Andrew McCabe, the former FBI deputy director fired by Donald Trump one day before he would qualify for a full pension, will receive his full pension under a settlement with the Justice Department, the New York Times reports.

McCabe will receive the balance of his pension benefits going back to the day he was fired in March 2018.  That will amount to $200,000 in cash; the Department of Justice will also pay his $500,000 in legal fees incurred following his firing.  The FBI will also expunge any reference to his firing in his personnel records, and it will award McCabe custom cufflinks and a display of his awards and medals, the customary parting gift for retiring senior officials.

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, Trump’s first attorney general, fired McCabe one day before he was fully vested in his pension based on a report that McCabe lied to the department’s inspector general about contact with a news reporter.  Justice Department lawyers did not find cause to bring criminal charges against McCabe.

The Marine lieutenant colonel who took to social media to complain about the senior leadership of the Marine Corps and the Biden Administration has pleaded guilty of six counts including conduct unbecoming an officer and disobeying an order, the Washington Post reports.

Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller admitted all actions he was charged with, explaining that his life began spiralling down after he posted his first video questioning Marine leadership and Biden policy after 13 US service members were killed during the Afghanistan pullout.  Scheller said he was shunned by other Marine officers, and his wife left him.

Scheller also pleaded guilty to charges of disrespect toward superior commissioned officers, willfully disobeying a superior commissioned officer, and dereliction in the performance of duties.  With his plea agreement, the maximum sentence he can receive at his Friday sentencing hearing is a letter of reprimand and seizure of two-thirds of his pay for the next twelve months, equalling tens of thousands of dollars.

WSVN has the story.

Was a close contest between this headline and that “experts” say Biden can’t save Christmas (on the lefthand side), but mind-meltingly fucking frivolous AOC coverage wins out every time.

“The Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court releases ‘discussion materials’ on membership and size of court, term limits, court’s role, and case selection and review. Holding a public meeting tomorrow to discuss further” reports Bloomberg White House correspondent Jen Epstein.

Check out the documentation here. National Zero will carry the livestream Friday at 10:00 AM EST.

NBC News: “A top administrator with the Carroll Independent School District in Southlake advised teachers last week that if they have a book about the Holocaust in their classroom, they should also offer students access to a book from an ‘opposing’ perspective, according to an audio recording obtained by NBC News. Gina Peddy, the Carroll school district’s executive director of curriculum and instruction, made the comment Friday afternoon during a training session on which books teachers can have in classroom libraries. The training came four days after the Carroll school board, responding to a parent’s complaint, voted to reprimand a fourth grade teacher who had kept an anti-racism book in her classroom. A Carroll staff member secretly recorded the Friday training and shared the audio with NBC News.”

“‘Just try to remember the concepts of [House Bill] 3979,” Peddy said in the recording, referring to a new Texas law that requires teachers to present multiple perspectives when discussing ‘widely debated and currently controversial” issues. ‘And make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust,’ Peddy continued, ‘that you have one that has an opposing, that has other perspectives.’ ‘How do you oppose the Holocaust?’ one teacher said in response. ‘Believe me,’ Peddy said. ‘That’s come up.’ Another teacher wondered aloud if she would have to pull down “Number the Stars” by Lois Lowry, or other historical novels that tell the story of the Holocaust from the perspective of victims. It’s not clear if Peddy heard the question in the commotion or if she answered.”

Through a multi-step process, an individual took the records of at least three educators, decoded the HTML source code, and viewed the SSN of those specific educators.

We notified the Cole County prosecutor and the Highway Patrol’s Digital Forensic Unit will investigate. pic.twitter.com/2hkZNI1wXE

— Governor Mike Parson (@GovParsonMO) October 14, 2021

New Yorker reporter Isaac Chotiner: “It seems like you’re saying to the people of New Hampshire that if you are elected in 2022, and are serving in 2024, when certification comes before the Senate again, you wouldn’t just talk the talk – you would walk the walk. Is that accurate?”

Don Bolduc: “Oh, absolutely it’s accurate. Everybody I talk to believes that in me. They tell me. They go, ‘I believe you’re going to do what you’re doing. I believe that you speak from the heart. I believe that you believe in God, family, community, country, that you believe our institutions have been undermined over the last fifty years, and we fundamentally have to get people back in office that come from the people, that relate to the people, and, oh, by the way, don’t want to be career politicians and will come home after they serve two terms.’ They’re absolutely right.”

Read more here. Don Bolduc is another potential nightmare for Moscow Mitch to add to his headache with Herschel Walker, as the much more electable current New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu still hasn’t officially entered the race for the nomination, while Trump inched ever so closely to endorsing Bolduc for the race in a statement last month.

The reader is introduced to the site ConservativeBrief.com when a former bit player, a guy most famous for being a convicted federal felon and now desperate for relevance, tweets with inane clickbait headline because that’s what they paid him (and other nobodies) to do.

Massive voter fraud uncovered, charges filed in swing statehttps://t.co/wCzpRCpfcg

— George Papadopoulos (@GeorgePapa19) October 14, 2021

The intended audience says to themselves “HOLY SHIT! THEY FOUND VOTIN FRAUD IN PENNSTILLVANIA! THAT PATRIOT GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS SAY THEY FOUND IT! HOT DAMN!”

“Federal prosecutors in Kansas have launched a criminal grand jury investigation into a retired Kansas City police detective who is the subject of long-swirling allegations that he ‘exploited and terrorized’ Black residents of the city’s north end for decades, CNN has learned.

“Roger Golubski is accused of being ‘a dirty cop who used the power of his badge to exploit vulnerable black women, including black women who worked as prostitutes,’ according to a 2019 civil complaint filed by a man exonerated of double murder charges investigated by Golubski. The veteran detective, who retired from the Kansas City, Kansas, police department in 2010 at the rank of captain, was also accused of being on the payroll of a local drug kingpin and of framing people for crimes they did not commit.

“The unproven allegations have roiled the community for years and recently attracted the attention of hip-hop mogul Jay-Z. The rapper’s social justice-oriented group, Team Roc, took out a full-page ad in the Washington Post last week calling the alleged police corruption in Kansas City ‘one of the worst examples of abuse of power in U.S. history.’  Golubski, 69, has not been charged with any crimes nor faced any discipline in connection with the highly public — and highly inflammatory — allegations against him. During a civil court deposition last year, he repeatedly invoked his constitutional right against self-incrimination, pleading the Fifth over and over again. An attorney representing Golubski in the civil case declined comment, citing the pending litigation.

“While the city’s newspaper and police reform activists have been clamoring for action, prosecutors have been quietly calling witnesses to testify about Golubski since at least August, two sources familiar with the matter told CNN.”

“Attorneys for President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, its onetime attorney Rudy Giuliani and conservative media figures asked a judge Wednesday to dismiss a defamation lawsuit by a former employee of Dominion Voting Systems who argues he lost his job after being named in false charges as trying to rig the 2020 election. Eric Coomer, a former security director at Colorado-based Dominion, says in the lawsuit he was driven into hiding by death threats after the Trump campaign and others publicized an unverified report that Coomer told activists of the Antifa movement in a pre-election telephone call that the vote could be fixed for Joe Biden.”

“Despite repeated claims and lawsuits, there has been no evidence that the 2020 election was rigged or of widespread fraud. Coomer’s Denver District Court lawsuit names the Trump campaign, Giuliani and onetime campaign lawyer Sidney Powell, conservative columnist Michelle Malkin, the website Gateway Pundit, Colorado activist Joseph Oltmann and One America News Network” – AP.

LGBTQ rights activist Jessica Shortall reports that the Texas state house committee on Youth Health & Safety on Thursday passed a bill that would allow for the inspection of girl athletes’ genitals when someone believes that individual to be transgender when they are participating in high school or grade school sports teams.

State House Bill 25, sponsored by Republican Valoree Swanson, would ban transgender children from participating in sports and other school-related activities.  It would also provide the opportunity for individuals to challenge the gender identity of female athletes, who would then have to undergo a genital inspection and other invasive procedures if they could not produce medical evidence establishing their gender.

In committee testimony, Swanson stated that transgender youth are taking over girls’ sports in the state, but when challenged, she could not name a single incident when a transgender athlete competed in the state.  Swanson referred to transgender tennis player Renee Richards, who competed briefly on the women’s professional tour in the 1970s, as an example; however, Richards competing did not open floodgates of transgender athletes participating in women’s tennis.

“Committee announces it will hold Steve Bannon in contempt for not complying with their subpoena. ‘The Select Committee will not tolerate defiance of our subpoenas, so we must move forward with proceedings to refer Mr. Bannon for criminal contempt’. The committee will meet Tuesday night to vote on adopting a contempt report” Axios’s Alayna Treene reports.

ABC News:  “Former President Donald Trump must sit for a videotaped deposition next week as part of a lawsuit involving his anti-immigrant rhetoric, a judge in the Bronx ordered.

“A group of Mexican protesters said they were assaulted during a rally outside Trump Tower in September 2015 over the then-candidate’s comments that Mexican immigrants were criminals and rapists.  The lawsuit named Trump, his campaign, his former head of security Keith Schiller, and others.

“‘Donald J. Trump shall appear for a deposition October 18, 2021 at 10 a.m. … or, in the event of illness or emergency, on another mutually agreed to date on or before October 31, 2021,’ Judge Doris Gonzalez’s order said.  Trump faces the prospect of another deposition by the end of the year as part of a defamation lawsuit filed by former ‘Apprentice’ contestant Summer Zervos, who alleges that Trump sexually assaulted her at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 2007, which Trump denies. Zervos claims that Trump defamed her during his campaign when he said she lied about the alleged assault.”

Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer opens a segment with “So it is happening with more infrequency from the lab in Wuhan to the warnings of melting glaciers. Scientists are getting it wrong in cases. Does the public have reason to lose trust as a result?” before introducing Fox radio anchor Brett Larson and continuing, “So we came across a story the other day with Glacier National Park up in Montana, they had a big sign out there warning the glaciers were going to disappear by 2020… and then they go in and take the signs down and we said ‘Brett, why don’t ya look into that?'”

Larson picks up with “Haha! You know it’s, uh, it is an interesting case… You know it kind of reminds me of when we do a forecast for a hurricane” and goes into a boring hypothetical about a hurricane that veers off from all three possible paths forecasted by TV meteorologists, continuing “They put those signs up about a decade ago sayng that the glaciers weren’t going to be here by 2020 because of the current model for global climate change. Turns out they weren’t right [blonde laughs] 85 percent of the glaciers have shrunk and they continue to [shrink] and they left the signs up because of the funding for the…” and Hemmer interjects with “What percentage of the glacierrrr… went bye-bye?”

Larson answers with “About 35 percent of it… So it’s it’s still there. But the thing is – and I am the least anti-science person around and why would I be because without science we wouldn’t have TV, we wouldn’t have these lights over our heads. But science is supposed to be questioned, you’re supposed to- that’s the whole point. A scientist doesn’t come forward and say ‘this is happening because of this’ and if they do… IIIIII’m not gonna trust that scientist.”

TLDR: Because climate scientists overestimated the rate of the still currently ongoing decomposition of glaciers in Montana, you don’t have to listen to other shit they say.

A reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch identified an error in a Missouri state agency’s website that exposed thousands of residents’ Social Security numbers.  The newspaper held off on publishing the story to prevent hackers from leveraging the problem, and it notified the agency of the error on Tuesday.

Now, according to the Missouri Independent, that reporter is facing prosecution as Republican Missouri Governor Mike Parson alleges the reporter actually hacked into the website for malicious purposes, and he’s referring the case to state law enforcement for investigation and prosecution.

“The state does not take this matter lightly,” Parson said Thursday at a press conference.  “This administration is standing up against any and all perpetrators who attempt to steal personal information and harm Missourians.”  He referred the case to the Cole County Prosecutor and has asked the Missouri State Highway Patrol to investigate.

On December 1st 2015, then-Onion sister site Clickhole, a satire of sites like BuzzFeed and Upworthy (now owned by the Cards Against Humanity company) published an article titled “Awesome: When A Little Girl Told Neil DeGrasse Tyson She Wanted To Live On Jupiter, He Completely Shut Her Down” which went exactly how it sounds, complete with fake tweets of the astrophysicist ranting things like “Things [fictional 8 year old girl] #Liza thinks: ‘I want to live on Jupiter and have a massive ammonia storm immediately obliterate me'” and “You know where’s a good place to live? A planet where the AVERAGE TEMPERATURE is -234 degrees Fahrenheit”.

On Tuesday CNN reported “Demi Lovato is standing up for extraterrestrials. The singer and actor who identifies as nonbinary has a docuseries on Peacock titled ‘Unidentified with Demi Lovato’ in which they explore what life there may be beyond this planet. In an interview with Pedestrian, Lovato explained that they do not believe that beings from another planet mean to harm humans. ‘I really think that if there was anything out there that would want to do that to us, it would have happened by now, but I think that we have to stop calling them aliens because aliens is a derogatory term for anything. That’s why I like to call them E.T.s!”

Real life Neil deGrasse Tyson was nicer to Lovato than fake Neil deGrasse Tyson was to a fictional 8 year old girl when asked to comment on Lovato’s view on politically correct labels for aliens in an interview with TMZ on Wednesday. Not much nicer though. Check it out here.

NRCC fundraising text spotted by former Forbes, future Axios Congress reporter Andrew Solender.

For the first time since the coronavirus pandemic swept the country in twenty months ago, first time unemployment claims in the United States dropped below 300,000 last week, another sign that the workforce is preparing to rebound.

NBC News reports that 293,000 people applied for first-time benefits during the week ending October 9th, the lowest since March 14, 2020.  The Department of Labor also said that 2.59 million people received unemployment benefits, the lowest for the year.  The unemployment claims were lower than the 318,000 forecasted by economists.

The unemployment report comes on the heels of a September job creation report that showed a below-forecast 194,000 new jobs created, but a net gain of 363,000 with revisions to previous months.  Additionally, a record 4.3 million people voluntarily quit their jobs in August, demonstrating Americans confidence in being able to get new jobs that better fit their employment goals.

“Schumer announces that the Freedom to Vote Act, the Klobuchar and Manchin legislation, will get a vote next week. Schumer notes Manchin has been talking with Republicans, trying to garner 10 votes” reports Vice’s Elizabeth Landers.