Last Call For Israeli Getting Serious Out There, Con't

Republicans have been falsely accusing President Biden of "funding Hamas's attack on Israel through Iran" all weekend, because they are suddenly very concerned with the security of the Jewish state. Secretary of State Tony Blinken called bullshit:

In response to this weekend's expansive attack, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to "destroy Hamas" and signaled that the country's forces will soon go on the offensive as the IDF evacuates civilians living near the border with Gaza.

Blinken said Sunday that the U.S. would stand behind Israel as it did whatever necessary to ensure "this doesn't repeat itself."

"I don't want to get ahead of what Israel may or may not do when it comes to Gaza," he said when asked whether Israel could control the situation if it invaded. "No country should be expected to live with the fear, the possibility and now the actuality of terrorists crossing a border, coming into people's homes, gunning them down in the street, dragging them across the border and making hostages of them. That is intolerable for any democracy. It's intolerable for Israel."

Republicans have criticized the Biden administration approach toward Iran, Hamas' largest sponsor, contending that the White House in effect enabled the attack and emboldened the extremists by facilitating Iran's access to sanctioned finances for humanitarian expenditures as part of a separate deal to free American detainees.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said in a statement that the money transfer was a sign of "appeasement." Other critics said it would free up Iran to better financially support Hamas.

Blinken, on "This Week," pushed back.

"There's a long relationship between Iran and Hamas. In fact, Hamas wouldn't be Hamas without the support that it's gotten over many years from Iran. We haven't yet seen direct evidence that Iran was behind this particular attack or involved," he said.

"It's unfortunate that some are, in effect, saying things that may be motivated by politics at a time when so many lives have been lost and Israel remains under attack," he continued, noting the funds are held in a restricted account monitored by the U.S. Treasury Department.

"By the way, not a single dollar from that account has actually been spent to date," Blinken asserted, adding, "So, some who are advancing this false narrative -- they're either misinformed or they're misinforming. And either way, it's wrong."

 

Mysteriously, obviously constructed disinformation is spreading all over Twitter/X/Whatever.

 

A doctored White House press release posted online falsely claimed that the Biden administration had authorized $8 billion in emergency aid to Israel on Saturday. The fact that it was faked didn't stop it from being posted across the internet and rising to the top of Google search results.

The faked document is one of the most far-reaching instances of misinformation to come out of the most recent violent conflict between Hamas and Israel, fooling several online publications into writing full articles about the fake news, which are still surfacing prominently in online search results.

The faked document appears to be an edited version of President Joe Biden's July memo announcing $400 million in aid to Ukraine. Despite images of the faked document appearing on social media, it was never published on the White House website or in the government's Federal Register of presidential documents.

The faked document first started appearing on social media accounts Saturday morning. Around noon on Saturday, a collection of verified accounts on X, formerly Twitter, began disseminating the fake release. Verified accounts are eligible for monetization on the platform.

Posts sharing the faked document and its claims, many of which are still up, have accrued hundreds of thousands of views on the platform.

Several of the posts on X now have "community notes" attached to them clarifying that the document is faked, but many more posts that are still up have no such clarification.

Under Elon Musk's ownership, Twitter has scaled back its operations which would have attempted to moderate misinformation on the platform.

As the fake release spread on X, it was reposted to other social media websites like TikTok, but on a much smaller scale. X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

 

 It's all very, very bonkers, but of course the Netanyahu administration hates President Biden. Of course, this is convenient for Israel here.

Expect a lot more of this.

Beshear Audacity Of It All, Con't

 As we close in on the final month before Kentucky goes to the polls to determine whether or not Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear gets to keep his job, a new Emerson College poll finds the incumbent with a huge lead going into the 30-day mark.

 

A new poll from Emerson College and Fox 56 shows Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear with a commanding 16-point lead over Republican nominee attorney general Daniel Cameron.

Out of 450 registered Kentucky voters polled Oct. 1-3, 49% told the independent, nonpartisan pollster they would vote for Beshear if an election between him and Cameron were held today. 33% said they would vote for Cameron. 13% of the respondents were undecided, and 5% said they’d vote for “someone else” despite there being no one else on the ballot.

With 450 registered voters surveyed, the margin of error on the results is +/-4.6%.

The 16-point lead is the largest in any publicly released poll, by a wide margin. Polls conducted from June to late September showed Beshear with anywhere from a 10-point lead to mid-single digits. A poll recently released by the conservative group Club For Growth showed Cameron down six percentage points to Beshear but gaining on the governor in the month of September.

Elections analysis website fivethirtyeight.com gives Emerson College an “A-” rating as a pollster.

Beshear’s campaign has outspent Cameron’s significantly throughout the general election season. Even with multiple political action committees (PACs) supporting Cameron, the amount of pro-Beshear advertisements on television thus far this month has outnumbered Cameron and groups supporting him. During the first full week of October, $1.8 million was spent on ads supporting Beshear compared to roughly $600,000 on ads for Cameron.

Unlike in 2019 — when Beshear defeated controversial former GOP governor Matt Bevin by a razor-thin 0.4 percentage point, 5,000-vote margin — there is no third-party candidate on the ballot this year. In 2019, Libertarian candidate John Hicks received 2% of the vote.

The responses to the poll roughly match up with Kentucky voters’ political behavior in a couple key ways: a majority voted for former Republican president Donald Trump in 2020, and most of them do not like current Democratic President Joe Biden. 55% said they voted for Trump in 2020 while 32% said they voted for Biden — Trump won that election 62-36.

In Kentucky, roughly 46% of registered voters are Republican, 44% are registered Democrat and a little more than 10% are registered as something else, according to State Board of Elections data from September.

However, the responses indicate the population surveyed was registered Democrat at a much lower rate than Kentucky voters on the whole and registered as independent at a much higher rate than the commonwealth’s voters. 31% said they were Democrats, 47% said they were Republicans and 22% said they were Independent or “other” when asked about their party registration.

 

Oversampling of independents isn't a huge deal in a state where basically one in five Democrats are Joe Manchin. If anything, it favors the huge lead.for Beshear.

 

People like the guy. He's been a good governor, he's personable and charismatic, his dad Steve was governor for eight years and like his father, Andy won because the Republican running for reelection was an asshole (back then it was Ernie Fletcher and his state hiring scandal).

Then again, Matt Bevin surprised everyone in 2015 when what the pollsters said was a big Jack Conway win turned into a nine-point loss, so badly called that it spelled the end of the state's biggest polling firm at the time.

So yeah, I'm taking an entire salt mine with these results. Beshear needs to run like he's nine points down, because for all we know, he is.

Sunday Long Read: Pool Fools

Devin Friedman wanted a pool. The pool contractor wanted him to pay by app, in this case, mobile banking app, Zelle. And in our Sunday Long Read this week, we find out how Devin and his wife spent $31,500 on a pool that wasn't a pool, but a scam.

 

I was trying to reach Gary Kruglitz, the proprietor of Royal Palace Pools and Spas. Gary cuts a certain figure. Just a hair over 6 feet tall, wears a mustache, square wire-rimmed bifocal glasses, thin short-sleeved dress shirts through which it is occasionally possible to glimpse just the hint of nipple when the lighting is right. He has an unusually high voice for a man his size, as if a Muppet crawled down his throat one night and couldn't get out again. I wouldn't say Gary is perplexed by this modern world we find ourselves living in as much as he might not be aware it exists. Sometimes when you talk to him, he'll look up from his papers, turn in your direction, and blink, like a bird that has heard something in the underbrush.

Gary — I changed his name so I could be as honest about him and his nipples as possible — spends his days working out of his pool warehouse, in an office covered desk-to-credenza in product manuals and spa brochures and invoices produced in gold-, pink-, and white-triplicate. A man trapped in the amber of another era, the type of guy who answers his phone yellllow and says bye now when he hangs up. But at this moment, Gary was not answering his phone at all. And I was desperate to reach him, because my wife and I had paid him a deposit of $31,500 to build us a pool, and he had apparently disappeared off the face of the earth.

"I'm sorry, Gary is not available right now," said Cheryl when I phoned that morning.

As best I could tell, there were three women who worked at Royal Palace Pools. Cheryl, Cheryl, and Sheryl. (Could be wrong on that.) The Cheryls didn't have offices. They stood point at the front of the store, behind the glass cases where the chlorine tablets and pool thermometers are displayed. There was a rumor that one of the Cheryls — Sheryl — was Gary's wife, but I couldn't imagine Gary making love, or having breakfast each morning with someone in his home. I believed the likelier scenario was that each night when the Cheryls went home, Gary climbed into an empty Jacuzzi shell with a bag of Funyuns and a worry-worn pad of invoices that served as his transitional object, pulled the thermal cover over himself, and waited in the dark with his eyes open until he could go back to the office. Regardless, if you wanted to get in touch with him, there was going to be at least one Cheryl between you and Gary.

"Do you know where he is?" I said. "This is urgent."

"Um. And who is this?" said Cheryl.

I gave her my name and her tone changed a bit.

"I see," she said tightly. "Well, I'll tell him that you called. Again."

"Please do," I said, trying to sound both grateful and angry. Then I hung up.

It's true that my wife and I had been calling Gary a lot. About a year and a half prior, we'd walked into his office in the Berkshires, in Massachusetts — home to white folks who love the Boston Pops, farm to table, and Lyme disease — and signed a contract for Gary to build a pool in our backyard. It made me feel a little bit like an asshole to be honest, the idea of having a pool. Just the rich-person-ness of it. But what is life if not a long march toward losing all your morals and shame. And thanks to the support of my friends and family, I was able to bury my feelings deep inside and become invested in the idea of having a pool. A pool could be evidence that my life hadn't amounted to nothing. When I found myself at a party with intimidating people, I would sometimes say to myself, I am a person with a swimming pool, so I could believe I had the same right to exist as anyone else. And people would have to be friends with me, right? Because who doesn't want a friend with a pool? It would be like when Jeff Allen's mom used to let him have pool parties at his house in eighth grade. Sure, after everyone ate all the grilled cheeses his mom had cut into triangles and sneaked shots of vodka and then thrown up in the bushes, they all left and didn't invite him to come along. But wasn't that better than sitting at home alone on a Friday night, which was probably what Jeff would have been doing otherwise? Wasn't that a win?

(Side note: Jeff grew up to be a heavy Facebook poster who writes screeds about how if people are so sure a man has a right to marry a man, then shouldn't a man have the right to marry a dog? He lives in Tennessee now with his wife, Krystal, whom he proposed to by having a trained dolphin swim up to her strapped with an engagement ring. Some people stay true to themselves.)

Originally, the pool work was supposed to commence in April 2020. But obviously that didn't happen, because that was when everyone was sealed in their homes rinsing groceries in a solution of three parts water to one part Clorox. But now it was 2021. The construction trade was beginning to lurch back to life. There were delays, of course. We were in the throes of the great pandemic renovation boom, and there weren't enough workers or materials. Container ships were lined up for miles at the ports, and the cost of lumber had become something normal people talked about. The New York Times was publishing hate-reads about people from cities moving to places like the Berkshires and building swimming pools and bringing their obnoxious, demanding, me-first city culture with them.

And so that March, we began calling Gary to say me first. Can you ensure we'll be first in line once the ground thaws? He'd try, he said. We took that as a promise.

We called him in April. We called him in May. The further into summer we got, the less responsive he became. If you've hired a contractor, this will sound familiar. Why answer the phone just to get yelled at by some people from a New York Times hate-read? June crept along, and Gary went completely dark. We were anxious. We felt wronged. We let our feelings be known: Gary, and here I'm paraphrasing our email, we Karen-ed our way into being first in line to build a pool in the spring and now here it is in the middle of summer and we literally cannot get ahold of you.

Finally, on July 5, we received a response. Gary emailed us that he was ready to begin. He said he could start within the week and reminded us that, according to the contract, we owed him $30K-plus before construction commenced. We checked the contract and saw that he was right. He sent another email with instructions for payment. Because a lot of bank branches were still closed, and the crew wanted their money, he requested that we transfer the money via Zelle. But because there are daily Zelle limits, he said, we should just transfer a little bit every day.

We Zelle-ed $3,500 on the 6th, $3,500 on the 7th, $5,000 on the 8th and again on the 9th. Now that he was getting his money, Gary was more responsive. Do you have all the materials you were waiting for, we asked in an email. Yep, mostly. Can you start next week? Yes. The emails were strange. We sometimes had to read them aloud: What if you put a period here, would it make sense then? What if there were a verb? But Gary's emails had always been weird. After all, you don't go into the Cheryls business because you care about the syntax in your electronic correspondence. This man ran his company from an AOL account, which I didn't even know you could still have.

After we Zelled more money, we got worried. What if Gary said he never got his deposit? We asked him to send us a signed receipt for the $23,000-ish we'd sent. Certainly, he said, I'm on a job, give me a few minutes. A few minutes later we got a signed receipt from Royal Palace Pools and Spas, printed on letterhead and photographed. All we had to do was send another $3,500 on the 12th and another $5,000 the 13th, his start date. If things went our way, the construction would be finished in a few weeks.

And then July 13 arrived. Early that morning we received an email from Gary that he was down the road with his crew and would be there imminently. But hours passed, and he didn't show. That's when we reached Cheryl and she said, "Oh, it's you," and told me she'd get him a message. We started calling every 15 minutes. This guy had taken our money and who knows when — or if — he was ever going to start building us a hate-read-worthy swimming pool.

Then, early that afternoon, we got Gary on the phone. Yellllow he said. We asked him where he was. He was confused by that. He was at the office, he said. But you told us you were on your way here, we said. You emailed us and said you were already on the road.

Gary was silent for a moment.

"I haven't emailed you in a month," he said.

Then my wife said holy fuck.

 

Zelle made it astonishingly easy to pay "Gary" and also astonishingly easy to scam Devin. The cautionary tale here this week is in an era of massive disinformation, that information can also include the ones and zeroes in your checking account. It's the biggest P2P banking app in Americ, way bigger than Venmo. And the fraud and scam potential for it is massive.

And worse, nobody's actually responsible for covering that fraud, because there are no laws or backstop behind it like bank deposits and the FDIC for example. On top of that, the one federal agency that should be involved, the Consumer Banking Protection Bureau, is currently facing a Supreme Court case that argues that the entire agency is unconstitutional, because the banks and the GOP want it gone.

So yes, take Devin's pool as an example. Be careful out there.

 

Be careful out there.

Last Call For The Big Lie, Alexa Edition

The thing with AI is that as with any computer database, if you feed it garbage input, it'll give you garbage output, and that applies to Amazon's Alexa digital assistant just like any other search engine or social media outlet.

Amid concerns the rise of artificial intelligence will supercharge the spread of misinformation comes a wild fabrication from a more prosaic source: Amazon’s Alexa, which declared that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Asked about fraud in the race — in which President Biden defeated former president Donald Trump with 306 electoral college votes — the popular voice assistant said it was “stolen by a massive amount of election fraud,” citing Rumble, a video-streaming service favored by conservatives.

The 2020 races were “notorious for many incidents of irregularities and indications pointing to electoral fraud taking place in major metro centers,” according to Alexa, referencing Substack, a subscription newsletter service. Alexa contended that Trump won Pennsylvania, citing “an Alexa answers contributor.”

Multiple investigations into the 2020 election have revealed no evidence of fraud, and Trump faces federal criminal charges connected to his efforts to overturn the election. Yet Alexa disseminates misinformation about the race, even as parent company Amazon promotes the tool as a reliable election news source to more than 70 million estimated users.

Amazon declined to explain why its voice assistant draws 2020 election answers from unvetted sources.

“These responses were errors that were delivered a small number of times, and quickly fixed when brought to our attention,” Amazon spokeswoman Lauren Raemhild said in a statement. “We continually audit and improve the systems we have in place for detecting and blocking inaccurate content.”

Raemhild said that during elections, Alexa works with “credible sources” like Reuters, Ballotpedia and RealClearPolitics to provide real-time information.

After The Washington Post reached out to Amazon for comment, Alexa’s responses changed.

To questions The Post had flagged to the company, Alexa answered, “I’m sorry, I’m not able to answer that.” Other questions still prompt the device to say there was election fraud in 2020.

Jacob Glick, who served as investigative counsel on the Jan. 6 committee, called Alexa’s assertions nearly three years after the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol “alarming.”

“If major corporations are helping to give life to the ‘big lie’ years after the fact, they’re enabling the animating narrative of American domestic extremism to endure,” said Glick, who now serves as a policy counsel at the Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection. “They should be doing everything they can to stop the ‘big lie’ in its tracks, lest we see history repeat itself.”

They should be, but why would they bother when the Biden administration is suing the pants off of Amazon over antitrust violations? If I'm an evil tech billionaire like Bezos or Musk or Zuckerberg, I'm putting my thumb on the scale to turn the country over to Trump and the fascists in order to get a better deal.

The point is that nobody should be surprised that three years later that Alexa is drawing on Big Lie bullshit and spreading it to tens of millions. We're at the point where The Big Lie has been "fact" to a majority of the GOP since November 2020.

Why wouldn't Big Tech look the other way?

School Daze: SWAT Team Edition

Over the last year, more than 500 schools have been subjected to faked shooting hoax calls to police in dozens of states and DC, and the coordinated effort is only getting worse now that school is back in session for tens of millions of kids.

 

Over the past year, more than 500 schools in the United States have been subjected to a coordinated campaign of fear that exploits the all-too-real American danger of school shootings, according to a review of media reports and dozens of public records requests. The Washington Post examined police reports, emergency call recordings, body-camera footage or call logs in connection with incidents in 24 states.

The calls are being investigated by the FBI and have generated an aggressive response by local law enforcement — particularly after officers in Uvalde, Tex., came under criticism for waiting more than an hour to confront the gunman during the May 2022 elementary school massacre.

In state after state, heavily armed officers have entered schools prepared for the worst. Students have hidden in toilets, closets, nurse’s offices. They’ve barricaded doors with desks and refrigerators. Medical helicopters have been placed on standby while trauma centers have paused surgeries, anticipating possible victims. Terrified parents have converged on schools, not knowing if their children are safe.

The wave of school shooting hoaxes is without precedent, education safety experts and law enforcement officials say. It’s part of a larger phenomenon known as “swatting,” where callers report nonexistent crimes with the goal of triggering a police response — preferably by SWAT teams — at the homes of enemies or celebrities.

The shooting hoax calls often come in waves, with multiple schools in a state targeted on the same day, and most are “remarkably similar,” said Drew Evans, the superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. More than 20 schools in the state were targeted in two separate incidents, one in September of last year and another this February.

“This is a really serious crime,” Evans said. “It places everybody in a situation of potential danger to have police officers rushing into a school.”

Many of the calls have followed a distinct pattern, according to police reports and recordings reviewed by The Post.

A male voice says that he is inside a school and that multiple students are shot. Many times, he claims to be a teacher. He says he is in a particular classroom or a bathroom, and tells the police to hurry.

He speaks with a heavy accent, police reports note. The calls first come in on non-emergency lines and are not recordings: The speaker interacts with dispatchers and responds to their questions.

When local authorities tried to trace the fake school shooting calls, they quickly ran into obstacles. Police reports show that the caller used free internet-calling services that allow anyone with an email address to make calls that appear to be coming from a U.S. number.

In incidents in at least 12 states, The Post found, the numbers were provided by TextNow, a Canadian company that offers free calls using voice over internet protocol, or VoIP.

TextNow says it works proactively to prevent bad actors from using its service while also keeping it free and accessible. The company “does not condone the use of our platform for harassment, fraud or other illegal activity that jeopardizes public safety,” said Derek Ting, TextNow’s co-founder, in a blog post in August. “However, when serving millions of people of various backgrounds and needs, you cannot solve every challenge with the biggest hammer you can find.”

 

The FBI continues to investigate, meanwhile, schools are getting invaded by armed SWAT teams looking for non-existent shooters, because Gunmerica. 

We would rather puts kids at risk than do something about guns.

Israeli Getting Serious Out There

Apparently today is the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War and Hamas marked the occasion with a massive rocket attack from Gaza into Israel, the thousands of rockets overwhelming Israel's Iron Dome defense system and killing dozens as a new uprising is underway. Needless to say, the Israeli counterstrike into Gaza is unprecedented as PM Benjamin Netanyahu has declared that Israel is now at war.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he hopes Israel's response to the Hamas incursion on Saturday will "exact a huge price" from the militant group.

Speaking at the beginning of a political-security cabinet meeting, Netanyahu said the following:

"Since this morning, the State of Israel has been at war. Our first goal is first of all to cleanse the area of the enemy forces that have infiltrated and restore security and peace to the towns that were attacked.

The second goal, at the same time, is to exact a huge price from the enemy, also in the Gaza Strip. The third goal is to fortify other arenas so that no one makes the mistake of joining this war.

We are at war, in war you have to keep calm. I call on all citizens of Israel to unite, to achieve our highest goal -- victory in the war.'

Netanyahu may have survived scandal after scandal that divided the nation but Israel will 100% rally around hum and the flag while pounding Gaza into ash this weekend. 

More on this as it develops, but this is the strongest attack from Hamas in decades, and Israel's response is going to be bloody as all hell.

Last Call For No Solving For X

As we come up on the one-year anniversary of Elon Musk taking over X/Twitter/Whatever, Miles Klee at Rolling Stone documents the atrocities as the once-premiere social media platform is now a toxic neo-Nazi-filled trash fire destined for the wrecking ball.

ON OCT. 26, 2022, Elon Musk enjoyed his first and last good day as the head of Twitter (now X). Following a $44 billion acquisition he tried to scuttle but was legally forced into closing, he attempted a bit of prop comedy — entering the company’s headquarters with a porcelain sink while flashing a mischievous smile. It was all the setup to a groaner of a pun announcing his arrival: “Let that sink in!” he declared in the video caption of his entrance. It was a master class in cringe.

Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in! pic.twitter.com/D68z4K2wq7— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 26, 2022

Nearly a year later, you’d be hard pressed to name a single improvement to the site under Musk’s direction. His biggest ideas have all blown up in his face: An $8 monthly subscription fee for a blue check that verified users then needed the option of hiding to avoid mockery. The abandonment of a valuable brand name and logo in favor of the meaningless “X,” which prompted a trademark lawsuit and led to the installation of a garish metal X structure on the roof of Twitter’s office — city inspectors had it removed just days later. Musk’s latest move is to have headlines stripped from article links, leaving only an image and media source, which he seems to believe looks better and will keep users scrolling. But for those who follow news on the app, it makes X that much more pointless.

i love clicking on a stock Getty image and having no clue what the article is going to be about, great job https://t.co/vYpw9aYgIZ— rat king 🐀 (@MikeIsaac) October 4, 2023

Of course, these mistakes pale in comparison to the rancid vibes Musk has cultivated by reinstating right-wing extremists and peddlers of misinformation previously banned from the platform, amplifying their conspiracy theories, and ensuring their garbage posts are shoved into “For You” feeds by Twitter’s algorithms. He buys into white supremacist propaganda, panders to anti-LGBTQ hate accounts, and, with advertisers fleeing these intolerable conditions, found a way to blame the catastrophic loss of revenue on a Jewish civil rights group that combats antisemitism.

How much longer can this wreckage of a formerly semi-functional website stay afloat? Although it has shed millions of daily active users since Musk started tinkering with it, the endgame is more likely to come down to money. Seven banks led by Morgan Stanley hold some $13 billion in debt after backing Musk’s blockbuster deal last year, and the company itself is presumably worth much less at this point — even according to his own math. If X can’t keep making its $300 million quarterly interest payments, the financial firms may repossess it in order to recoup a fraction of their losses.

 

I'm still in the camp that says Elongated Muskrat is doing this on purpose, that he spent tens of billions on Twitter in order to destroy it ahead of the 2024 elections in order to sow chaos going into the 2024 elections. With Facebook/Threads/Whatever now out of the election integrity game, there's little hope to stop voters from being targeted with voting disinformation to a degree that it could throw the entire ballgame to the GOP and Trump's promised authoritarian takeover attempt of the federal government.

 

Whether or not voters can see the light in all this coming darkness, well, we have to try to light the way.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

MAGA terrorists continue to get closer and closer towards assassinating Democratic politicians, and enabling them to do so is being done on purpose by GOP lawmakers.

 

A man illegally brought a loaded handgun into the Wisconsin Capitol, demanding to see Gov. Tony Evers, and returned at night with an assault rifle after posting bail, police said Thursday.

The man, who was shirtless and had a holstered handgun, approached the governor’s office on the first floor of the Capitol around 2 p.m. Wednesday, state Department of Administration spokesperson Tatyana Warrick said. The 43-year-old man said “he would not leave until he saw Governor Evers” so he could talk about “domestic abuse towards men,” Capitol police said in a bulletin sent to lawmakers and their staffs.

Evers was not in the building at the time, Warrick said.

A Capitol police officer sits at a desk outside of a suite of rooms that includes the governor’s office, conference room and offices for the attorney general.

The man was taken into custody for openly carrying a firearm in the Capitol, which is against the law, Warrick said. Weapons can be brought into the Capitol if they are concealed and the person has a valid permit. The man arrested did not have a concealed carry permit, Warrick said.

The man posted cellphone video of his arrest on his Facebook page, which one of his Facebook friends downloaded and provided to The Associated Press. In the footage, the man tells police as they speak to him outside of the governor’s office that he is armed “to defend myself” from people who he says police won’t protect him from.

“I am not a threat,” the man tells police. His dog is with him.

When told by officers that it’s illegal for him to openly carry a firearm in the Capitol, the man says, “I will admit that I broke that law.”

Warrick said she was not aware of the video and could not comment on it.

The man was booked into the Dane County Jail but later posted bail.

He returned to the outside of the Capitol shortly before 9 p.m., three hours after the building closed, with a loaded assault-style rifle and a collapsible police baton in his backpack, Warrick said. He again demanded to see the governor and was taken into custody.

The man said “he did not own a vehicle and it is likely he has access to a large amount of weapons and is comfortable using them,” police said in the bulletin sent to Capitol workers.

Capitol police named the suspect, but court records show that no charges had been filed as of late Thursday afternoon. The AP normally does not name suspects until they are charged and efforts are made to get comments from them, their lawyer or other representative.

Madison police reported Thursday that the man was taken into protective custody and taken to the hospital. He could not be reached by the AP, and a spokesperson for the police department did not return an email seeking additional details.

So yeah, when MAGA chud terrorists show up in state capitols with guns looking to "have a talk" with Democratic governors twice in the same fucking day and when FOX News "comedian" Greg Gutfeld openly calls for that Second Civil War I keep tagging because it's the only way he feels he can deal with politicians he doesn't like because "elections don't work"  then maybe we should start paying attention to the fact right-wing terrorists are outright calling for deadly mass violence against their political enemies.

Those political enemies include all of us, folks.

 

Phantasma Santos, Con't

Meanwhile, indicted NY GOP Rep. "George Santos" is still facing more than a dozen federal fraud and campaign finance charges, and his former campaign treasurer just turned over a guilty plea.

 

Nancy Marks, the former treasurer for embattled Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., is expected to plead guilty Thursday to federal charges, according to court records.

Marks resigned from Santos' team in January amid reports of multiple controversies revolving around his campaign finances.

The exact charges remain under seal, but court records indicate she has waived indictment and will plead guilty to a criminal information filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York.

Marks has been a fixture of Republican politics on Long Island for decades. She was a treasurer for Lee Zeldin’s unsuccessful campaign for governor and she worked for several political committees, including God, Guns, Life, Veterans for MAGA and Defend the Constitution.

Santos blamed Marks when questions were raised about the sources of his fundraising and his spending. The Republican congressman pleaded not guilty in May to a 13-count indictment accusing him of fraud, money laundering and theft of public funds.

How many other NY Republicans will "Santos" take down with them?

We're about to find out.

Last Call For Climate Of Destruction, Con't

Data from the EU's Copernicus climate change office indicates September 2023 was the hottest September on global record by such a wide margin that scientists are wondering whether we've crossed the line of no return.

The September milestone, reported in new data released late Wednesday by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, added to an alarming stretch of record-breaking global temperatures. During June, July and August, the planet had its hottest summer on record “by a large margin.”

September's temperatures have climate scientists even more stunned.

“This month was, in my professional opinion as a climate scientist — absolutely gobsmackingly bananas,” Zeke Hausfather, the climate research lead for the financial services company Stripe, wrote Tuesday on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, said it’s worrying to see so many new records set, but it’s even more alarming to see by what margin they are being toppled. Average surface air temperatures last month were almost a degree Fahrenheit hotter than September 2020, which had been the warmest September on record.

“Normally when you’re beating a record, it’s by hundredths of a degree,” she said, “so this is really a huge amount."

September was also the most anomalously warm month in recorded history, meaning its deviation from the average was higher than any month so far, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service.

That warmth has continued into October. Temperatures around the world have remained elevated with a resurgence of summerlike conditions gripping residents of the Upper Midwest and the Northeast this week, despite being almost two full weeks into fall.

Record-smashing temperatures — above 90 F in some places — added to unseasonable warmth across a huge swath of the country, with cities from the Great Lakes to the Northeast experiencing high temperatures 10 to 30 degrees above average.

But the United States was hardly alone with its wild temperature swings: An October heat wave is baking Western Europe, with temperatures soaring well above 90 F in parts of France and Spain. And in the Southern Hemisphere, unseasonably warm temperatures have been recorded across South America and Australia, all coming on the heels of multiple bouts of extreme heat in previous months, during what should have been the winter season in that part of the world.

 

Conservatives will tell you that all this international climate data is really a conspiracy to use X as a fascism justification to take over the world, where X is vaccines, digital currency, electric vehicles, elections that they don't win, LGBTQ+ folks existing, Black folks surviving and thriving, abortion, and gas stoves. Probably fluoride too.

Meanwhile, the actual effects are pretty well detailed, documented and predictable. It's getting worse, and it's getting worse at a faster rate.

Plan accordingly.

 

The Gaetz Of Heck, Con't

A not-so-gentle reminder that many Republicans really hate GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz, and that at this point they are more than willing to air his dirty laundry.

Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-O.K.) claimed on national television Wednesday night that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-F.L.) bragged about chasing down erectile dysfunction medication with an energy drink to prolong his sexual endeavors.

Gaetz brought a motion to oust Rep. Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House of Representatives on Monday, and a day later, he and a posse of like-minded Republicans voted to axe the California congressman a day later.

The ousting of McCarthy has left the GOP party in chaos and plenty of ire was directed at Gaetz, as even fellow MAGA loyalists were furious over the ensuing infighting after the GOP left itself with no leader and no clear path forward.

Frustrated with Gaetz’s actions on Wednesday, Mullin unleashed wild allegations against the congressman when speaking to CNN’s Manu Raju outside the Capitol.

Mullin began by saying that after Gaetz was accused of sexual misconduct with a 17-year-old girl, “the media didn’t give [him] the time of day.” Gaetz has consistently denied any wrongdoing, arguing that bad actors in the Justice Department were trying to ruin his life. That allegation prompted an investigation by the Department of Justice, which decided not to file charges in February.

“And there’s a reason why no one in the Congress came and defended him: Because we had all seen the videos he was showing on the House floor, that all of us had walked away, of the girls that he had slept with,” Mullin added. “He would brag about how he would crush E.D. medicine and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night. This was obviously before he got married.”

He continued, “And so, when that accusation came out, no one defended him. And then no one in the media would give him the time of the day. All of a sudden he found fame because he opposed the speaker of the House back in November. And he’s always stayed there. And he was never gonna leave until he got this last moment of fame by going after a motion to vacate.”

In a statement to CNN read by anchor Anderson Cooper on air, Gaetz denied his colleague’s claim.

“I don’t think Markwayne Mullin and I have said 20 words to each other on the House floor. This is a lie from someone who doesn’t know me and who is coping with the death of the political career of his friend Kevin,” Gaetz’s statement read. “Thoughts and prayers.”

 

And while the DoJ investigation into Gaetz has been dropped, the House Ethics Committee investigation into Gaetz has been going for over two years now, and there's a growing movement (powered by Newt Gingrich of all people) to expel Gaetz based on the results of the probe. 

Whether that happens, well, all bets are off here.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Donald Trump continues to attack judges, prosecutors and court officers running his criminal and fraud trials on social media, despite now being under multiple gag orders, and as I have been saying for a while now, he's doing it on purpose in order to dare someone to put him in jail.

Trump continued to complain online after arriving in court on Wednesday.

"Just arrived at the Witch Hunt Trial taking place in the very badly failing (so sadly!) State of New York, where people and companies are fleeing by the thousands," he wrote. "Corrupt Attorney General, Letitia James, is a big reason for this. Statute 63(12) is meant to be used for Consumer Fraud. It has never been used before on a 'case' such as this, especially since I did absolutely nothing wrong. I borrowed money, paid it back, in full, and got sued, years later, with a trial RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF MY CAMPAIGN. I am not even entitled, under any circumstances, to a JURY. This Witch Hunt cannot be allowed to continue. It is Election Interference and the start of Communism right here in America!"

"Despite the gag order — which again, is limited only to the judge's staff — Trump is back on Truth Social this morning with a post taking aim at New York Attorney General Tish James and filled with words from a Trump legal bingo card," tweeted MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin.

Attorney Bradley Moss argued that the post itself "does not cross the line," opining that "this post was reviewed by the lawyers" before it was sent.

While the Truth Social posts may not have violated the judge's order, some legal experts predicted that he would "almost certainly" violate it.

"If we're gonna ask, is Trump gonna violate a gag order? Almost certainly, yes," former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal told MSNBC. "It's more likely that he'll violate the gag order than almost anything... I mean, we're talking a significant probability he's going to violate the gag order, and then the question is: Will the judge at that point take the really heavy medicine of putting a former president in jail, or will there be some sort of warning and monetary fine first?" he said, adding he expects the latter but the outcome would depend on exactly how Trump violates the order.

"It's kind of like failing kindergarten," Katyal added. "To get a gag order imposed, you have to try. Trump managed to work at it and do it. And succeed. But it took a lot of work on his part. Now, I think the judge is basically saying, you attack a member of my staff, there will be serious sanctions, including even up to jail."

CNN legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Elliot Williams suggested during Wednesday's edition of "CNN This Morning" that a prison stint is the only way to get the former president to comply with the gag order.

"In order to have a serious sanction against a defendant who's a billionaire, you really have to be sanctioning him hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars to really sort of stick it to him," Williams said. "And that's just not going to happen under the laws of New York court policy or procedure.

"You could put him in prison," he continued, addressing host Poppy Harlow. "You could do that. It's less likely but it's certainly doable and, frankly, Poppy, that's the one thing I think will work at this point because — just think about it — nothing has worked whether it is warnings, threats of gag orders or anything else. You've got one penalty left, right?" 

 

Luckily, Judge Engoron still has other options other than trying to jail Trump.

 

Trial attorney Bernard Alexander, who specialized in employment law and civil rights cases, told Insider, however, that Trump is unlikely to incur those kinds of penalties even if Engoron finds he's failed to comply with the gag order. Any decision the court makes, Alexander said, will have to strike a balance between maintaining the former president's right to free speech and the legal objective of holding a fair trial.

"For one thing, the judge can prevent Trump's legal team from presenting certain evidence. But judges prefer not to put their thumb on the scales of justice that way," Alexander told the outlet, adding that if Trump's trial had a jury, the judge could instruct the jury to consider the violation in their decision.

Alexander went on to say that the court could also impose a fine against Trump, "but that would be meaningless," and noted that judges in civil cases usually don't order people to go to jail, so Engoron will have to be creative in the sanction he chooses to issue to dissuade Trump from theoretically continuing to violate the order.

"Trump has money and he uses it to bully people. He can keep paying fines amounting to thousands of dollars – which is what would have to be imposed in a case like this – without giving it a second thought," Alexander told Insider. "The sanction must be something effective to reign Trump in, in order for him to take it seriously."

Alexander expressed that he was not surprised the order was issued and deemed it the correct course of action for Engoron.

"The judge is trying to maintain the integrity of the court and proceed with as light a touch as possible to allow the case to progress without any hint that the court is being impartial. The more Trump violates the rules, the more the judge has to act to maintain integrity and control," he said.

 

Trump is trying to get into as much trouble as possible in order to raise MAGA outrage and to sink the entire legal process.  Trump is already appealing the fraud liability finding by Judge Engoron even as the trial continues. It's a mess but a calculated one. 

Trump is trying to break the system to the point where it can't be used to punish him. We keep saying that Trump is not above the law, but he's also an unprecedented bad actor with considerable power to harm the country. Keep that in mind.

And no, he's not going to get locked up for violating gag orders as Liz Dye explains.

 

Shorn of all of the BS, Trump’s argument against a gag order boils down to “I’m running for president, and telling me to keep quiet is going to be a massive interference in the political process.” There’s also an unspoken element of “You and what army?”

The reality is that, absent a conviction, no judge is going to lock up the former president, who is running to return to office and who has a secret service detail and millions of angry followers. In some sense, every party to this transaction already knows that the court simply cannot treat Trump like any other defendant. And so they’re trying to fashion a solution which will nudge the former president to behave slightly better, knowing that a severe restriction is likely to provoke a showdown which will gum up the works for everyone.

In practical effect, this boils down to putting the squeeze on Trump’s lawyers and hoping that they’ll do their best to keep their client in line.

In an earlier round of motions, prosecutors argued for a protective order blocking Trump from disclosing any evidence turned over in discovery. Trump’s lawyers howled that this was a violation of their client’s First Amendment rights, just as they’re doing now. Judge Chutkan wound up imposing a narrower order blocking the disclosure of “sensitive information” such as grand jury transcripts, witness interviews, and personally identifying information. In practical effect, she ordered Trump not to post witness information on Truth Social.

But more than that, she imposed an obligation on Trump’s lawyers to safeguard that information by refusing to let Trump keep copies or take notes on it. And she put the kibosh on Trump’s plans to share that information with “volunteer attorneys or others without paid employment arrangements to assist with the preparation of this case” — a category of people which might include unindicted co-conspirators like Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Trump’s fixer Boris Epshteyn. By placing the onus on Trump’s counsel to control the flow of sensitive information, Judge Chutkan has so far managed to keep Trump from posting it online. Because while no judge wants the chaos that will come from sanctioning Donald Trump for his speech, they’ll happily sanction his lawyers in a heartbeat.

Trump’s desire to postpone his trial provides another lever Judge Chutkan can use to keep him in line. At an August hearing on the parameters of the first protective order, she tacitly warned Trump that the more he potentially poisoned the jury pool, the less inclined she would be to delay the trial.

“Even arguably ambiguous statements from parties or their counsel, if they can be reasonably interpreted to intimidate witnesses or to prejudice potential jurors, can threaten the process,” she said. “The more a party makes inflammatory statements about this case which could taint the jury pool … the greater the urgency will be that we proceed to trial quickly.”

Judge Chutkan has scheduled an October 16 hearing on the motion for a gag order. This would not appear to indicate that she views the matter of Trump’s social media posts as particularly urgent. In the meantime, the former president has directed most of his ranting toward Justice Engoron as the New York trial unfolds this week. Perhaps the sheer volume of Trump’s legal woes will keep him out of trouble with judges, if only because every time he gets tempted to do something deeply damaging in one case, he’ll be distracted by proceedings in another.

 

Having said all that, Trump's going to continue to Trump. Whether or not real pain can even be applied to him, well, we'll see.

Last Call For Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

With Repubicans canceling any and all new funding for Ukraine President Bien will make the case to the American people that supporting Ukraine with American weapons and dollars is vital to protecting Europe and NATO.

President Joe Biden said on Wednesday that he would deliver a "major" speech about funding for Ukraine and "why it's critically important for the United States and our allies that we keep our commitment."

The comments came in response to a question from NBC News about whether he was worried about the U.S. being unable to deliver aid to Ukraine due to the disarray on Capitol Hill. The president took questions from the press following his planned remarks on student debt.

"I'm going to make the argument that it's overwhelmingly in the interest of the United States of America that Ukraine succeed," Biden said.

Biden argued that the administration's focus on international coalition building has improved the position of the U.S.

"They've strengthened us across the board, not just as it relates to Ukraine, whether it's Japan and South Korea or whether it's what's happening in Europe itself," Biden said. "And so I think that it's clear to the vast majority of the foreign policy community on both left and right that this has been a valuable exercise for the United States of America to increase the support we have around the world."

The Republican Party has become increasingly divided over U.S. aid to Ukraine, and the issue was part of the standoff in the House that nearly led to a government shutdown. The 45-day continuing resolution that averted the shutdown ultimately did not include any new Ukraine aid, to the dismay of many Democrats.

When asked how long the support could continue without additional funding, Biden said that the U.S. can back Ukraine in "the next tranche," adding that "there is another means by which we may be able to find funding for that." He declined to go into details on the funding source, as did press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre during the press briefing.

It's good to see the White House move on this, with support for Ukraine being whittled away by Trump and the GOP on a daily basis it seems.

But let's not forget the reason we're here, Putin's invasion. He's stopped here, or he'll invade again.

Let's Make A Deal: Georgia Edition

The wheelin' and dealin' in the Peach State continues after the dam broke with the first of Trump's Georgia election fraud co-conspirators cutting a deal last week. More are now expected to follow.

Fulton County prosecutors are floating plea deals to a number of defendants in the election interference case involving former President Donald Trump, according to people with knowledge of the proposals.

At least a handful of the now 18 defendants have received offers from the District Attorney’s office — or prosecutors have touched base with their attorneys to gauge their general interest in striking a deal for a reduced charge in exchange for their cooperation, according to the legal sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive ongoing negotiations.

It’s common for prosecutors to float plea deals to lower-level defendants in large racketeering cases as they home in on their biggest targets. Trump and his former personal attorney Rudy Giuliani face the most charges in the 41-count indictment, which centers on efforts to overturn the results of Georgia’s 2020 presidential election.

Late last week, Atlanta bail bondsman Scott Hall became the first defendant to accept a deal, pleading guilty to five misdemeanor counts in exchange for his testimony.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has learned that Fulton prosecutors have also offered a deal to Michael Roman, who worked as director of Election Day operations for the Trump campaign in 2020. A member of Roman’s legal team told The AJC they rejected the DA’s proposal and that no agreement has been reached.

”We’re maintaining our client’s innocence,” the legal team member said.

People who were indicted for their alleged roles in the appointment of a slate of Trump electors, election data breach in Coffee County and harassment of Fulton poll worker Ruby Freeman have also been approached by prosecutors, according to multiple sources. In the case of at least two of those defendants, no concrete offer has been made.

“It’s kind of a dance,” said John Banzhaf, a professor of public interest law at George Washington University who is closely tracking the case.

“Basically, the first person who flips always gets the best deal. The next one who comes along probably will get a deal that’s almost as good,” he said. “But at a certain point the addition of an extra person… is less important (to prosecutors)… so they’re not going to get as good a deal.”

A spokesman for DA Fani Willis declined to comment. It’s unclear how many defendants have tentatively accepted prosecutors’ offers. The AJC reached out to lawyers for each of the 18 remaining defendants for this story.

Fani's crew makes the deals, and they roll over on Rudy and Trump. For all the shouting about Trump being the House GOP circus's new ringmaster, it's gonna be hard for him to do much from an Atlanta jail cell. 

Stay tuned. I'm betting more deals get announced soon.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Again, Trump is deliberately attacking judges, prosecutors, and court officers during his trials in order to drive hatred towards them, but also to play a game of high-stakes chicken where Trump believes he can force judges to take action against him and "prove" the trials -- and the charges against him -- are nothing more than punishment for a corrupt and evil government. He's trying to martyr himself and create a groundswell of support to win in 2024. Tuesday's actions at his civil trial were no exception to this plan.

 

The New York judge presiding over Donald Trump's civil fraud trial on Tuesday issued a gag order after the former president attacked his clerk by name and shared her image on social media.

“Personal attacks on members on my court staff are unacceptable, inappropriate, and I won't tolerate it [in my courtroom],” said New York State Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron.

He added later to "consider this a gag order for all parties from posting about any members of my staff."

The judge rebuked the "untrue and personally identifying posts" about a staff member.

“Schumer’s girlfriend, Alison R. Greenfield, is running this case against me. How disgraceful! This case should be dismissed immediately!!” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform, along with a picture of the clerk and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

The post appeared to show a photograph of Greenfield standing next to Schumer, without any more context. Fact-checkers note that false rumors about Schumer and infidelity appear to trace their origins to a now-shuttered satirical website.

Engoron didn't mention the former president by name, but the remarks clearly referred to him. The judge said he ordered the post deleted, and it was. Trump deleted his Truth Social post.

 

And as usual, if somebody gets hurt here, it won't of course be Trump. Again, the plan is to force a judge to sanction Trump in order to massively increase the outrage and the violence.

Our system is not set up to handle a criminal like Trump.