poverty programs such as housing, health care and food assistance.” He has called for massive cuts to Medicaid and floated future cuts to Social Security and Medicare. [Yikes!]
Toward that end, Vought and his colleagues at the Center for Renewing America are leading proponents of a radical interpretation of executive authority that claims the president can unilaterally refuse to spend money allocated by Congress. Known as the “impoundment” power, Vought and his fellow travelers assert that a 1974 law that mandates presidents spend money Congress has allocated — passed after President Richard Nixon refused to spend federal funds for clean water and schools — is unconstitutional. This theory, if Trump acts on it, would centralize budgeting power within the Oval Office and tilt the balance of power between the president and Congress even further towards the executive branch.
Aside from slashing the United States’ very limited safety net, Vought’s think tank released a budget proposal for fiscal year 2023 that would unleash the FBI against Trump’s declared enemies and “thwart the increasing societal destruction caused by progressive policies at the state and local levels that have defunded police, refused to prosecute criminals, and released violent felons into communities.”
Now, as he reprises his role as the head of OMB, he will wield considerable influence within the Trump administration and will almost certainly play a central role in the likely purge of the federal workforce.
Gautam Adani, chair of India’s Adani Group and one of the world’s richest people, was indicted with others on bribery and fraud charges unsealed Wednesday in federal court in New York.
Adani and other defendants are accused of paying Indian government officials more than $250 million in bribes to obtain solar energy supply contracts worth more than $2 billion in profits.
The 62-year-old and two executives in Adani Green Energy Limited — his nephew Sagar Adani and Vneet Jaain — are also charged with misleading U.S. and international investors about their company’s compliance with anti-bribery and anti-corruption practices as they raised more than $3 billion in capital to fund the energy contracts.
The five-count indictment in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn also charged Ranjit Gupta and Rupash Agarwal, former executives in the renewable-energy company Azure Power Global, and three former employees of the Canadian institutional investor Caisse de Depot et Placement du Quebec: Cyril Cabanes, Saurabh Agarwal and Deepak Malhotra…
The Earth’s magnetic North Pole is currently moving toward Russia in a way that British scientists have not seen before…
In the 300 years between 1600 and 1900, scientists estimate that the magnetic North Pole moved about six miles per year. At the beginning of this century, it picked up to about 34 miles per year, before slowing in the last five years to about 22 miles per year…
her stepfather, who is an ex-state law enforcement official and a former sexual assault nurse, took Rachel to the police station and to a hospital where an official report was given. […”]I started thinking about my nieces and my nephews, and I had to protect them[“…] Rachel credits officials with the Shirley Police Department for making sure Jessup was held accountable. […] The crime could land Jessup in prison up to 20 years.
[…]
despite reports of the sexual assault—the community voted for Jessup
[…]
Jessup told county officials he will step down from the elected position as a council member as soon as he is sworn in—due to the state law that convicted felons cannot become elected officials.
[…]
In the meantime, Rachel is pushing forward and plans to graduate college this spring and head to graduate school, where she’s studying social work.
Silent Arrow has announced that it has been selected by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) for a $1.8 million Direct to Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract to develop a logistical drone.
This contract focuses on the development and flight testing of the Silent Arrow CLS-200, a special missions Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) designed for contested logistics operations over a range of 200 nautical miles (230 miles)…
Conspiracy theorist and right-wing media personality Alex Jones sued on Monday to challenge the sale of his Infowars platform to the parent company satirical news outlet The Onion and the families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook mass school shooting.
Jones alleged in a filing in Texas bankruptcy court on Monday that “conspiratorial negotiation and agreement” involving his bankruptcy trustee and a “flagrantly non-compliant Frankenstein bid” led to the Sandy Hook families and Global Tetrahedron, The Onion’s parent company, winning an auction last week for the site…
Jones’s filing on Monday alleges the winning bidders in the bankruptcy auction for Infowars submitted an offer that only appeared more valuable than the $3.5m bid from a company associated with his online store. He claims The Onion’s bid was worth $1.75m on its own, but managed to appear more valuable in the aggregate because the Connecticut-based Sandy Hook families agreed to forgo some of the funds they’d earn from the sale, meaning a separate group of families who won a different defamation suit against Jones would receive a higher ultimate payout from the Jones estate…
Christopher R. Murray, the bankruptcy trustee overseeing the sale of Jones’s assets, responded to the filing on Monday, painting Jones’s move as “a disappointed bidder’s improper attempt to influence an otherwise fair and open auction process.”
Jones, he argued, “alleges, without evidence, collusion and bad faith in an attempt to mislead the Court and disqualify its only competition in the auction.”
Lawyers for the Sandy Hook families also said they would not back down…
Alex Jones making allegations without evidence to back them up? Say it isn’t so.
(Maine, USA)
Another, and the tallest, sign that the holiday season is nearing is the annual construction of Rockland’s lobster trap tree.
Volunteers gathered Wednesday, Nov. 20 to erect the tree out of lobster traps at Mildred Merrill Park, overlooking Harbor Park and Rockland Harbor…
The tree stands 40-feet tall with about 200 traps, donated by Brooks Trap Mill. The tree is adorned with 2,500 lights, 600 feet of natural green garland and more than 100 lobster buoys. A large lobster from the Trade Winds inn will sit atop the tree…
A Marine Corps veteran who pleaded guilty to making ricin after his contacts with a Virginia militia prompted a federal investigation was sentenced Wednesday to time served after the probe concluded he had no intent to harm others.
When the FBI arrested Russell Vane, 42, of Vienna, Virginia in April, authorities feared the worst: a homegrown terrorist whose interest in explosives alarmed even members of a militia group who thought Vane’s rhetoric was so extreme that he must be a government agent sent to entrap them.
Fears escalated when a search of Vane’s home found castor beans and a test tube with a white substance that tested positive for ricin. Vane also strangely took steps to legally change his name shortly before his arrest, and posted a fake online obituary…
The Humboldt County community is rallying to find a cherished piece of local art. Morris the Banana Slug, who has stood guard outside of Eureka’s Morris Graves Museum of Art since the summer, was stolen earlier this month in a nighttime heist that has stumped local authorities.
On the night of Nov. 2, the Morris Graves Museum of Art welcomed 800 community members for its monthly arts celebration and town art walk. After the festivities ended and staff locked up, they unknowingly said their last goodnight to Morris: Sometime between 9 p.m. and 11 a.m. the next morning, according to the museum curator, thieves broke into the Melvin Schuler Sculpture Garden, cut the lock and pried Morris — who was secured to the garden’s brick walkway with construction-grade adhesive — from his spot before vanishing with the beloved ceramic icon…
whheydtsays
New volcanic eruption started in Iceland at 11:14 PM (local…they’re on GMT, a bit less than 2 hours ago as I write this). It’s in the same area the last few eruptions have been. Initial fissure is about 2 Km long. Initial flow rate estimated at 12-13 cu. m/sec. Pretty much any Icelandic news site should be carrying the news by now.
JMsays
@88 birgerjohansson: There are a lot of public announcements but not a big actual market move yet. The tariffs probably will be very unpopular but it’s still some time before Trump can do it. What is happening now is more “OMG, what is going to happen?” angst then real panic or anger.
With Trump there is often a large gap between what he announces and what he does and exactly what he tariffs and by how much will matter a lot. He could easily add tariffs to Chinese products that are already essentially banned because the companies are not allowed to do business in the US, declare victory and go play golf. He could also put tariffs on all imports of important goods, trigger a global trade war and crash the global markets.
StevoRsays
The first openly transgender person elected to the US House of Representatives Sarah McBride says she is “not here to fight about bathrooms” in response to a bill aimed at blocking House members and employees from using bathrooms “other than those corresponding to their biological sex” on Capitol Hill. On Wednesday, US House Speaker Mike Johnson said that all single-sex bathrooms in the US Capitol building would be reserved for individuals of that biological sex.
Repug Congressbigots make hateful statement and ruling on on the Transgender Day of Remembrance.
StevoRsays
See :
The Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDoR), also known as the International Transgender Day of Remembrance, has been observed annually from its inception on November 20 to memorialize those who have been murdered as a result of transphobia.[1][2] The day was founded to draw attention to the continued violence directed toward transgender people.[3]
Transgender Day of Remembrance was founded in 1999 by a small group, including Gwendolyn Ann Smith,[4] Nancy Nangeroni, and Jahaira DeAlto,[5] to memorialize the murders of Black transgender women Rita Hester in Allston, Massachusetts,[6] and Chanelle Pickett in Watertown, Massachusetts.[7][8] After Hester’s death in 1998, Smith was surprised to realize that none of her friends remembered Pickett or her murder three years prior, saying “It really surprised me that it had already, in a short period of time, been forgotten, and here we were with another murder at the same site.”[8][9] The first TDoR took place in November 1999 in Boston and San Francisco, as both Hester and Pickett’s deaths occurred in November.[8][10] TDoR continued to be observed annually on November 20, the anniversary of Pickett’s murder.[8] In 2010, TDoR was observed in over 185 cities throughout more than 20 countries.
Gautam Adani, the Indian billionaire behind Queensland’s controversial Carmichael coal mine, has been charged in the US over an alleged multi-billion-dollar fraud scheme.
American authorities accuse the Adani Group chairman, his nephew Sagar Adani, and six associates of plotting to pay bribes to Indian government officials of more than $US265 million ($407 million).
Prosecutors also said the Adanis and another executive at Adani Green Energy, Vneet Jaain, raised several billion dollars in loans and bonds by concealing the corruption from lenders and investors.
According to court documents, some of the defendants referred privately to Gautam Adami with the code names “Numero uno” and “the big man”.
Sagar Adani allegedly used his mobile phone to track specifics about the bribes, which aimed to obtain solar energy supply contracts expected to yield $US2 billion ($3 billion) in profits.
Some measure of justice for one dodgy billionaire hopefully?
Reginald Selkirksays
@115 StevoR … would be reserved for individuals of that biological sex.
As if any of these dipshits know anything about biology.
Bekenstein Boundsays
Earth’s magnetic North Pole is shifting toward Russia. What does that mean?
Field reversal soon, or else Putin is cooking up some kind of superweapon. :P
StevoRsays
@103. Reginald Selkirk : “Earth’s magnetic North Pole is shifting toward Russia. What does that mean?”
Et tu North Magnetic Pole? Does everything have to be shifting towards Russa’s, well, Putin’s favour these days?
Admittedly not sure how this helps Putin much..
StevoRsays
@118. Reginald Selkirk : Yep – & very telling about their warped cruel priorities.
StevoRsays
Seems our galaxy may not be as typical or common a type as we’d thought :
For decades, scientists have used the Milky Way as a model for understanding how galaxies form. But three new studies raise questions about whether the Milky Way is truly representative of other galaxies in the universe. … (snip).. The results, published in three studies in the Nov. 18 issue of The Astrophysical Journal, reveal that, in many ways, the evolutionary history of the Milky Way is different from other comparable-sized galaxies.
Paraphrased for brevity.
The contempt of courts: Refusal to accept federal funds shows disdain for families
Oh, Lynna, thanks, again, for your work here. However, personally, as a terrible play on words, thinking about most of the topics posted here, it makes me want to roll over in agony.
If you don’t mind my expressing it, our take on things today is our video at theartsinarizona.org
Followup to comment 489, (in the previous set of 500 comments on The Infinite Thread).
FFS. Really?
Fox News praises Trump for allowing ‘Morning Joe’ hosts to kiss his ring
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain @1, “Far more commonly family poverty is confused with neglect.”
Yes, that’s important to note.
shermanj @2: “Oh, Lynna, thanks, again, for your work here.” Thanks for that comment.
Cartoon: Taken for a ride
Followup to comment 495, (in the previous set of 500 comments on The Infinite Thread).
Washington Post link
More at the link.
Dental supply stock surges on RFK’s anti-fluoride stance, activist involvement
Hello.
Two international data cables in the Baltic Sea have mysteriously broken. It’s that time of year, I guess.
https://yle.fi/a/74-20125395
Study: EV battery prices to drop by 50% by 2026
Dr. Pekka Jahunen explains concepts for exploring space.
.
“How The Moon’s Bumpy Gravitational Field Can Help Launch Things From Its Surface ”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=VP4fn0_cb24
There is also a discussion about extracting ammonia salt from Ceres for its nitrogen.
Ceres rotates fast enough (and has an orbital velocity low enough) to make a space elevator feasible. You could even build a megasatellite around it with a frame holding multiple Oneill cylinders.
Ultra-Thin Silicon Wafers Wring More from Power Electronics
Weekends Were a Mistake, Says Infosys Co-founder Narayana Murthy
Phys.org
“Statistical approach improves models of atmosphere on early Earth and exoplanets”
.https://phys.org/news/2024-11-statistical-approach-atmosphere-early-earth.html
Some Arab Americans who voted for Trump are concerned about his picks for key positions
Leopards, etc.
Oh look, I beheld this months ahead of time:
People like Vicar, myself, and very few others are the only credible political commentators on here. If you’re looking for ways to move forward from your devastating and complete defeat, I have ideas.
13th-century Polynesians settled on freezing sub-Antarctic islands after ‘mind-blowing’ sea voyage
Re: beholder @ #15…
Current vote counts (which are still continuing) have Harris slightly ahead in the popular vote, so hardly a “devastating and complete defeat”.
beholder:
You’re proud of your predictions and how you voted?! You talk about a campaign of fear and turning the dial up to 11 but after the nominations up to now that was not even close; it’s even worse than anything foreseen and that’s just the preview. If you think Biden was bad (and he is on many fronts), it’s going to be so much worse on all fronts (unless you’re rooting for dictators and fascism). And there’s not going to be any guard rails like there would have been with the democrats.
So enjoy your smugness while the world burns around you and people die and suffer. Unless you end up amongst the casualties.
Video: CNN – Undocumented mechanic says he won’t regret his support for Trump even if he’s deported (4:03)
@ 18
Take your advice, roll it up, and use it to fuck your puckered asshole until you bleed out and die.
Whoops, that was meant to be hurled at 15.
You think having to grow up without a father would be better?
Oh, wait. Yeah, they’d definitely be better off without this particular father serving as a role model. Nevermind.
@17 whheydt
Fake news. Are you even trying anymore?
@20 Akira
You first. If it works, I’ll consider it.
@ 23
You’re welcome try.
One thousand days today since Putin decided to invade Ukraine. The consequences have been catastrophic for both Ukraine and Russia.
The death toll disputed estimated at around 120- 174,000 Russian troops, 57,000 Ukranian troops & 39,000 civilians but probly really higher.
See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War#Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine
Akira MacKenzie @20,
That wording is courtesy of CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain. I approve that wording. The reminder was directed to birgerjohansson @480, 481, from the previous set of 500 comments in The Infinite Thread.
Akira, you already know this. You should not have to be reminded.
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-19/ukrainian-refugee-cafe-owner-london-ukraine-russia-war-1000-days/104608972
Please ban yourself for the night, Akira M.
No, Trump doesn’t actually have an electoral mandate—here’s why
Posted by readers of the article:
Followup to comment 3.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/suckers-make-up-with-fascist
So you’re taking beholder’s side, eh? After all he’s said and done here?
I’m sure you and your fellow fascist stooges will go on helping Trump all you can, while he turns up the dial on enabling Israeli genocide in Palestine to 11, abandons the Ukrainians to the mercies of your chum Putin, and gets on with imposing fascism at home. But you won’t find much help here.
Stephan’s History of the world.
“The original gods of Israel (El, Baal, Yahweh, Asherah)”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=n9q_b9UvfBY
Kyle Kulinski demolishes the uber-smug Bill Maher’s bulldust here – just under 15 minutes long
@15. Beholder : Talking of the infuriatringly , unhelpfully uber-smug and utterly wrong. Fuck off you vile hypocritical, worse than useless Trump enabling, genocide assisting troll! You got Trump who is the person you * ACTUALLY fucking voted for elected. YOU inflicted him on the retsof our planet with your purity disunity bullshit. You have hurt the entire planet and at least doubled if not tripled or quintupled the amount of genocide we will see you willfully ignorant, fanatically, blinkered piece of exrement.
.* You and Vicar and every fucking douchebag extremist unelectable third party spoiler voter and counter-productive fool who did anything other than vote for Kamala Harris and encourage and support people to vote for Kamala Harris. Turns out it was close – closer now than it first appeared – and you could have made a difference for good instead of evil. But refuse dto do so because good wasn’t good enough for you even when the ONLY alternative was, again, evil. Which for the umpteenth time are relative fucking terms and you’ll never get the perfect unicorn that farts rainbows you demand as your minimum ideal candidate. Its politics its life, its how your shitty Amercian system works – or used to pre-Trump’s fascist Christian Suypremacist Dictatorship which, again, is on you.
Robot runs marathon in South Korea, apparently the first time this has happened
India Plans To Build a Moon-Orbiting Space Station By 2040
Do you remember that chat we had about the protective effects of the Earth’s magnetic fields not long ago? This would be outside the protection of those fields, which no previous nor existing space station has been.
Re 29 and 31,
Apparently, Trump won the popular vote by a smaller margin than he lost it in 2016. He must be still one of the least mandated presidents in United states history, on average. Barely mandated, if you consider just his second term.
Airbags, but for knees.
Seen on a t shirt :
Crows before bros.
Support your local murder.
What Is An Anti-SLAPP, Anyway? A Lawsplainer Series
@ 29, 38
The right is so anti-gay I am surprised they are touting a man-date.
Reginald Selkirk at 16 – That’s interesting. I looked up Enderby Island on Google Maps. It’s one of the smaller islands in the Auckland group, but seems to have an excellent natural harbor.
The Polynesian (proto-Maori) settlers there must have lived off seabirds, seals and fish. I suspect the settlement was abandoned largely because the local game populations collapsed after some decades of overexploitation. Similar collapse happened on the NZ main islands, and the early Maori then became increasingly agricultural people. That wasn’t an option in the frigid south, particularly since the Polynesians only had crops that required a tropical or at least warm temperate climate.
The proto-Maori also settled Chatham Islands (which are slightly warmer and larger than Auckland Islands, but about equally remote from mainland, and still too cold for Polynesian farming) shortly after settling the NZ mainland. A small population lived there for centuries on hunting, fishing and gathering, and evolved into a people called Moriori. They practically lost all contact with Maori, since both cultures became less interested in seafaring, and the Moriori din’t really even have resources for maintaining open sea canoes and navigation skills.
Shortly after European contact in the early 19th century, the Maori were eager to adopt new technology (particularly guns) and became heavily involved in colonial-industrial sealing and whaling. They rekindled their old tradition of settling remote islands, including the Chatham and Auckland, and genocided the Moriori in the process. Not that an isolated population that small would’ve been sustainable over a timescale of millennia, anyway. The Maori settlement on Auckland Islands farmed sheep and introduced useful plants. Eventually, the settlement was again abandoned, I presume because mainland communities increasingly offered a modern standard of living, which was more attractive than hardscrabble survival.
SteveoR @34 and 35, please dial back the personal insults. You can make your points without labeling another commenter as “excrement,” etc. Thank you.
Note to Akira, and to all who comment here. I am not taking beholder’s side. I am not taking anyone’s side. I am trying to keep discussions relatively civil. Dial back the personal insults. Stick to the facts as much as possible. Do not promote violence. Do not fantasize about doing violence to other human beings. Do not indulge in imagining random violence befalling other human beings. Steer clear of even “joking” about violence, including metaphorical violence. Thank you.
In other news:
Trump’s defense attorney is known for his practicality, his loyalty and the copious cash he made representing him. He’s poised to take on a leading role at the DOJ next.
Good news:
Link
https://www.wonkette.com/p/rfk-jr-fixing-to-screw-up-his-one
RFK Jr. Fixing To Screw Up His One Not-Crappy Goal
Medical professionals are worried he’ll set back years of work on treating diabetes and obesity.
Link
Moscow Times: Putin Lowers Threshold for Using Nuclear Weapons in Updated Doctrine
Nuclear saber rattling but it is a dangerous move. Putin is authorizing himself to use nuclear weapons widely enough that he will always be able to find a reason. Any non-trivial attack would be grounds for using nuclear weapons and some non-attacks are now considered grounds for nuclear weapons, such as preparing defenses against Russia.
The changes were proposed some time ago and it’s surely not a coincidence that they were signed at the same time as Ukraine made it’s first long range missile strikes into Russia.
Prosecutors say sentencing in Trump hush money case can be postponed
The president-elect had been scheduled to be sentenced later this month after being convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
Oh FFS.
Link
Another doofus for Trump’s cabinet:
Link
Link. That link leads to a news roundup that includes other, unrelated reports.
Excerpt from an article by John Cassidy of The New Yorker:
Same link as in comment 53.
Musk is in it for the money. And for potential deregulation that will allow him to be even more free to do whatever he wants to do.
Watch Rachel Maddow spell out how to block Trump
Link
Followup to comment 56.
Hacker accesses sealed testimony of woman alleging Matt Gaetz had sex with her when she was 17
The file that was hacked Monday included the testimony of the woman who alleges she had sex with Gaetz when she was 17 in 2017, and the testimony of a second woman who said she witnessed the encounter, a source told NBC News. [Video at the link.]
Followup to 332 and 437 from the previous set of 500 comments.
More than 40,000 protest New Zealand Maori rights bill
6-hour Facebook video. A mix of English and Māori languages. No subtitles. Justice for Palestine makes a speech at 4:25:52.
Hana-Rāwhiti delivers speech after world-shaking haka
* Video of her protest speech at the link.
* Wikipedia – Electoral System of New Zealand, Māori seats
https://mastodon.nz/@Xas/113508581688801139Trump picks Dr. Oz to lead massive Medicare, Medicaid agency CMS
Mehmet Oz in April 2020
Scientist behind superconductivity claims ousted
Jaguar is now JaGUar
Fuck me.
A sweet story to cheer you up
“My Golden Retrievers Gentle Approach to a Terrified Rescue Puppy”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=YGkSDyh8zYE
Youtube: 20 Nov: BRUTAL DEFEAT. Russians ARREST ALL GENERALS. Siversk Offensive Ended
After repeated failures the army attacking Siversk was out of options. They launched a final attack before the season ended. This also failed and the situation was so bad that the Russian command arrested the general in charge and a bunch of other officers.
The Russians now have a problem with officers lying about their success. The war is going so badly the officers must succeed or be recalled to Moscow. Facing that the officers are declaring victory and hoping they can fix the situation with follow up forces before the high command notices. This has happened in both the Siversk offensive and the Kursk offensive.
This is very bad for the Russians in a bunch of ways. As word gets out it makes the war and the commanders in charge unpopular. It makes the planning and operations by the central command impossible to do well because they don’t know how far things are from the front or what areas actually need reinforcement. And worst for Putin, it makes the government look like it isn’t in control, one thing Putin can’t tolerate because if it gets out of hand it can bring down his government.
JM @63:
Putin brought that on himself.
Related news, as posted by NEXTA on X/Twitter:
If Lavrov is praising Scholz, then Scholz should conclude that he did something wrong.
As posted, with a photo, by WarTranslated (Dmitri):
https://x.com/wartranslated/status/1858851661160046856
Also available in this report, which also features a lot of other Ukrainian and/or Russian news.
Followup to lumipuna @8.
As posted by NavyLookout:
https://x.com/NavyLookout/status/1858841426387157038
Map at the link.
Also available here. You have to scroll through other reports to find it.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/what-the-hell-is-it-that-nancy-mace
What The Hell Is It That Nancy Mace Is Doing In the Ladies’ Room?
Posted by a reader of the article:
And that one word condemns that legislation, for it makes it a bill of attainder, and thus unconstitutional.
Or, it would condemn it if the Supreme Court could remotely be trusted anymore.
Pumping the AI bubble
Two randos exchanging comments
@69
Nvidia’s data center Blackwell GPUs reportedly overheat, requiring rack redesigns and causing delays for customers
@8, 66
undersea cables cut
Danish Navy boards Chinese ship suspected in European undersea cable sabotage — Sweden’s Defense Ministry put freighter at the time and place of the disruption
US shuts Kyiv embassy citing strike threat after Ukraine fires ATACMS at Russia
Link
See also I may have to put my retirement plans on hold, in which PZ mentions Linda McMahon.
Link.
More at the link.
Link
What does RFK Jr. think about Oz’s connections to shady deals involving large amounts of Big Pharma dollars??
Cartoon: From dawn to dusk
https://www.wonkette.com/p/mtg-threatens-mutually-assured-dickstruction
Defense Secretary Austin says women in military ‘make us stronger’
Austin in an exclusive interview with NBC News called women in the military a strong asset. Trump’s choice for Secretary of Defense [Pete Hegseth] has cast doubt on women in combat roles.
‘Bomb cyclone’ storm leaves 1 confirmed dead and more than 500,000 customers without power on the West Coast
A Pacific storm system 300 miles off the coast of Washington — described as a “bomb cyclone”— is bringing high winds, rain and snow to the region.
Video and photos at the link.
@77 Lynna, OM
True! I don’t like her whether she’s mad or not.
I’m sure she would. She has a history of this.
Greene displays sexual images of Hunter Biden at IRS whistleblower hearing
Consequences:
Heh. Elon Musk did the Democrats a favor.
Link
Followup to comment 81.
Link
FBI Says It Busted ISIS’s Graphic Designer in Houston
This Solitary Dolphin in the Baltic Sea Is Really Going Through It Right Now
Operation Smash Hit Rammed A 100 MPH Train Into A Nuclear Waste Canister To Prove How Strong It Was
@45 Lynna, OM wrote: I am trying to keep discussions relatively civil.
I reply, we are entering a New Dark Ages (yes, I’m wearing the phrase out). I very much agree that we should be civil here. However, I also feel so angry at so much of the outrageous hatred, bigotry, lies and violence in which we are immersed, it is difficult for me to exercise sufficient self-discipline to not explode with expletives.
Hey, people, let’s keep in mind that PZ starts his videos with the greeting “friends”. let’s all drop the temperature (I, too, will try to do that). stay sane and stay civil (at least here and toward each other), this should remain a haven for rational and decent for discussion.
German satire program. The US election starts at 14.30
“Ampel-Aus, Neuwahlen, Trump triumphiert – die krasseste Woche des Jahres”
Heute-Show vom Nov. 8
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=Vscm7Db6OqI
I find it difficult to follow the intricacies of day-to-day US economic events from over here in Sweden.
How deep is the negative reaction in US financial circles as it becomes evident that Trump really intends introducing tariffs, and appointing unqualified members of government?
Is this just a couple of bad days at the stock exchange or is it a stronger pessimism?
Tom’s of Maine toothpaste tainted with bacteria, says U.S. Food and Drug Administration
shermanj @86, I understand. Good points. Thanks for posting that.
In other news (but also somewhat related): GOP House speaker segregates Capitol bathrooms to target 1 member”
Well actually, the Dow-Jones is up a couple hundred points since the election.
Followup to comments 3 and 30.
Link
House Ethics Committee to keep Gaetz report under wraps
In other words, the Republicans on the committee obeyed Trump.
Re: birgerjohansson:
If you type “vti” into google on a desktop browser you’ll see a chart of Vanguard’s total market index fund, basically the S&P500 plus a bit of mid/small companies. You can click-drag across it to see the percent difference between two dates. There was a surge post election that fell days later, but zooming out, it’s not unusual for the stair step pattern.
Of course the whole point of diversifying across the whole market is to NOT react to daily chaos of any given sector. Reportedly there’ve been upticks in private prisons and Elon’s death traps, chasing dystopian fad investments.
NPR said the stock market reflects uncertainty, that companies had been holding back on decisions until they learned which administration they’d be dealing with, and now they carry on with a new normal.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/in-triumphant-return-meatball-mcpeenertoilet
In Triumphant Return, Meatball McPeenerToilet Named Ambassador To NATO
Alleged ‘potato cartel’ accused of conspiring to raise price of frozen fries, tater tots across U.S.
Merkel eviscerates ‘emotional’ Trump in upcoming memoir
The former German chancellor painted a scathing picture of the president-elect — and hinted at a playbook for dealing with him.
Republicans tend to juice the economy in the short-term by deregulating unethical business practices, then leave the resulting disaster for Dems to clean up.
There is actually a precedent for the House to release an investigation of a former member: There was a congressman named (I am not making this up) Bill Boner.
The Boner precedent makes it perfectly legit to release the investigation of Matt Gaetz.
“Bombshell Matt Gaetz Testimony Alleges Sex Trafficking a Minor | The Daily Show”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=2lVHumVPYgk
Trump set to appoint Project 2025 architect Russ Vought to Office of Management and Budget
Vought is a leading proponent of “Schedule F,” a plan to potentially fire thousands of federal civil servants and replace them with MAGA acolytes.
Watch Jimmy Kimmel mock Trump’s ridiculous Cabinet picks
Video at the link.
Billionaire Gautam Adani charged in New York with massive fraud, bribery
Earth’s magnetic North Pole is shifting toward Russia. What does that mean?
Republican Commissioner’s daughter steps forward as the woman he sexually assaulted in Las Vegas
Italian village offers $1 homes to Americans upset by the US election result
US Air Force plans new unmanned aircraft capable of carrying 500 lbs over 230 miles
Alex Jones sues Sandy Hook families and The Onion for ‘Frankenstein bid’ to buy Infowars
Alex Jones making allegations without evidence to back them up? Say it isn’t so.
Man convicted of killing Laken Riley sentenced to life in prison without parole
Wow, that was fast.
Michael Knowles: “Atheist chaplains, in a way, have already existed for a long time and we just call them psychiatrists”
A Lobster Trap Tree Grows in Rockland
Military Veteran Gets Time Served for Making Ricin Out of ‘Curiosity’
The missing banana slug that has a California community outraged
New volcanic eruption started in Iceland at 11:14 PM (local…they’re on GMT, a bit less than 2 hours ago as I write this). It’s in the same area the last few eruptions have been. Initial fissure is about 2 Km long. Initial flow rate estimated at 12-13 cu. m/sec. Pretty much any Icelandic news site should be carrying the news by now.
@88 birgerjohansson: There are a lot of public announcements but not a big actual market move yet. The tariffs probably will be very unpopular but it’s still some time before Trump can do it. What is happening now is more “OMG, what is going to happen?” angst then real panic or anger.
With Trump there is often a large gap between what he announces and what he does and exactly what he tariffs and by how much will matter a lot. He could easily add tariffs to Chinese products that are already essentially banned because the companies are not allowed to do business in the US, declare victory and go play golf. He could also put tariffs on all imports of important goods, trigger a global trade war and crash the global markets.
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-21/sarah-mcbride-responds-to-bill-restricting-transgender-bathrooms/104627958
Repug Congressbigots make hateful statement and ruling on on the Transgender Day of Remembrance.
See :
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_Day_of_Remembrance
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-21/gautam-adani-indicted-in-new-york/104628238
Some measure of justice for one dodgy billionaire hopefully?
As if any of these dipshits know anything about biology.
Field reversal soon, or else Putin is cooking up some kind of superweapon. :P
@103. Reginald Selkirk : “Earth’s magnetic North Pole is shifting toward Russia. What does that mean?”
Et tu North Magnetic Pole? Does everything have to be shifting towards Russa’s, well, Putin’s favour these days?
Admittedly not sure how this helps Putin much..
@118. Reginald Selkirk : Yep – & very telling about their warped cruel priorities.
Seems our galaxy may not be as typical or common a type as we’d thought :
Source : https://phys.org/news/2024-11-milky-outlier-similar-galaxies-universe.html