Having secured her 18th term in the House, Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced Thursday she is stepping down from her leadership role in the caucus to allow others to rise within Party ranks, NPR reports.

Thank you all — and may God continue to bless the United States of America. pic.twitter.com/XDlQRwvDjY

— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) November 17, 2022

“With great confidence in our caucus, I will not seek reelection to Democratic leadership in the next Congress. For me the hour has come for a new generation to lead the Democratic caucus that I so deeply respect,” Pelosi said in a speech on the House floor. “I’m grateful that so many are ready and willing to shoulder this awesome responsibility.” House Majority Leader Congressman Steny Hoyer also announced he’s stepping down, but will also remain in the House.

Pelosi’s semi-retirement comes as Republicans took control of the House and announced Thursday their primary legislative agenda for the next two years is investigating Hunter Biden.

Dem Alaska Congresswoman Mary Peltola has once again defeated dumbass former Governor Sarah Palin in the race for the state’s at-large US House seat and secured a full term following her surprise win in the August special election, Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman projects.

Hunter Biden's laptop is REAL.

— House Republicans (@HouseGOP) November 17, 2022

According to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice, twenty-one American families donated more than $783 million to political campaigns and PACs during the midterm election cycle, surpassing the total amount contributed by 3.7 million small donors and demonstrating that candidacies are directed by a handful of wealthy people.

The pattern is the opposite of the funding sources from 2010, when small-dollar donors out-contributed the top 100 donors by close to a 3-to-1 margin.  Not coincidentally, 2010 was also the year the Supreme Court destroyed protections for buying elections when it issued the Citizens United ruling, allowing unlimited financial contributions to political efforts by so-called “dark money” groups that hide their funders.  Total spending during the election is estimated to have surpassed $8.9 billion.

In a lengthy jeremiad titled “Experts: GOP Botched Early-Voting Ground Game,” right wing political news aggregator RealClearPolitics quotes some “election integrity” douchebag’s morose surrender to the reality that banking votes early helps push campaigns over the top in tight races.

“Given that the rules are what they are, if you aren’t playing by the rules, you are conceding an advantage to your opponent,” said “Honest Election Project” founder Jason Snead, while likening the early vote to “performance-enhancing drugs” advantaging Dem campaigns. “Unless states ban these drugs, then everyone’s got to use them, or they’re just going to constantly be behind.”

Fortunately that message of “they ‘cheat’ so we have to ‘cheat’ too” is still lost on the Holy Orange God Emperor of MAGAmerica, who in his Tuesday night 2024 campaign launch speech said if reelected he would “immediately demand voter ID, same day voting [emphasis added], and only paper ballots,” be imposed on election systems, which we’re going to go ahead and assume that he won’t be encouraging his fans to vote early in either the primary or general elections.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi will on Thursday announce her decision to step down from leadership of the Dem caucus, Tara Palmeri at Puck News reports. Pelosi will remain in Congress in sort of a “Speaker Emeritus” role, but she will have no formal position in House Dem leadership.

“If we could keep it about Hunter Biden–  This is kinda a big deal,” Republican Kentucky Congressman Jim Comer insists, outlining what the next two years of a Republican-led House will undertake, abandoning any pretense that they’re going to do things to help Americans and not run the House as a political attack machine promoting distractions and manufactured outrage.  “If we could keep it about Hunter Biden, that would be great.”

Fat former President Trump’s second moronic lawsuit against New York Attorney General Letitia James, filed earlier this month in a Florida court, has been moved to a federal court. As the Orange Pharaoh’s shitty luck would have it, the case has landed before South Florida Circuit Judge Donald Middlebrooks, the Bill Clinton appointee who tossed Trump’s insane lawsuit vs Hillary Clinton and dozens of other defendants over the 2016 election and the subsequent investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia that rightly cast doubt on his legitimacy as President of the United States.

Just last week Middlebrooks sanctioned dumbass MAGA lawyers Alina Habba and Peter Ticktin for $50,000 over their false inclusion of a defendant, Dem political consultant Charles Dolan, who had never had any connection to the Hillary 2016 campaign or the Russia investigation.

A group of Democratic consultants and strategists are building a “war room” to wage a public opinion battle agains the MAGA House GOP’s planned flurry of witch hunts against the Biden administration, called the “Congressional Integrity Project,” Politico reports.

CIP founder Kyle Herring told Politico the effort will include “rapid response teams,” investigative researchers, pollsters, and eventually a paid media campaign to put congressional Republicans “squarely on the defense,” and “investigate the investigators, expose their political motivations and the monied special interests supporting their work, and hold them accountable for ignoring the urgent priorities of all Americans in order to smear Joe Biden and do the political bidding of Trump and MAGA Republicans,” like Jim Jordan and the rest of his ilk.

FBI and Air Force special investigations agents earlier this month conducted raids on two homes belonging to Area 51 conspiracy theorist Joerg Arnu, owner of the “Dreamland Resort” website, a repository of research about the secret military installation, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports.

“This is an open and ongoing law enforcement investigation between the Las Vegas FBI and Air Force OSI,” Air Force Lt Col Bryon McGarry said in a statement said in a statement about the raids on Arnu’s homes in Las Vegas and Rachel, Nevada, a tiny town close to Area 51 where the “Little Ale’Inn” sells UFO-themed merchandise. The site, DreamlandResort.com, has been on the web since 1999. Arnu said declined to comment to the Review Journal Wednesday but said in a statement on the site he had been raided “without warning” while staying at the home in Rachel on November 3rd, and he “was only told that the search was related to images posted on my Area 51 website.”

Arizona Proposition 309, a ballot measure asking to eliminate the ability of registered voters who do not have a state or federally-issued photo ID with them when they vote in-person to provide other proof of identity to cast a ballot, failed to pass last, the AP projects.

The measure, which would also have required additional information to be added to mail in ballots, failed to pass by an estimated 20,000 votes, undoubtedly adding insult to injury to the MAGA conspiracy freaks who think their statewide candidates lost because of voter fraud.

In a Delaware courtroom defending his $56 billion compensation package from Tesla, Elon Musk testified that he intended to reduce his oversight of his new purchase, Twitter, and eventually hand off management to a new executive, Reuters reports.

Investors in Tesla sued in Delaware, where the company is incorporated, claiming Musk’s compensation package had a number of easily-achievable targets that triggered escalators, which he pushed through a compliant board he appointed.  Musk’s purchase of Twitter arose to further demonstrate Musk’s lack of attention and commitment to Tesla.

Musk said that the corporate restructuring at Twitter is almost complete and that he will then seek someone to become CEO of the social media giant.  When a user tweeted to former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey if he was interested in the job, Dorsey replied with one word:  “Nope.”

Saying the system incentivizes the wrong things in legal education, two of the nation’s most respected law schools are withdrawing from the rankings process by US News & World Report, a popular though highly-criticized benchmark, the Washington Post reports.

“The U.S. News rankings are profoundly flawed — they disincentivize programs that support public interest careers, champion need-based aid, and welcome working-class students into the profession,” Yale Law School Dean Heather Gerken wrote in a blog post Wednesday.  “We have reached a point where the rankings process is undermining the core commitments of the legal profession.”

Yale will retire from the rankings as the reigning champion, sitting at the top of this year’s edition.  Harvard slums it in fourth, likely drawn down by the behavior of alumni like Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis and Tom Cotton.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Ukraine sits in a highly advantageous position versus Russia both militarily and politically, giving it significant leverage should it choose to negotiate a peace with the Kremlin, CNN reports.

General Mark Milley said the Russian military was “really hurting bad” nine months after invading Ukraine in what Russian military leaders believed would be a rapid invasion and takeover of the nation.  The Russians, Milley noted, “have failed every single time” on their strategic goals.

Miley noted that with the recent military gains of the Ukrainian forces liberating lands the Russians secured in the early days of the war, when the Russians were repelled from capturing strategic cities like Kyiv, the political leadership of the Kremlin may be of the mindset to withdraw, making Ukraine’s continued support vital to pushing Russia out.

Talk about getting hit square in the face with the reality of the hatred directed at you:  former Vice President Mike Pence was greeted by CNN interviewer Jake Tapper with an image of the gallows some of the Republican-led domestic terrorists erected as their compatriots shouted to “Hang Mike Pence.”  Asked, “Is it still tough to see that?” by Tapper, Pence drones in a voice that would send a persistent insomniac into Dreamland, talking about how Donald Trump’s murderous mad angered him on the day, but now the entire thing saddens him.  And a sad Mike is sad.  Mother needs to flash him some ankle to get him out of his funk.

“This is so obviously a scam,” says Trump supporter and Hungarian tourism ambassador Tucker Carlson, seen here talking to a emasculated Republican whose balls he holds.  “I mean it’s an ideological jihad, a holy war being waged by some on the left against Russia for their own creepy, ideological reasons, but it’s also a money making opportunity for war profiteers including one prominent Democrat who’s trying to do an arms deal in Ukraine right now–we’ll tell you about that tomorrow–but I don’t understand how Congress can appropriate a single more dollar without an audit that tells us what happened to the other tens of billions you already sent.”

Tucker doesn’t explain how the Russian invasion of Ukraine is “a scam” when the Kremlin ordered it and tens of thousands of people–many civilians–are being killed by Russian forces.  And those “creepy, ideological reasons” for aiding Ukraine include helping a democratic government defend itself from an illegal invasion by Tucker’s idol.

Lefty fan favorite Congresswoman Katie Porter has defeated Republican Scott Baugh to win reelection in California’s 47th District, Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman projects.

Officials from NATO and Poland have confirmed that the missile attack that killed two Polish men working at an agricultural processing facility was actually an off-course Ukrainian air defense missile, the Washington Post reports.

“We have no evidence at the moment that it was a rocket launched by Russian forces,” Poland’s President Andrzej Duda said.  “However, there are many indications that it was a missile that was used by Ukraine’s antimissile defense.”

Investigators say the rocket is from an S-300 rocket system, manufactured during the Soviet era and currently used by both Russian and Ukrainian forces.  The missiles were reportedly fired to destroy some of the volley of Russian missiles fired from Russian territory Monday.

Perhaps President Joe Biden is speaking tongue-in-check congratulating Kevin McCarthy for being the head of a divisive, chaotic Republican House caucus.  But still, Biden split from the behavior of his predecessor by providing a civil kudos to his political opponent.  The President’s statement:

Last week’s elections demonstrated the strength and resilience of American democracy. There was a strong rejection of election deniers, political violence, and intimidation. There was an emphatic statement that, in America, the will of the people prevails.
I congratulate Leader McCarthy on Republicans winning the House majority, and am ready to work with House Republicans to deliver results for working families.
In this election, voters spoke clearly about their concerns: the need to lower costs, protect the right to choose, and preserve our democracy. As I said last week, the future is too promising to be trapped in political warfare. The American people want us to get things done for them. They want us to focus on the issues that matter to them and on making their lives better. And I will work with anyone – Republican or Democrat – willing to work with me to deliver results for them.

CNN projects Democratic Congresswoman Karen Bass has won the election to be the next mayor of Los Angeles, beating Republican billionaire Rick Caruso, a political dilettante who ran as a Democrat, using $100 million of his own money to try to buy the election. Bass becomes the first woman to lead the nation’s second largest city.  For the first time in history, the mayors of the four largest US cities–New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston–will be Black people.