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German Transport Minister Volker Wissing on Monday said he can’t rule out foreign sabotage as the reason why persons unknown severed critical communications wires at railroad radio signal towers hundreds of miles apart in Northern Germany, halting trains for hours Saturday, Bloomberg reports.

“We have increased vigilance since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, because we know that infrastructures have become an increased target,” said Wissing, who did not name names, but by mentioning the war in Ukraine made the implication pretty fucking obvious. According to Bloomberg the saboteur would have to have had extremely detailed knowledge of how the rail system works to know to cut the wire at the main signal tower in Berlin and then at its backup in the town of Herne. “It is clear that there is a connection between the crime in Berlin and in Herne, and there is little to suggest that it was a coincidence,” said Wissing to public broadcaster ARD.

Putin’s army lashed out on Monday in continued frustration over the devastating weekend attack on the Kerch Strait bridge, with at least eight civilians killed in a single strike on Kyiv, the AP reports.

At least 10 cities were hit, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who said the Russians “chose such a time and such targets on purpose to inflict the most damage.”

Apparently, Sarah Palin’s campaign only rented one stick of chairs from the venue where the Patriot Freedom PAC rally was being held, Dena’ina Civic and Convention Center in Anchorage, in a room that can hold up to 3,300 people, according to Alaska Public Radio reporter Liz Ruskin.  The little speck on stage there is Republican Congressional candidate and half-term governor Sarah Palin.  Also on the program:  Senate candidate Kelly Tshibaka and… Sheriff David Clarke?  All tickets are Standing Room Only… ’cause they don’t have enough chairs.

Two people were shot near the Long Island home of Republican New York gubernatorial nominee Lee Zeldin, but no one from the candidate’s family was involved, CNN reports.  Zeldin’s twin teenage daughters were in the home at the time of the shooting and barricaded themselves in an upstairs bathroom until police cleared the area.

Details of the shooting were unclear, but somehow the victims ended up in the family’s shrubbery and under the porch.  Local law enforcement say the Zeldins were not targeted and the location of the shooting seems to be incidental to the candidacy.

Zeldin said neither he nor anyone in his family know the victims.  He added that his family was providing security camera footage to investigators.   Security is heightened around Zeldin after he was assaulted by a man holding a sharp object in August.

The Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), Putin’s post-Soviet answer to NATO, learned that the host nation for the pact’s joint military exercise, Kyrgyzstan, announced on Sunday it was canceling the event, Politico reports.

Scheduled to start tomorrow, the “Indestructible Brotherhood-2022” exercises were supposed to feature troops from Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan on Kyrgyzstan’s eastern highlands, focusing on securing ceasefires, which presumably includes the massacre of civilians as Russian is undertaking in Ukraine.  Five observer nations including Serbia, Syria and Uzbekistan were planning to attend.

The cancelation is the latest sign of unrest in the alliance.  Armenia is still pissed that its CSTO cohorts didn’t come to its defense when it had a series of border skirmishes with Azerbaijan. Kyrgyzstani officials gave no reason for the cancelation.

Having ordered the invasion and occupation of a sovereign neighboring nation while abetting war crimes, Russian President Vladimir Putin (R-Moscow) announced that Ukrainians executed an attack on the only bridge linking Russia to Crimea, calling the attack an “act of terrorism,” NBC News reports.

“There’s no doubt it was a terrorist act directed at the destruction of critically important civilian infrastructure of the Russian Federation,” Putin said during a Sunday meeting with the chairman of Russia’s Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, parts of which were broadcast. “And the authors, perpetrators, and those who ordered it are the special services of Ukraine.”

Like Republicans, Putin believes that there should be no consequences for his actions, and that because Russian invaded Ukraine, the Ukrainians should just sit back and accept the consequences without doing anything to defend themselves or regain their liberty.  Just as the GOP feels that there should be no pushback to their oppressive policies and that they should feel no consequences or resistance in the political or legal arenas, Putin doesn’t understand that when you start a war, you will suffer retaliation.

Comedian Ariel Elias, a stand-up comic not particularly known for political comedy, apparently angered a couple Trump-supporting members of the audience at Uncle Vinnie’s Comedy Club in Mt. Pleasant, New Jersey because she made people laugh using Donald Trump as the punch line he is.  (Seriously, what standup comic wouldn’t include Trump in a set?)

Elias handles the hecklers efficiently–effectively turning the audience on them–when she moves on from humiliating the Trump supporters. Seconds later, a full beer can gets hurled at the stage, reportedly from the spouse of the woman who was heckling the comedian earlier. The comedy club is pressing charges against the man, and they’ve booked Elias back for another gig at the club.

For at least the fourth time since the February invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has replaced a senior military commander overseeing the military operation amid ongoing military and security failures in the region, NBC News reports.

Two days after his 70th birthday and a day after the bombing of a key bridge in Crimea, Putin announced that Sergei Surovikin would take over all military and security operations in the occupied Ukrainian territories, the first time Putin has named a unified commander for the operation.  Putin had previously replaced commanders when operations faltered in April, June and August.  In June, he also conducted what observers called a “purge” of senior military commanders overseeing the invasion.  In August, Putin also replaced the head of naval operations in the Black Sea after the sinking of the Black Sea fleet’s flagship.

The head of Russia’s Air Force, Surovikin oversaw Russian operations in Syria, where the Kremlin relies mostly on unofficial mercenaries to conduct its operations, with Russian military largely providing support functions so as to not face Western-backed faction directly.  While he was in command, the Russians undertook the devastating bombing of Aleppo in 2016, where hospitals and civilian facilities were destroyed in the wholesale destruction of the city that resulted in nearly 1,000 civilians dead in four months.

Republican Senators Tom Cotton and Rick Scott are headed to Georgia on Tuesday to fire up enthusiasm for their would-be future colleague, the pro-choice for his girlfriends but pro-forced birth for other women, mentally insane idiot Herschel Walker, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

The not very charismatic or popular Senators, stuck with no other choice but to continue to support the dipshit Walker if they want to break the chamber’s 50-50 Dem majority, only need to make it through the next 50-odd hours without any more credible evidence that the absentee father did in fact pay for at least one abortion in the last few decades. Would suck for them if the woman who had the abortion(s) came forward publicly and showed off the receipts and get well soon card.

A Norway-based Iranian rights group estimates that nearly 200 people have been killed by pro-government forces in Iran in the three weeks since large-scale protests erupted over the death in police custody of 22-year-old Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini, Reuters reports. “At least 185 people, including at least 19 children, have been killed in the nationwide protests across Iran. The highest number of killings occurred in Sistan and Baluchistan province with half the recorded number,” the Iran Human Rights organization said on Saturday, adding that the number includes at least 20 cops.

The water superintendent of a Vermont town unilaterally decided to lower the amount of fluoridation added to the water supply–dropping it below state-recommeded levels–because he was concerned about the safety of the levels of the Chinese-manufactured products, the Associated Press reports.

Water fluoridation has been an accepted practice in municipal water systems in the United States since the 1950s.  The process, which involves adding three separate chemicals into the water processing system, increases the amount of fluoride in the water and allows the water system to provide supplemental fluoride which strengthens teeth, particularly with children.

Kendall Chamberlin, Richmond, Vermont’s water and wastewater superintendent, told the town water and sewer commission in September that he had unilaterally lowered the levels of fluoridation in the town’s system because he had concerns that two of the components used in fluoridation were manufactured in China. 

Two Words: Let’s Go Brandon!

— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) October 8, 2022

US Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Chris Magnus told the Los Angeles Times this week that Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott’s bullshit games with shipping migrants north is actually drawing more of them to the United States. “It’s safe to say what’s going on is a pull factor, which is somewhat ironic given the criticism from some of these same governors involved in this about various pull factors that they claim already exist… when migrants hear that there are buses that will take them to locations where they are told they will receive benefits and jobs,” said Magnus.

Persistent Trump apologist and fainting couch enthusiast Lindsey Graham, a Republican Senator from South Carolina, told DC Metropolitan Police officer Michael Fanone and other officers who defended the Capitol during the January 6th Republican-led domestic terrorist attack on Congress that they should have shot the insurrectionists, the Guardian reports.

In a new book, Fanone recalls a meeting he and others had with Graham in May 2021, after Graham had expressed disgust with Trump on the Senate floor but before Graham started to prostrate himself to Donald Trump to garner political favor.  In that meeting, Graham told the officers they should have simply opened fire.

“You guys should have shot them all in the head,” Graham said, according to Fanone.  “We gave you guys guns, and you should have used them. I don’t understand why that didn’t happen.”

Disgraced former President Trump last year told his minions to propose to the National Archives that he would return the documents they were asking for if they would give him the ones he believed would prove he was innocent of colluding with the Russians in 2016, the New York Times reports.

Trump’s lawyers never made the proposal, probably because doing so would be an admission that he committed a crime by taking the documents from the White House as his failure of a presidency ended, not to mention God knows how many other federal felonies by turning the back and forth with the archives into essentially a hostage negotiation. The Times’s reporting also tracks with a Friday piece by ABC News about the Donald’s failed 11th hour attempt to declassify documents he and asshole John Solomon selectively identified as exonerating when viewed completely out of context.

A truck bomb killed at least three Russians and severely damaged the Kerch road and rail bridge that serves as the only connection between the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula and the Russian mainland on Saturday, CNN reports. A spokeswoman for the Russian Investigation Service said the agency “has opened a criminal case about the incident at the Crimean Bridge. According to preliminary information, this morning a truck was blown up on the automobile part of the Crimean Bridge from the Taman Peninsula [the westbound lanes of the bridge], which led to the ignition of seven fuel tanks of a train travelling toward the Crimean Peninsula. As a result, two car lanes of the bridge partially collapsed.” Yeah that sounds pretty fucking bad for Russia, lol.

• Ten million new jobs in 20 months.  Way to go, Brandon.  
• Here’s the thing Republicans don’t get:  if Trump loses a primary–not just the nomination, but any state primary–his mob will see those results as invalid and turn their violence and anger on the GOP candidate who won, claiming that candidate cheated.  The same is true for any Trump-endorsed candidate:  the mob will claim they were cheated.  The GOP has not reined in its most vile element, and they’ll be the first ones to experience its wrath first this coming presidential election cycle.
• Herschel Walker will become the GOP advocate against absentee fathers the same way Bristol Palin lectures about pre-marital abstinence.
• How bankrupt are conservatives?  Watch Ron DeSantis:  “Let’s go, Brandon!” is now “Help me, Brandon!”  Their staged principles go out the window when they’re the ones in need. 
  Read More ▶ “Random thoughts Friday, Volume XC”

And the plot thickens….  Texan Herschel Walker, the Republican nominee for the Senate from Georgia, has confirmed to NBC News that he does know the woman who had an abortion at Walker’s urging, but he claims he didn’t know the woman had an abortion.

“The first I knew about any of this was when some reporter asked me about an abortion. And I’m like, ‘No, that’s a lie.’ And then I was asked if I paid for an abortion, and I said No.  I did not pay for an abortion,” said Herschel Walker. “I’m not saying she did or didn’t have one [an abortion]. I’m saying I don’t know anything about that. I don’t know.”  He added:  “I have nothing to hide. That’s why I’m talking to you.”

Walker’s wife has been communicating with the unnamed woman over years, trying to act as a middleman between Walker and the woman, arranging for payments to get to the mother of Walker’s child.  Walker reportedly had little to no contact with the woman, who again is the mother of his child.