StupidiNews!

• All 21 people aboard a jet bound from Houston to Boston have survived with at worst minor injuries after the plane clipped a fence on takeoff and crash landed, flames engulfing the wreckage.
• The full House January 6th Committee has unanimously referred former Trump advisor Steve Bannon to a full House vote on criminal contempt charges expected on Thursday.
• Japan's Mount Aso has erupted, prompting officials on the southern island of Kyushu to issue warnings for ash and pyroclastic flows near the mountain.
• Congressional Democrats will drop President Biden's plan for universal free community college as Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema continue demanding infrastructure bill cuts.
• The EPA has announced a major new initiative to study and regulate industrial chemicals called PFAS that are increasingly in use by manufacturers that could pollute areas for decades.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

Our old Russian friend and billionaire fixer Oleg Deripaska got a visit from the G-Men today, or at least two of his several US homes did, as the sanctions against the Putin pal oligarch begin to heat up again.

 

FBI agents on Tuesday swarmed the home of Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska in Washington, D.C., an agency spokesperson confirmed to NBC News.

The reason for their presence wasn’t immediately clear. The spokesperson said the agency is conducting “law enforcement activity at the home” but wouldn’t elaborate.

The investigation is being led by federal investigators in New York City, according to two officials briefed on the matter.

A spokeswoman for Deripaska, a billionaire oil tycoon who was placed under U.S. sanctions three years ago, said the FBI also searched a home in New York City. She said both properties belong to Deripaska's relatives.

“The searches are being carried out on the basis of two court orders, connected to U.S. sanctions," the spokeswoman said. "The houses do not belong to Mr Deripaska."

Lawyers for Deripaska did not immediately return requests for comment. Asked about the spokeswoman's claim that the investigation is tied to sanctions, the FBI spokesperson declined to comment.

The 11,000-square-foot home sits on one of the most exclusive blocks in Washington.

Next-door neighbor George Conway, the husband of former President Donald Trump senior counselor Kellyanne Conway, walked over to the house Tuesday afternoon to snap a photo of the law enforcement activity. Conway said he has never seen Deripaska at the home.

Deripaska, who is a longtime associate of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, was among two dozen Russian oligarchs and officials who were sanctioned by the Treasury Department in April 2018.

 

Trump may have pardoned Manafort (he had to, you see) but it doesn't mean Deripaska is off the hook by any means. The Justice Department has waned Oleg for a very long time, and it looks like they're going to get him sooner rather than later.

 

Insurrection Investigation, Con't

The good news is that the January 6th Committee has referred Steve Bannon to the full House of Representatives for criminal contempt and referral to the Department of Justice.

 

The House committee investigating the January 6 US Capitol attack is expected to formally kick off the process to hold Steve Bannon, one of former President Donald Trump's closest allies, in contempt of Congress on Tuesday night when the panel is scheduled to meet and advance a referral to the Justice Department. 

The measure is expected to move to a floor vote without any opposition from the committee members and marks a critical milestone in the investigation as the panel hopes even the remote threat of jail time inspires more Trump-aligned witnesses to cooperate. 

In Tuesday's meeting, the committee will adopt a contempt report, which was released Monday night and outlines the efforts the committee made to get a witness to comply with the subpoena, and the failure by the witness to do so. 

This report is then referred to the House for a vote. If the vote succeeds, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi certifies the report to the United States attorney for the District of Columbia. Under law, this certification then requires the United States attorney to "bring the matter before the grand jury for its action," but the Justice Department will also make its own determinations for prosecution. 

Any individual who is found liable for contempt of Congress is then guilty of a crime that may result in a fine and between one and 12 months imprisonment. But this process is rarely invoked and rarely leads to jail time. 

As severe as a criminal contempt referral sounds, the House's choice to use the Justice Department may be more of a warning shot than a solution. Holding Bannon in criminal contempt through a prosecution could take years, and historically, criminal contempt cases have been derailed by appeals and acquittals.

 

That's the bad news. Nothing's going to happen to Bannon or to any of the other Trump cultists for holding the line. This will be tied up in the courts for years.

 

And the worse news is there's no confirmed US Attorney for DC to prosecute this or any of the January 6th committee cases in federal court.

Senate Republicans are blocking the confirmation of President Joe Biden's pick to oversee the hundreds of prosecutions stemming from the January 6 attack on the Capitol, people familiar with the matter tell Insider.

The Republicans' "hold" on the nomination is not based on any objection to Matt Graves, a former federal prosecutor whom Biden nominated in July to serve as US attorney in Washington, DC. Instead, his nomination "is being used for leverage," Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton told Insider. She declined to specify what Senate Republicans want or which lawmakers are behind the hold.

"We've learned this on condition that we not speak about it specifically, but I can tell you that what we have learned is that the Graves nomination is not being held up for any reason connected to the nomination. And I can also say we do expect approval of this nomination eventually," said Norton, a Democrat who represents the District of Columbia in Congress as a non-voting member.

"'Caught in the fire' is how I would put it," she added, "because it doesn't have anything to do with him."

Sen. Chuck Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, told Insider on Monday evening that he was not aware of the hold.​​

Norton, who recommended Graves to the White House following a fast-tracked search process, said she expects the Senate to confirm him in the "near future" and noted "it's not unusual for senators to put a hold on something in order to make a point or as leverage."

"Importantly, this leverage doesn't have to do with the District of Columbia or with the nominee," Norton said.

"This will go away. It's not related to anything that residents of the District of Columbia have concern about," she added.

A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment.

 

Trump of course continues to burn up the clock from his end, now suing the National Archives to prevent the release of any of his documents. 

Former President Donald Trump on Monday sought to block the release of documents related to the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection to a House committee investigating the attack, challenging President Joe Biden’s initial decision to waive executive privilege.

In a federal lawsuit, Trump said the committee’s August request was “almost limitless in scope,” and sought many records that weren’t connected to the siege. He called it a “vexatious, illegal fishing expedition” that was “untethered from any legitimate legislative purpose,” according to the papers filed in federal court in the District of Columbia.

Trump’s lawsuit was expected, as he had said he would challenge the investigation and at least one ally, Steve Bannon, has defied a subpoena. But the legal challenge went beyond the initial 125 pages of records that Biden recently cleared for release to the committee. The suit, which names the committee as well as the National Archives, seeks to invalidate the entirety of the congressional request, calling it overly broad, unduly burdensome and a challenge to separation of powers. It requests a court injunction to bar the archivist from producing the documents.

In a joint statement late Monday, Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the panel’s vice chairwoman, said they would fight the lawsuit, which they said is “nothing more than an attempt to delay and obstruct” the investigation.

“There’s a long history of the White House accommodating congressional investigative requests when the public interest outweighs other concerns,” Thompson and Cheney said. “It’s hard to imagine a more compelling public interest than trying to get answers about an attack on our democracy and an attempt to overturn the results of an election.”

 

And it will 100% work, because it doesn't matter what Bennie Thompson or Liz Cheney thinks, or what President Biden does, the only thing that matters now is what five of nine Supreme Court justices decide, and they will side with Trump.  Even if the documents do get released, the rest of the committee's work will be tied up in the courts for years.

At this point the most likely outcome of the January 6th Committee is...nothing. No consequences for any of Trump's goons, and especially not for Trump himself.  Maybe a report gets released and the end of next year before the GOP takes over the House and dismantles the committee in January 2023, maybe we never see it.  Maybe the Dems somehow keep control of the House and fight on.

But nobody should honestly be expecting a different outcome at this point. It's wishful thinking.

The Road To Gilead, Con't

We've come a long way down the road towards the end of legalized, safe abortion in the United States, and another milepost on that road whizzed by on Monday as the US Supreme Court agreed to hear the possibility of an expedited challenge to Texas's abortion ban.

The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to a request from abortion-rights advocates and providers to quickly consider taking up their challenge of a restrictive Texas law that bans most abortions after as early as six weeks of pregnancy.

The petitioners last month had submitted the unusual request for the Supreme Court to hear the case before final judgment in lower courts.

If the court agrees to consider the case on an expedited basis, it could accept briefs, hear arguments and deliver a ruling much faster than if the case had to wind through the normal court channels. Though the case is pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, arguments would not be held until December at the earliest, the petitioners said.

The high court directed the respondents in the case to file a response by noon on Thursday. That’s the same time Texas is due to file its reply in a separate challenge of the law, which the Department of Justice brought to the Supreme Court earlier Monday.

A pivotal abortion case is already set for oral argument on Dec. 1. Proponents of abortion rights fear the court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, could weaken or abolish decades-old precedent protecting the right to an abortion before fetal viability.

 

I mean "not saying no outright" is a good thing, but then again an expedited case means this court could get to kill abortion in Texas far more quickly, leaving the road open to a couple dozen more red states filing Texas "fetus bounty hunter" laws.

Either way, the Mississippi case that the court is hearing in six weeks will almost certainly be the beginning of the end. What I expect is that the expedited case will be taken up and then rendered moot while the Mississippi case is being heard, and I fully expect a national ruling allowing states to invalidate abortion (with individual states having already passed such laws in anticipation).

November 2022 is going to be a far more fraught political environment than it is now, and that's not a good thing.

Last Call For The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

The more you realize that the GOP is the party of white supremacy, and that everyone still involved with supporting the party is a white supremacist, full stop, the more the actions of the GOP make sense. And as much as candidates like Glenn Youngkin in Virginia try to convince voters that he's not in the party of white supremacists, the actual, avowed white supremacists keep showing up at his campaign events to support him.

A routine campaign stop for Virginia gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin turned chaotic on Saturday night after the candidate's team was forced to boot a local Republican leader and apparent white nationalist from the event, causing a scene that a spokesperson called "antithetical" to the Republican hopeful's message.

The incident happened just before Youngkin was slated to give a stump speech to a crowd of "Latinos for Youngkin" at a local restaurant, when campaign officials approached a man, named Fredy Burgos, who was wearing both a red pro-Trump hat emblazoned with "Build the Wall" and a pin promoting white nationalist and Unite the Right rally attendee Nicholas Fuentes.

Burgos is a longtime far-right activist and former local Republican party official who made waves during the Trump years with a series of bombastic statements that earned him plenty of enemies in local conservative circles. The Washington Post, reporting on a 2018 drive to oust him from his post on the Fairfax County Republican Party committee, wrote that he was a "verbal bomb-thrower whose attacks against Muslims, immigrants and others have turned off moderates."

He even appeared alongside several of Fuentes' white nationalist followers — known online as Groypers — at a Loudoun County School Board meeting recently, which has become a local flashpoint in the nationwide right-wing campaign to ban anti-racist lessons in public schools.

As Saturday's Youngkin event was getting underway, Burgos, who sported a thick mustache and vintage suit vest for the occasion, made a short-lived walk around the inside of the venue, only to be forced out after Salon inquired about his pin and associations.

Notably, Burgos said he only became a Youngkin supporter recently, after Virginia state Senator-turned-"toxic [Youngkin] surrogate" Amanda Chase lost her bid to Youngkin. Prior to the loss, she had taken to calling herself "Trump in heels."

Despite Burgos being booted from the event Saturday, he told Salon he remains a steadfast supporter of the candidate and that he hopes to appear at future rallies.

"I'm a supporter of the ticket," Burgos told Salon after being removed from the "Latinos for Youngkin" event. "They are concerned about the [Build the Wall] hat. I think that they have a problem thinking that other people may have a problem with the hat."

 

Burgos will be back at Youngkin's rallies, because Youngkin needs the votes of Burgos and other Virginia white supremacists. You'd better 100% believe that if Youngkin wins, he'll be implementing the GOP agenda against women, Black folk, LGBTQ+, Latino, and reality.

The Manchin On The Hill, Con't

President Manchin continues to slash the Build Back Better plan, this week demanding an end to extending the child tax credit for the vast majority of American families.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) has told the White House the child tax credit must include a firm work requirement and family income cap in the $60,000 range, people familiar with the matter tell Axios.

Why it matters: While Manchin’s demands would dramatically weaken one of President Biden’s signature programs to help working families, they also would reduce the package’s overall costs.That would make it easier for the pivotal senator to support a final package, potentially higher than Manchin's previous $1.5 trillion top line. 

At the same time, progressives would have a hard time accepting the changes Manchin is demanding.They'd also fundamentally alter a program the president funded for one year in the $1.9 COVID-19 relief package passed in March. 

Manchin's office declined to comment on Axios' report.

The big picture: Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) held a call with House centrist lawmakers last Wednesday in which the senators detailed some of their specific concerns about Biden’s $3.5 trillion social spending plan. They also discussed the White House’s decision to link the package to approval of the separate $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill — a demand of House progressives. 

Sinema told lawmakers she will not vote for the social spending plan until the House passes the infrastructure bill, according to Reuters. Neither Manchin nor Sinema endorsed Biden's compromise price for the social spending plan in the $1.9 trillion to $2.2 trillion range. Manchin also continues to privately tell colleagues the president’s Clean Electricity Performance Program, a cornerstone of Democrats' plan to achieve zero-carbon electricity, is a non-starter.

Go deeper: While Manchin has previously indicated he wanted progressive to pick one of Biden's three programs to help working families, he now seems more favorably disposed to policies that target families with young children in need. In addition to the pared-back CTC, Manchin is open to Biden's $450 billion plan to subsidize day care and offer free universal preschool, the people familiar with the matter told Axios. Manchin, however, wants to impose stricter income caps on the day care subsidies while keeping preschool free for everyone, as it already is in West Virginia. 

The senator is less interested in the $225 billion to $450 billion paid family leave proposal or $400 billion for a new program to provide elder care, according to people familiar with the matter.

 

So right now we have a single US senator (or two) making the decisions for 100% of Americans, and the trajectory is permanently in a downward spiral. Every week Manchin and Sinema make a new demand, Democrats "scramble" to cut the bill, and then the goalposts get moved the following week.

The point of course, and I have been telling you guys this for months now, is for the pair to kill both bills in a way that they can blame Joe Biden and "progressives". They're getting closer and closer to that point with every massive cut to the bill. Eventually the response from Rep. Pramila Jayapal is going to be "Fuck Joe Manchin" and the game ends with the "moderates" scoring a decisive and historic win, and we all get nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

Now, here's the truly perverse part.

No matter how much Manchin and/or Sinema pare down the Build Back Better plan, no Republican will vote for it, no Republican will allow cloture on it, and no Republican will pay a price for blocking the bill during the final vote. They are the real villains here.

The Democrats though? They will be decimated, just like in 2010 and 2014. The end result will be most likely be Republican control of Congress.

Change my mind, please, because we're heading for the abyss here and there's little chance of coming back in my lifetime if we crumple here.

Insurrection Investigation, Con't

 It's good to know GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger isn't ruling out a January 6th Commission subpoena for Donald Trump, but nobody honestly things that will happen, for reasons I've stated multiple times in the past.

 

A Republican on the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol on Sunday did not rule out issuing a subpoena for former President Donald Trump as it seeks to obtain information from his allies. 

"I don't know. I think if I had that answer now, I'd probably go in, you know, and not be able to see all the pieces," Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger told CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union" when asked if the committee could do a thorough investigation without subpoenaing Trump. "If we subpoena all of a sudden the former president, we know that's going to become kind of a circus so that's not necessarily something we want to do up front. But if he has pieces of information we need, we certainly will." 

The House has issued subpoenas to allies of the former President, including former administration official Kash Patel and former chief of staff Mark Meadows. The committee announced last week it was moving forward to hold Trump ally Steve Bannon in criminal contempt for refusing to comply with a subpoena. 

Asked Friday what his message is to those who defy subpoenas from the January 6 select committee, President Joe Biden told CNN's Kaitlan Collins, "I hope that the committee goes after them and holds them accountable." 

"I do, yes," Biden said when asked if he thinks they should be prosecuted by the Department of Justice. 

But DOJ spokesperson Anthony Coley said Friday that the department will "make its own independent decisions in all prosecutions based solely on the facts and the law. Period. Full stop."

 

Trump certainly possesses information, but the Commission will never subpoena him. The second he does, his domestic terrorist cultists will immediately try to harm or kill people across the country in a mass orgy of violence. 

Should they do it anyway?  Of course. Trump needs to be dragged in front of the cameras and fried like a cheese curd. But it won't happen.

People will be hurt or killed if he does. It really is that simple.

 

StupidiNews!

• Security forces in Haiti continue to investigate 16 kidnapped American and one Canadian Christian missionaries attributed to gang members in Port-au-Prince over the weekend.
• Former Trump Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Clark may be facing disbarment and criminal charges for his role in Trump's "soft coup" in 2020.
• US oil futures have topped $85 a barrel as skyrocketing demand for the global economy re-emerging from the pandemic has driven prices to their highest level in nearly a decade.
• Continuing military tensions between India and China over a key Himalayas pass show no sign of resolution as Beijing is demanding Delhi withdraw troops from the area.
• Discovery of fecal remains from nearly 3,000 years ago reveals Iron age Europeans consumed beer, blue cheese, and plenty of cereal grains.

Last Call For The Big Lie, Con't

Donald Trump now DEMANDING!!!11!!1! a new election in Arizona, or better yet, for the state to just declare him the 2020 winner, or else.

 

Former President Donald Trump dropped yet another absolutely bonkers statement about the 2020 results in Arizona, demanding an election redo or that he be declared the winner.

Trump has continued to cling to the big lie, and has embraced the widely-mocked Republican push for auditing the 2020 election results.

A Pima County, Arizona official said after the Maricopa County audit, “it has done a lot of damage to voter confidence across the state and across the country.”

Trump is now glomming onto claims of election fraud in Pima County, declaring falsely once again that “the election was Rigged and Stolen from the Republican Party in 2020, and in particular, its Presidential Candidate.”

He claimed that the Justice Department had this information since last November and didn’t act. You may remember that in December, Attorney General Bill Barr unequivocally stated, “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election.”

Trump concluded his statement by declaring, “Either a new Election should immediately take place or the past Election should be decertified and the Republican candidate declared the winner.”

 

It's ridiculous, and before you say "It's Trump, it's not our problem" understand that as long as he commands an entire political party and tens of millions of voters, he very much is our problem.

If he's now demanding elections to be overturned, flat out, either Arizona's GOP will do so, or they will at least try.

Eventually, somebody in a red state is going to actually do it.

School Of Hard-Right Knocks, Con't

I know that like in California's recall election where the Democratic governor was "doomed", it seems to me that Terry McAuliffe is suffering from the same level of "doom" in next month's gubernatorial race, likely because Virginia Republicans keep "helping" Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin like this.

 

Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) encouraged a group of students to go against their school’s policy and not wear masks.

“If nobody in Rappahannock complies [with the mask mandate], they can’t stop everyone,” Good said to a government class of 20 students Thursday, Rappahannock News reported. “If I was ya'll, I’d say none of ya'll wear a mask. What are they gonna do? They’re still going to have school.”

The state of Virginia mandates that every school must require masks regardless of students' vaccination status. The meeting between the class and Good had to take place outside because Good refused to wear a mask in the school.

Along with discouraging masks, Good claimed that masks are ineffective and that coronavirus vaccines are more dangerous for teenagers than the virus itself.

The Food and Drug Administration has deemed the vaccine safe for those above the age of 12.

“Being able to expose students to different world views is important on both sides,” Rappahannock County High School Principal Carlos Seward, who was at the event, said, according to the local outlet. “We don’t endorse one way or the other.”

Other topics discussed were Good’s anti-abortion stance, his thoughts about colleges being taken over by “the left,” his anti-critical race theory position and his support for video cameras in classrooms.

Superintendent Shannon Grimsley told the local outlet she believes the students will not listen to Good’s remarks regarding violating the face mask policy.

“Our students and families are very smart, competent individuals who have seen in real time the impact of increasing chances of being quarantined or causing others to be quarantined, as well as the potential of losing privileges, such as the ability to host events and fun activities should numbers increase too much,” she said.

However, the school previously had trouble with compliance and said events would get canceled if coronavirus cases didn’t go down. There are currently 54 students and staff in quarantine.

 

The conventional wisdom bleats are all about how "concerned, angry parents" are going to tip the election -- and the country in 2022 -- to the Republicans. Several dozen students in quarantine, but an elected official is telling kids don't wear masks when there's a potentially lethal disease going around.

That seems like the party that cares about kids, right? 

 

Parents should totally vote for them.

Sunday Long Read: The Man Who Hated Hillary

Tech guru and self-proclaimed "ethical hacker" Robert Willis has revealed himself to be "Hacker X" in our Sunday Long Read from Ars Technica's Ax Sharma, the man behind the domestic disinformation empire on Facebook and other social media to destroy Hillary Clinton in 2016.

 

This is the story of the mastermind behind one of the largest "fake news" operations in the US.

For two years, he ran websites and Facebook groups that spread bogus stories, conspiracy theories, and propaganda. Under him was a dedicated team of writers and editors paid to produce deceptive content—from outright hoaxes to political propaganda—with the supreme goal of tipping the 2016 election to Donald Trump.

Through extensive efforts, he built a secret network of self-reinforcing sites from the ground up. He devised a strategy that got prominent personalities—including Trump—to retweet misleading claims to their followers. And he fooled unwary American citizens, including the hacker's own father, into regarding fake news sources more highly than the mainstream media.

Pundits and governments just might have given Russia too much credit, he says, when a whole system of manipulating people's perception and psychology was engineered and operated from within the US.

"Russia played such a minor role that they weren't even a blip on the radar," the hacker told me recently. "This was normal for politicians, though… if you say a lie enough times, everyone will believe it."

Previously dubbed "Hacker X," he's now ready to reveal who he is—and how he did it.

The fake news impresario who has now decided to break his silence is "ethical hacker" Robert Willis.

Some in the information security community might know "Rob" today as an active member who speaks at conferences and works with the Sakura Samurai ethical hacking group. (The Sakura Samurai have, on many occasions, responsibly disclosed vulnerabilities in the computer systems of government and private entities. I have previously interacted with Rob on about two occasions, minimally, when I had questions regarding Sakura Samurai's vulnerability writeups.)

But back in 2015, Willis was just another hacker looking for an IT job. He had already received one job offer—but still had an interview scheduled at one final company.

"I was thinking of not showing up to the interview," he told me. "I had, after all, just committed to another company."

That final company was opaque—it would not reveal either its name or the actual job duties until Willis showed up in person. But the opacity was itself intriguing. Willis decided to do the interview.

"I showed up at the location, which was a large corporate building. I was given directions to wait downstairs until I was collected. The secretiveness was intriguing. It may have turned some people off, but I love an adventure. I had not been given any information on the job other than that they were very excited, because to find someone like me was very rare—I had tons of random, overlapping, highly technical skills from years of wearing multiple hats at smaller private companies."

Even before his ethical hacking days at Sakura Samurai, Willis had gained an extensive technical skill set in networking, web applications, hacking, security, search engine optimization (SEO), graphic design, entrepreneurship, and management. He knew how to take advantage of search engine algorithms, once, he said, getting a random phrase to the No. 1 spot on one engine within 24 hours. "Many will say this is/was impossible, but I have the receipts," he said, "and so do other credible people."

At the interview site, a man came down to get him, and they rode the elevator to a floor with a nearly empty office. Inside waited a woman beside three chairs. They all sat. His hosts finally revealed the name of their company: Koala Media. The moment felt like an orchestrated Big Reveal.

"I wasn't scared but excited at how crazy this was already turning out [to be]," Willis told me. "I listened. I was told that there were big plans for the office I was sitting in and that they had already hired the initial writers and editor for the new operation."

The interviewers at the company told Willis that "everything was to be built with security in mind—at extreme levels."

Should he get the job, his primary role would be to rapidly expand a single, popular website already owned by Koala Media. For this, they needed someone with Willis' diverse skill set.

Then the interview took a political turn. "They told me that they were against big companies and big government because they are basically the same thing," Willis said. They said they had readers on the right and the left. They said they were about "freedom." That sounded OK to Willis, who describes himself as a social liberal and fiscal conservative—"very punk rock, borderline anarchist."

Then the interviewers told him, "If you work for us, you can help stop Hillary Clinton."

"I hated the establishment, Republicans, and Democrats, and Hillary was the target because she was as establishment as it got and was the only candidate that was all but guaranteed to be running on the main ticket in the future 2016 cycle," said Willis. "If I were to choose a lesser evil at the time, it would have, without a doubt, been the Republican Party, since I had moved to the new city due to the Democrats literally destroying my previous home state. It felt like good revenge."

Willis says he had no indication that the company that was about to recruit him was extreme or would become so in the future. In his perception, the company was just "investigative" with regard to its journalism.

When Koala offered him the job, he took it.

 

My issues are of course manifold: perhaps an avowed master of disinformation, gleefully taking credit for the operation against Hillary in 2015 and 2016 and doing everything he can in the article to downplay the documented Russian Fancy Bear operation and refusing to cleanly identify his employers?

He may not be telling the full truth as recounted here.

The one thing I do believe is his incandescent hatred of Hillary Clinton. That part I don't question.

Last Call For Retribution Execution, Con't

Michael Wolff's new book on Jeffrey Epstein basically says Epstein was going to cut a deal with prosecutors by flipping on Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, and then, well, you know.

Jeffrey Epstein believed he could make a deal with prosecutors by revealing secrets about former presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, according to a new book by Michael Wolff, reported by The Daily Mail.

The disgraced financier and convicted sex offender was arrested in July 2019 on sex trafficking charges, and died a month later in his jail cell by suicide.

In his new book, "Too Famous: The Rich, the Powerful, the Wishful, the Damned, the Notorious - Twenty Years of Columns, Essays and Reporting," Michael Wolff reveals Epstein's thinking in his final few months.

According to the book, Epstein believed that The Justice Department had arrested him, under the instruction of then-President Donald Trump, because they wanted information on Bill Clinton, who had flown on his private jet multiple times.

"The White House, through the Justice Department, was looking to press a longtime Republican obsession, and Trump ace-in-the-hole, and get Epstein to flip and reveal the sex secrets of Bill Clinton," Wolff wrote, according to The Daily Mail.

Epstein also believed New York prosecutors who were investigating Trump's business affairs might have ordered his arrest to "pressure him to flip on Trump," Wolff reportedly suggests in the book.

Wolff said that there were "many likely holes in these theories," but Epstein believed that there could have been "a deal to be made," The Daily Mail said.

Wolff revealed that months before Epstein's death, he visited the billionaire at his infamous $75 million mansion in New York City, The Daily Mail said.

During Wolff's visit, Steve Bannon reportedly called Epstein on the phone and told him that he had feared him during Donald Trump's presidential campaign because he thought the financier knew secrets about Trump.

"You were the only person I was afraid of during the campaign," Bannon told Epstein.

"As well you should have been," Epstein reportedly replied.

 

Would be nice if one of these enterprising journalist types found out the actual truth.

The Good Package, Con't

President Joe Manchin is making more cuts to the Build Back Better Program, this week eliminating the renewable energy climate change provisions in order to protect West Virginia coal and gas barons.

The most powerful part of President Biden’s climate agenda — a program to rapidly replace the nation’s coal- and gas-fired power plants with wind, solar and nuclear energy — will likely be dropped from the massive budget bill pending in Congress, according to congressional staffers and lobbyists familiar with the matter.

Senator Joe Manchin III, the Democrat from coal-rich West Virginia whose vote is crucial to passage of the bill, has told the White House that he strongly opposes the clean electricity program, according to three of those people. As a result, White House staffers are now rewriting the legislation without that climate provision, and are trying to cobble together a mix of other policies that could also cut emissions.

A White House spokesman, Vedant Patel, declined to comment on the specifics of the bill, saying, “the White House is laser focused on advancing the president’s climate goals and positioning the United States to meet its emission targets in a way that grows domestic industries and good jobs.”

A spokeswoman for Mr. Manchin, Sam Runyon, wrote in an email, “Senator Manchin has clearly expressed his concerns about using taxpayer dollars to pay private companies to do things they’re already doing. He continues to support efforts to combat climate change while protecting American energy independence and ensuring our energy reliability.”

West Virginia’s other senator, Republican Shelley Moore Capito, said she was “vehemently opposed” to the clean electricity program because it is “designed to ultimately eliminate coal and natural gas from our electricity mix, and would be absolutely devastating for my state.”

The $150 billion clean electricity program was the muscle behind Mr. Biden’s ambitious climate agenda. It would reward utilities that switched from burning fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, and penalize those that do not.

Experts have said that the policy over the next decade would drastically reduce the greenhouse gases that are heating the planet and that it would be the strongest climate change policy ever enacted by the United States.

“This is absolutely the most important climate policy in the package,” said Leah Stokes, an expert on climate policy, who has been advising Senate Democrats on how to craft the program. “We fundamentally need it to meet our climate goals. That’s just the reality. And now we can’t. So this is pretty sad.”

The setback also means that President Biden will have a weakened hand when he travels to Glasgow in two weeks for a major United Nations climate change summit. He had hoped to point to the clean electricity program as evidence that the United States, which is historically the largest emitter of planet-warming pollution, was serious about changing course and leading a global effort to fight climate change. Mr. Biden has vowed that the United States will cut its emissions 50 percent from 2005 levels by 2030.

The rest of the world remains deeply wary of the country’s commitment to tackling global warming after four years in which former President Donald J. Trump openly mocked the science of climate change and enacted policies that encouraged more drilling and burning of fossil fuels.

 

President Manchin has spoken, so shall it be. You knew that when he was elected to lead both the Senate and the White House in November, I don't know why anyone thought the Biden plan's death by a thousand Manchin statements was ever going to play out differently.

Don't say you weren't warned.

The Return Of Kynect...For Now

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear has kept a major campaign promise: the return of the state's wildly successful Obamacare health exchange Kynect, eliminated by previous Gov. Matt Bevin because it was so successful and Bevin needed to prove that Kynect was a failure. When Bevin couldn't, he just killed it. Now Beshear has brought it back.

 

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, with help from U.S. Health and Human Services Secrertary Xavier Becerra, rolled out the reopening Friday of Kynect, the state-based health insurance exchange.

Friday was the start of open enrollment for existing recipients of Medicaid, the government health plan for low-income people and those with disabilities. Open enrollment for private health plans on Kentucky’s exchange is from Nov. 1 to Jan. 15.

The exchange was started by Beshear’s father, former Gov. Steve Beshear, under the federal Affordable Care but was shuttered in favor of the federal health exchange by his successor, former Gov. Matt Bevin.

“I’m really excited about today. Kynect was the gold standard,” Andy Beshear said in a Zoom news conference with Becerra. “Health care coverage is neither red nor blue, Democrat or Republican. It is necessary for survival in a pandemic and it is necessary for Kentucky to thrive.”

Becerra praised Kynect, calling it a “Kentucky-made, Kentucky-driven and Kentucky-based product” and that no one knows better the health care needs of Kentuckians than Beshear. He labeled Beshear a “true champion of health care.”

Beshear said the goal is to get health insurance to 280,000 uninsured Kentuckians.

Beshear announced last year that he was bringing back Kynect, the online health exchange where people can shop for and buy health insurance, as well as sign up for Medicaid.

Kentucky received national praise for the program that brought about one of the lowest rates of uninsured in the country. Bevin, though, said it was too costly and redundant of the federal website to buy health insurance. He stopped it in 2017.

Beshear said Friday that Kentuckians now can browse plans and explore benefits at kynect.ky.gov that take effect Jan. 1, 2022.

Compared with current federal exchange offerings, Kentuckians will benefit in 2022 from more health care insurance providers and the opportunity to tailor coverage to address their unique needs, said Beshear.

He said the change is expected to save Kentuckians at least $15 million a year.

 

I'd take advantage of it while you can,  I fully expect the KY GOP supermajority to move Kynect under the aegis of Attorney General Daniel Cameron's office in January and then dismantle it in the spring, but it will be nice for a couple of months to live in a state when not everyone in political power wants poor people to die in order to stop burdening the commonwealth.

 

Don't expect Kynect to last more than a few months. Use it if you need to.

Last Call For A Political Assassination In Britain

Long-time Tory MP Sir David Amess has died from stab woulds he received from a 25-year-old suspect in Essex on Thursday as he was meeting with his constituents, according to the BBC.

Conservative MP Sir David Amess has died after being stabbed at his constituency surgery in Essex.

Police said a 25-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of murder after the attack at a church in Leigh-on-Sea.

They said they recovered a knife and were not looking for anyone else in connection with the incident.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson said "our hearts are full of shock and sadness" at the loss of "one of the kindest" people in politics.

Sir David, 69, had been an MP since 1983 and was married with five children.

Mr Johnson said Sir David had an "outstanding record of passing laws to help the most vulnerable".

"David was a man who believed passionately in this country and in its future. We've lost today a fine public servant and a much-loved friend and colleague," he said.

Health Secretary Sajid Javid said he was "a great man, a great friend, and a great MP, killed while fulfilling his democratic role".

Sir David, who represented Southend West, was holding a constituency surgery - where voters can meet their MP and discuss concerns - at Belfairs Methodist Church in Eastwood Road North.

Essex Police said they received reports of a stabbing shortly after 12:05 BST and found a man injured.

He was treated by emergency services but died at the scene.

 

Not much to say here other than political violence in America that we've seen over the last five years has in no way been limited to the US. 

MP Jo Cox was murdered five years ago in the same situation.

Politics are dangerous.