More than 800 people joined, renewed memberships or made donations to the far-right nationalist group the Oath Keepers in the days surrounding the January 6th domestic terrorist attack on the Capitol for which multiple members of the group are facing conspiracy charges, the Guardian reports.

Discovered through information released from a hack, the surge in membership for the group came as founder Stewart Rhodes promoted the activities of the group as “Oath Keepers Deploying to DC to Protect Events, Speakers, & Attendees on Jan 5-6: Time to Stand!” on its website.

Many of those joining or donating are former members of the military, with one donor identified as a former lieutenant colonel in the Marines and another being a Marine veteran and a former Blackwater contractor.  A Republican candidate for Wyoming was also in the data dump. 

The volcano on the Spanish island of La Palma opened a new fissure overnight, with eight new earthquakes measuring up to magnitude 3.5 on the Richter scale shaking the island, the Associated Press reports.

More than six thousand people have been evacuated from the region in the immediate area around the volcano, which has produced significant lava flows.  The 250-square mile island has a population of 85,000.  No deaths or significant injuries due to the eruption have been reported.

Part of the Canary Islands, La Palma has largely continued continued to operate as the volcano bubbles.  Spanish officials are promoting the volcano as a tourist attraction, but local residents are advised to stay inside.

https://youtu.be/_p1C3iAf-3k
Said the demented one-term president on right wing MAGAchurch pastor Gene Bailey’s stupid red telephone YouTube interview: “The media is corrupt, pastor, you know it as well as I do, and many people know it and probably the ones that know it best are the media itself. They are corrupt, they don’t tell the truth and they are, in fact, the enemy of the people, and it’s a terrible thing. We had a tremendous audit, it was done by the Senate, the Arizona Senate, and they’re brave people, and the findings were unbelievable, so the media doesn’t want to call it. I think they called it findings, said they had findings, and the findings were just brutal, and yet the media doesn’t want to report the findings. It’s really a very sad thing for our country.”

“Dr. Anthony Fauci faced a tough grilling over whether or not he should step aside as his critics view him as a deterrent in the Biden administration’s ongoing effort to vaccinate Americans. During Wednesday’s appearance on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, Fauci was confronted by a list of COVID-era ‘controversies,’ including the pause of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, the ivermectin debate, the avoidance of natural immunity as well as his ‘noble lie’ discouraging Americans not to wear masks in the early months of the pandemic to prevent an N95 shortage.”

“‘I have lost confidence in the CDC and the FDA and I actually believe a lot of Americans, a significant part of America now have lost confidence in you, Dr. Fauci,’ Hewitt began. ‘Is there a point where you will say, ‘I do more harm than good because people don’t listen to me anymore,’ and step aside?’ ‘No. Absolutely, unequivocally no, Hugh. Sorry,’ Fauci reacted. ‘When you have an evolving situation and data are rapidly evolving in something that is unprecedented and unknown, you have to evolve with it and look at the data as it exists now and make to the best of your ability a decision, a recommendation, all the kinds of things that go into the evolution'” Fox News reports.

Fauci’s been mostly off the right wing’s radar for the last few weeks as the rage-a-holics decided to switch things up and go berserk on another high-level apolitical federal bureaucrat, General Mark Milley. The white rage at those two is inextricably linked to their inability to cope with the loss of their Orange God Emperor, shrieking over underlings “sabotaging” him when in reality Trump destroyed his own presidency precisely by not listening to them.

“Justice Brett Kavanaugh has tested positive for COVID-19, the Supreme Court said this morning. He is fully vaccinated and has no symptoms” SCOTUSblog reports.

Cheerleader “correspondents” at CNN. No reporting. https://t.co/z4jVfj0qdU

— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) October 1, 2021

“In the weeks after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, the leader of far-right group the Oath Keepers encouraged members to borrow money to hoard fuel, in advance of what the group claimed would be a Biden administration attack on the power grid” reports the Daily Beast.

“All the while, the group was making almost daily withdrawals from a crowdfunding site, totaling nearly $30,000. A leaked trove of Oath Keepers messages, uploaded by the transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets this week, reveals some of the group’s communications after members participated in the Capitol attack. in the leak are paranoid email blasts from the group’s founder, Stuart Rhodes, who told members that the Biden White House was about to ‘conduct a ‘night of the long knives’ decapitation strike’ on Oath Keepers under the guise of a massive power outage. Those conspiratorial fears were frequently accompanied by appeals to spend money.”

“One week after the Capitol attack, while Donald Trump still held office, Rhodes sent an email pleading for the then-president to invoke the Insurrection Act in order to cling to power, leaked emails show. (Although the message is addressed to Trump, it is unclear whether Rhodes sent it to him or merely included its text in an email to Oath Keepers.) Part of Rhodes’s justification, a mere seven days after the Capitol riot, was the supposed threat from the left, which he thought would begin attacking pro-Trump families. ‘The domestic enemy wolves will be at the door of all your supporters as well,’ Rhodes wrote. ‘Liberty-loving American constitutionalists will have no choice but to honor their oaths and defend both the Constitution and their families when the communists and obedient Deep State minions come for them (as they are already planning on doing).'”

AP: “Merck & Co. said Friday that its experimental COVID-19 pill reduced hospitalizations and deaths by half in people recently infected with the coronavirus and that it would soon ask health officials in the U.S. and around the world to authorize its use. If cleared, Merck’s drug would be the first pill shown to treat COVID-19, a potentially major advance in efforts to fight the pandemic.”

“All COVID-19 therapies now authorized in the U.S. require an IV or injection. Merck and its partner Ridgeback Biotherapeutics said early results showed patients who received the drug, called molnupiravir, within five days of COVID-19 symptoms had about half the rate of hospitalization and death as patients who received a dummy pill. The study tracked 775 adults with mild-to-moderate COVID-19 who were considered higher risk for severe disease due to health problems such as obesity, diabetes or heart disease. Among patients taking molnupiravir, 7.3% were either hospitalized or died at the end of 30 days, compared with 14.1% of those getting the dummy pill. There were no deaths in the drug group after that time period compared with eight deaths in the placebo group, according to Merck. The results were released by the company and have not been peer reviewed. Merck said it plans to present them at a future medical meeting.”

Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill into law Thursday that enacted a number reforms to policing and police departments in the state, NBC News reports.

The new law includes a provision that allows the state to decertify officers who have been found guilty of misconduct, preventing them from leaving one city’s police department and getting a job at a different city’s force.

The bill raises the minimum age for police officers from 18 to 21.  It also proscribes times when police departments can use beanbag rounds or rubber bullets when responding to unrest, and it bans the use of various chokeholds.  In another response to George Floyd’s murder at the hand of a Minneapolis police officer, the bill required police officers to report when their colleagues use excessive force.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer sent a message to Democratic representatives that that no additional vote will happen Thursday night, putting to bed hope that the Biden infrastructure plan will get a vote on the House floor tonight.

Daily Mail:  “An elderly Japanese man developed ‘restless anal syndrome’ after catching Covid, in what doctors claim is a world first.  The unidentified 77-year-old was admitted to Tokyo Medical University Hospital after testing positive for Covid.   Despite his age, he did not require any oxygen during his stay and managed to start breathing normally again 21 days after being admitted.

“However a problem of another kind emerged several weeks after he was discharged.  The man began to suffer ‘deep anal discomfort’ about 10cm above his perineum, the region between the genitals and the anus. This gave him an ‘essential urge to move’, according to medics who treated him.   Defecation did nothing to relieve the man’s discomfort, wrote Dr Itaru Nakamura who detailed the case in BMC Infectious Diseases. …

“Dr Nakamura said the symptoms of ‘suffering’ in the anal region; the urge to move, the worsening with rest, improvement with exercise but worsening at evening, led medics to diagnose him with restless anal syndrome.  They classified this as a variant of the relatively common condition restless leg syndrome, and directly attributed it as being caused by his Covid infection.  Dr Nakamura said how Covid impacted patients’ nervous system was not fully understood a number of neurological conditions had been reported following infection.

Ok so everyone is making deals tonight.

Here’s my offer to the Speaker.

I’ll vote YES if you..

1. Decertify election

2. Trump back in the WH

3. Fire Fauci

4. Expel Maxine

5. Investigate Ilhan

6. Build the Wall – close the border

7. End mask/vaccine mandates.

Deal?

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) October 1, 2021

Perhaps it came after reading the coverage on National Zero, but the Republican mayor of Anchorage, Alaska has now apologized for supporting the use of Star of David patches from the Holocaust by anti-mask advocates disrupting public meetings, the Associated Press reports.

“I understand that we should not trivialize or compare what happened during the Holocaust to a mask mandate, and I want to apologize for any perception that my statements support or compare what happened to the Jewish people in Nazi Germany,” Bronson said Thursday after news of his support of the patches made national news.

“Nearly 1,000 police battled Thursday for control of an Ecuador prison where rioting left at least 116 inmates dead, some of them decapitated, as rival drug gangs went to war armed with guns and grenades. Another 80 prisoners were wounded, according to Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso, in one of the deadliest prison battles in South American history. The riot broke out Tuesday at a prison complex in the port city of Guayaquil between prisoners believed to have links to Mexican drug gangs – mainly the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels” AFP reports.

“The police service tweeted Thursday that 900 officers and members of tactical units were engaged in a ‘mega-operation’ to restore order. Earlier they said 400 police were helping to “guarantee security” in the complex. On Wednesday at least two officers were injured when rioting inmates, armed with guns, attacked police sent in to retake control of the facility. Soldiers and tanks are also stationed outside the jail, where hundreds of worried family members have gathered, desperate for news from the men locked up inside. ‘It is a very painful thing… They say people have had their heads taken off,’ said Juana Pinto, who is seeking news about her inmate son. Cecilia Quiroz, a relative of another prisoner, added: ‘For us family members, this is a horrible thing… We do not know what to do. We feel powerless, not to be able to help them.'”

Anchorage Daily News: “Opponents of a mask ordinance wore yellow Stars of David and shouted at Anchorage Assembly members, and four people were arrested during a second night of heated public testimony on a proposed mask ordinance for the city. The testimony stretched until midnight and the Assembly did not vote on the ordinance. Another meeting is scheduled for Thursday.”

“As Alaska grapples with its worst COVID-19 surge yet, the ordinance would require masks in indoor public spaces and outdoors at large events. Many spoke out against the proposal, which has drawn intense pushback from Mayor Dave Bronson, who has pledged not to enact any mandates to slow the spread of COVID-19. But many others urged the Assembly to move forward with a mask mandate. Also during Wednesday’s meeting, Bronson defended the use of yellow Stars of David by people opposed to the mask ordinance. ‘We’ve referenced the Star of David quite a bit here tonight, but there was a formal message that came out within Jewish culture about that and the message was, ‘never again.’ That’s an ethos. And that’s what that star really means is, ‘We will not forget, this will never happen again.’ And I think us borrowing that from them is actually a credit to them,’ Bronson said. In reply to an earlier question asking if Bronson supported testifiers wearing stars, the mayor’s spokesman said in an emailed statement that ‘the mayor’s expectation is that people show respect to all cultures and religions.'”

A study by researchers at the University of Washington found that killings at the hands of police officers have been underreported or misclassified over forty years, and that the actual number may be nearly double the reported amount, the New York Times reports.

The data, from 1980 to 2018, shows that as many as 31,000 people were killed by police over that 40 year period, but only 17,000 were actually reported as such.  Researchers compared data from the National Vital Statistics System to information collected by independent groups that tracked police killings and found less than half of the deaths were classified as such on official records.

The study throws into question the relationships between police and the people who certify information on death certificates, the local coroners.  It also will lead to renewed calls for authorities to investigate police violence, particularly against Black communities.

CAN KICKED! WOOOHOOO!

With Trump World claiming the investigation being led by Special Counsel to the US Attorney John Durham would uncover myriad plot to undermine Donald Trump, the sole indictment filed by Durham so far is being questioned for its veracity, the New York Times reports.

Durham charged Michael Sussman, a former lawyer for the Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign, with making false statements to the FBI during the course of its investigation into an alleged signal between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, the largest public bank in Russia.  Supposedly, Sussman claimed he wasn’t representing a client when in fact, he was.

In a lengthy 27-page indictment, Durham laid out a scenario with four data scientists dismissing a signal between a server at the Trump Organization and a counterpart at Alfa Bank.  Durham claimed Sussman intentionally misled investigators about this point to push the FBI to open a probe into the two servers.

During last year, Republican Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson paid just $2,105 in state income tax despite having reported income of more than $450,000, making his effective tax payment at less than one-half of one percent, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.

Johnson, who is reportedly weighing a reelection campaign for his third term in the Senate seat in 2022, has a reported net worth of between $16.5 million and $78.1 million.  In previous years, Johnson reported paying $60,000 to the state.

“The senator had a smaller tax payment because he had less income to report in 2017,” said Vanessa Ambrosini, a spokeswoman for Johnson, told the Journal Sentinel. “The senator will not be providing media with his tax returns.”