New York Times: “The Federal Election Commission has dismissed Republican accusations that Twitter violated election laws in October by blocking people from posting links to an unsubstantiated New York Post article about Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son Hunter Biden, in a decision that is likely to set a precedent for future cases involving social media sites and federal campaigns. The F.E.C. determined that Twitter’s actions regarding the Hunter Biden article had been undertaken for a valid commercial reason, not a political purpose, and were thus allowable, according to a document outlining the decision obtained by The New York Times.”

“The commission’s ruling, which was made last month behind closed doors and is set to become public soon, provides further flexibility to social media giants like Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat to control what is shared on their platforms regarding federal elections. The suppression of the article about Hunter Biden caused an avalanche of conservative criticism in October and prompted accusations that the tech company was improperly aiding the Biden presidential campaign, including a formal complaint by the Republican National Committee that said Twitter’s actions amounted to an ‘illegal in-kind contribution’ to the campaign. But the F.E.C. disagreed. The commission said Twitter had ‘credibly explained’ that blocking the article’s distribution was a commercial decision and that the move followed existing policies related to hacked materials, according to the ‘factual and legal analysis’ provided to the parties involved in the complaint. Twitter actually reversed course within a day of its decision to block distribution of the Hunter Biden article, and its chief executive, Jack Dorsey, has called the initial move a ‘mistake.'”

“Andrew Neil has stepped down as chairman of GB News, it has been confirmed. The journalist and broadcaster, 72, has been absent from the channel after announcing a break two weeks into its launch. He will continue to contribute to GB News as a regular guest commentator. He said: ‘I am sorry to go but I have concluded it’s time to reduce my commitments on a number of fronts. Over the summer I’ve had time to reflect on my extensive portfolio of interests and decided it was time to cut back. I wish GB News well in continuing to fulfill its founding promise and mission to reach audiences currently underserved by existing news broadcasters'” The Scotsman reports.

Apparently this is a pretty big deal as Neil was supposed to be one of the respectable-ish names added to the lineup of GB News after its launch in June. GBN itself was supposed to be the British version of Fox News (though Murdoch is not involved) and one of its founders is notorious Brexit scumbag Nigel Farage. The launch has been a complete clusterfuck.

“Our Country is far more susceptible to attack by outside terrorist groups than ever before. Our enemies all over the World are inspired by what just happened in Afghanistan – the removal of the Military first, and our ‘gift’ of $85 billion in Military equipment. We are no longer respected after the pathetic and incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan. It will be a long time before we gain our reputation back. Just nine months ago, the United States was viewed as being strong, and now we are being viewed as weak and stupid. The Taliban has totally retaken Afghanistan – a far more potent position than they had 20 years ago, after we spent trillions of dollars, with hundreds of thousands of lives lost (on both sides). This loss emboldens not only foreign terrorists, but also Antifa and BLM. It’s sad that this is not what you hear from the Fake News Media who are only interested in talking about ‘terrorism’ from the right and protecting an illegitimate president. Our reputation is gone, our Borders are broken, inflation is raging, and COVID continues, even with the vaccines (developed under ‘Trump’), to ravage our Nation” rants the bitter Orange God Emperor.

Said Tucker Carlson in an interview with MAGA blogger Dave Rubin: “Well it’s – I guess I would ask myself, like, I mean I lie if I’m really cornered or something. I lie. I really try not to. I try never to lie on TV. I just don’t – I don’t like lying. I certainly do it, you know, out of weakness or whatever. But to systematically lie like that without asking yourself why am I doing this? So if these people ask themselves why am I doing this? And they say, well, I want to protect the system because I really believe in the system” and there you have it. Tucker admits to lying to the Fox News audience.

Republican Texas Congressman Ronny “Dr. Feelgood” Jackson, who was known for doling out pills without prescriptions when he was the White House physician, told Fox & Friends hosts that he got the coronavirus vaccine only because of the mandate enacted by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.  Without realizing it, Jackson just demonstrated that mandates work in getting people vaccinated.

USCP Press Release: “This morning the United States Capitol Police arrested a California man who had multiple knives in his truck near the Democratic National Committee headquarters. ‘This is good police work plain and simple,’ said Chief Tom Manger. ‘We applaud the officers’ keen observation and the teamwork that resulted in this arrest.’ Around midnight, a Special Operation Division Officer was on patrol when he noticed a Dodge Dakota pickup truck, with a swastika and other white supremacist symbols painted on it, outside of the DNC headquarters.”

“The truck did not have a license plate. Instead, a picture of an American flag was placed where the license plate should have been. The Capitol Police officer pulled over the truck along the 500 block of South Capitol Street, SW. The officers noticed a bayonet and machete, which are illegal in Washington, D.C., inside the truck. The driver, 44-year-old Donald Craighead of Oceanside, California was arrested for Possession of Prohibited Weapons. Craighead said he was ‘on patrol’ and began talking about white supremacist ideology and other rhetoric pertaining to white supremacy. ‘This is an excellent example of the work our officers do every day,’ said Operational Services Bureau Deputy Chief Jason Bell. ‘We are so proud of these officers for their vigilance.’ The USCP Investigations Division is continuing our investigation on the suspect.”

“Discrimination against black people and Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities in a controversial suite of new laws is ‘objectively justified’, the government has claimed. Home Office documents published on Monday admitted that different groups would be disproportionately impacted by measures in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Bill. They include enhanced stop and search powers and the criminalisation of ‘residing on land without consent in a vehicle’.”

“The Home Office admitted that proposed Serious Violence Reduction Orders (SVROs), which would allow police to stop and search people based on their previous offending history without the ‘reasonable grounds’ currently required, would disproportionately affect black people. But its equalities impact assessment added: ‘Any indirect difference on treatment on the grounds of race is anticipated to be potentially positive and objectively justified as a proportionate means of achieving our legitimate aim of reducing serious violence and preventing crime'” – The Independent.

The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta writes a deeply moving, often crushing, profile of his cousin, Glenn Vogt, former general manager of the Windows on the World in the North Tower of the World Trade Center and his twenty year struggle with survivor’s guilt after 79 of his employees perished in the attack, as Vogt would have been there had his son not overslept and missed his school bus that morning.

Daily Beast: “A hospitalized COVID-19 denier whose attempts to be treated with deworming drug ivermectin inspired a far-right harassment campaign against her hospital died early Monday, sparking cries among QAnon conspiracy theorists that she had been the victim of ‘medical murder.’ Before her COVID-19 diagnosis, Veronica Wolski was a prominent Illinois booster of the QAnon conspiracy theory who recorded herself hanging pro-QAnon banners over bridges and flouting mask laws in stores, once declaring, ‘I have never once worn a mask.'”

“After she was hospitalized in Chicago two weeks ago with COVID-19, Wolski’s supporters in QAnon and other far-right groups besieged the medical center with hundreds of phone calls and even some death threats, demanding that she receive ivermectin, whose effectiveness as a COVID-19 treatment is unproven. Top QAnon leaders like former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn embraced her cause, with pro-Trump lawyer Lin Wood calling the hospital and demanding she receive ivermectin shortly before Wolski’s death. On Monday morning, Wood announced in a post on social networking app Telegram that Wolski had died shortly after midnight and called her death a ‘medical murder,’ urging his followers to ‘go to war.'”

“Trump, in the exclusive Fox News interview, said that during his administration, more people were interested in getting vaccinated against COVID-19. ‘If you remember, when I was president, there were literally lines of people wanting to take it,’ Trump said, pointing to vaccine hesitancy among some Americans. ‘Now, you have a different situation, and it’s very bad.’ Trump went on to point to comments made by some Democrats, including future Vice President Kamala Harris, who said they may not trust the effectiveness of a vaccine that he was pushing” Fox News reports.

“‘Of course, they famously said, if Trump came up with it, I’ll never take it,’ Trump recalled. ‘They disparaged the vaccine, and now they wonder why people aren’t wanting to take it?’ He continued. ‘It’s a disgrace.’ ‘Look, it was one of my greatest achievements doing it in less than nine months instead of five years, or maybe never,’ Trump said, referring to the approval timeline for some vaccines at the FDA. ‘We saved millions of people all over the world.’ But pointing to those against getting a jab, Trump said: ‘They don’t trust this president, and that’s why they’re not taking it.'”

What then-Senator Kamala Harris said on CNN on September 5th 2020 was “I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump and it would have to be a credible source of information that talks about the efficacy and the reliability of whatever he’s talking about, I will not take his word for it” because she, like most Americans with education and common sense believed at the time, was that Trump was full of shit (like he is and was about virtually every other topic) and desperate to get reelected. It was really surprising to find out he was telling the truth that a COVID-19 vaccine was coming.

Politico Playbook obtained a copy of Melania Trump’s Chief of Staff/White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham’s forthcoming conscience/reputation cleanser book, reporting: “At 1:25 p.m. on Jan. 6, soon after rioters had broken through barricades outside of the Capitol, Melania Trump received a text message from her then-chief of staff, Stephanie Grisham. ‘Do you want to tweet that peaceful protests are the right of every American, but there is no place for lawlessness and violence?’ Grisham asked the first lady. A minute later, Melania replied with a one-word answer: ‘No.’ At that moment, she was at the White House preparing for a photo shoot of a rug she had selected, according to exclusive excerpts of Grisham’s forthcoming book.”

“Grisham, a years-long Trump loyalist who resigned within hours of that text exchange, also writes that she asked Melania a couple times whether she should reach out to Jill Biden during the transition to set up the traditional inauguration tea. But instead of setting up the meeting, Melania told her that they should ‘see what the West Wing does.’ The reason, according to Grisham: Melania, like her husband, believed the election was illegitimate. Grisham joined the Trump campaign in 2015 and, despite her misgivings, remained with the White House until close to the end. She writes that Melania’s response to her text on Jan. 6 ‘broke’ her since she had long defended the first lady against accusations that she was a Marie Antoinette-type dilettante.”

“Now, Grisham writes, she sees Melania like ‘the doomed French queen. Dismissive. Defeated. Detached.’ Though it shouldn’t be a huge surprise that Melania stood by her husband on important questions like the election, Grisham writes in the book that she was ‘shocked’ to learn that Melania seemed to share Donald Trump’s view that the election was rigged. Melania told Grisham that ‘something bad happened’ and that the election results weren’t legitimate. She didn’t listen to Grisham when she tried to explain to her that there are small irregularities in all elections but there was no grand conspiracy to unfairly remove Trump from office, according to the book.”

“It’s the third rail of Republican politics in Wisconsin right now. Do not praise anything that Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has done, especially his response to the coronavirus pandemic. But there was Ryan Owens, a Republican candidate for attorney general, doing just that last year in a podcast produced by the University of Wisconsin-Madison political science department. ‘We have to keep our eye on this,’ Owens told the ‘1050 Bascom’ podcast on April 6, 2020. ‘The governor, to his credit, was ahead of the game when it came to the ‘safer at home’ order,’ Owens said of the Evers administration’s March 2020 measure closing schools and nonessential businesses due to COVID-19. ‘We can quibble around the edges about the treatment of religion and things like that with it, but he was well ahead of a lot of states when he issued that order, to his credit.’ But Owens, a political science professor at UW-Madison, didn’t stop there.”

“‘I’m glad I’m not the one who’s having to make these decisions right now because no one is happy about them,’ Owens said. The statements are particularly surprising because Owens has sharply criticized his Republican opponent, Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney, for filing 10 criminal complaints last year for violations of Evers’ safer-at-home order. All the complaints were later dropped. In response, Toney accused his GOP foe of being a hypocrite. Toney and Owens are running for the right to face off against Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul in November 2022. ‘Ryan Owens applauded Tony Evers for the safer-at-home order, which shut down our economy and schools. And he slammed Republicans in the process,’ Toney said. ‘Clearly, he’s speaking out of both sides of his mouth, which is what Madison politicians do” – Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

CNN: “Americans have grown more supportive of coronavirus vaccine mandates for workers, students, and in everyday public life, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS. The shift comes amid renewed worries about the pandemic and a continued partisan divide over the efforts to combat it. The public is split about evenly, 51% to 49%, on whether requiring proof of vaccination for everyday activities is an acceptable way to increase the vaccination rate, or an unacceptable infringement on personal rights. But there’s greater backing for requiring vaccines in many specific instances. More than half of Americans now say they support requiring vaccinations for office workers returning to the workplace (54%), students attending in-person classes (55%) and patrons attending sporting events or concerts (55%), although fewer (41%) support requiring vaccinations for a shopper to enter a grocery store.”

“It’s early 2019, a few months before Jeffrey Epstein will be arrested on sex charges, and he is sitting in the vast study of his New York mansion with a camera pointed at him as he practices for a big ’60 Minutes’ interview that would never take place. The media trainer is a familiar figure: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s campaign guru and onetime White House adviser. Mr. Bannon is both conducting the interview and coaching Mr. Epstein on the little things, telling him he will come across as stupid if he doesn’t look directly into the camera now and then, and advising him not to share his racist theories on how Black people learn. Mainly, Mr. Bannon tells Mr. Epstein, he should stick to his message, which is that he is not a pedophile. By the end, Mr. Bannon seems impressed.”

“‘You’re engaging, you’re not threatening, you’re natural, you’re friendly, you don’t look at all creepy, you’re a sympathetic figure,’ he says. This explosive, previously unreported episode, linking a leader of the right with the now-dead disgraced financier, is tucked away at the end of a new book by Michael Wolff, ‘Too Famous: The Rich, the Powerful, the Wishful, the Notorious, the Damned.’ Mr. Bannon confirmed in a statement that he encouraged Mr. Epstein to speak to ’60 Minutes’ and said that he had recorded more than 15 hours of interviews with him. He disputed Mr. Wolff’s characterization of the transcript, however. Mr. Bannon, who has made 15 documentaries, said that he ‘never media-trained anyone’ and was recording the interview for a previously unannounced eight- to 10-hour documentary meant to illustrate how Mr. Epstein’s ‘perversions and depravity toward young women were part of a life that was systematically supported, encouraged and rewarded by a global establishment that dined off his money and his influence'” – New York Times.

The North Korean military launched multiple test flights of its newly-developed cruise missile Saturday and Sunday,  with the official North Korea touting the launches as “another effective deterrence means for more reliably guaranteeing the security of our state and strongly containing the military maneuvers of the hostile forces against the DPRK.”

CNN reports that the weekend tests had the missiles travel in over-land “figure 8” and oval patterns before they were sent to destroy targets 930 miles away.  North Korea frequently puts on a performance of military strength when a new administration for a world power comes into office.

During a speech at the University of Louisville Sunday night, US Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett said that she’s worried the public believes the Court’s decisions are tainted by the personal political beliefs of the individual justices, a perception she wants to dispel, according to Politico.

Justices must be “hyper vigilant to make sure they’re not letting personal biases creep into their decisions, since judges are people, too,” Barrett said at the lecture.  Barrett was appoint to the Court one month after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a move the critics of Republican Senator Mitch McConnell decried as hypocritical because he blocked for more than a year the nomination of Merrick Garland.

Saying “judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties,” Barrett said.   “To say the court’s reasoning is flawed is different from saying the court is acting in a partisan manner.  I think we need to evaluate what the court is doing on its own terms.”

A group of Afghan military pilots who flew their families to Uzbekistan earlier this weekend have been transferred to a US military base in the country, the first group that will exit Afghanistan in a Biden Administration with the two countries, the New York Times reports.

The pilots and their families are the first of three such groups that will fly Afghan military planes out of the country over the next few days in an arrangement brokered by the Biden Administration.  The Taliban have been pressuring the Uzbeks to return the pilots, who are hated by the Taliban because they conducted air attacks on them.

About 450 people will be evacuated to Uzbekistan from Afghanistan under the arrangement.  The US secured Uzbekistan’s support in transiting refugees to other countries where they will be processed and relocated.

House Democrats are poised to introduce legislation that would increase the corporate tax from 21% to 26.5% and assess a 3% tax on annual incomes over $5 million for an individual, the Wall Street Journal reports.   Republicans are likely to oppose the tax increases because, they’ll say, it will adversely impact working families.

Proposals in the House Ways and Means Committee are designed to raise revenue for the Democrats’ ambitious policy initiatives including the child tax credit, infrastructure and a national paid leave program.  Other programs under consideration will be an increase in the minimum tax paid by foreign corporations from 10.5% to 16.5% and an increase in the capital gains tax from 23.8% to 28.8%.

“This meets two core goals the president laid out at the beginning of this process—it does not raise taxes on Americans earning under $400,000 and it repeals the core elements of the Trump tax giveaways for the wealthy and corporations that have done nothing to strengthen our country’s economic health,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said Sunday.

Reuters: “From a control room inside the police headquarters in Venice, Big Brother is watching you. To combat tourist overcrowding, officials are tracking every person who sets foot in the lagoon city. Using 468 CCTV cameras, optical sensors and a mobile phone-tracing system, they can tell residents from visitors, Italians from foreigners, where people are coming from, where they are heading and how fast they are moving. Every 15 minutes, authorities get a snapshot of how crowded the city is – alongside how many gondolas are sliding on the Canal Grande, whether boats are speeding and if the waters rise to dangerous levels.”

“Now, a month after cruise ships were banned from the lagoon, city authorities are preparing to demand that tourists pre-book their visit on an app and charge day-trippers between 3 and 10 euros to enter, depending on the time of the year. Airport-like turnstiles are being tested to control the flow of people and, should the numbers become overwhelming, stop new visitors from getting in. Venice mayor Luigi Brugnaro says his aim is make tourism more sustainable in a city visited by 25 million people a year. But he acknowledges the new rules are likely to be a hard sell. ‘I expect protests, lawsuits, everything…but I have a duty to make this city liveable for those who inhabit it and also for those who want to visit,’ he told foreign reporters on Sunday.”

After eighteen years of active duty service in the US Army, my lieutenant colonel husband has resigned

He’s walking away from all he’s worked for and believed in since he was an ROTC kid at UGA

He’s walking away from his retirement

His resignation memo: pic.twitter.com/u1QU488fmI

— Katie Phipps Hague (@AtTheHague) September 9, 2021

Katie Phillips Hague posted the letter of resignation her husband, Lt. Colonel Doug Hague submitted to the US Army after eighteen years of service.  (At 20 years, he’d be eligible for a pension equal to 40% of his highest monthly pay.)  Hague cited encroaching Marxism, the degradation of freedom in the country, and a lack of confidence in the current administration and military leadership.