American and IDF intel sources tell Semafor that the Hamas terrorists who slaughtered and kidnapped Israeli civilians on October 7th were high on a synthetic amphetamine called Captagon, a drug designed specifically to suppress feelings of hesitation or remorse and allow them to maximize the brutality of their assault. Capatgon – which is mass-produced in Syria and Hezbollah-controlled areas of Lebanon and trafficked to other regions nearby – has previously been used by ISIS terrorists to fuel their savagery during their operations. It’s also reminiscent of the Nazi Wehrmacht’s use of a similar drug called Pervitin during their invasion of France in 1940.

Whether or not his unseen girlfriend can get out of one of her Canadian modeling gigs is unknown, but South Carolina Senator Tim Scott will be on the stage for the third GOP Presidential debate with former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley and dude Vivek Ramaswamy, CBS News reports.  Scott had achieved the 4% polling levels needed, and his campaign just announced he exceeded the number of donors needed.  The third debate will be held in Miami next week.

This is one of those situations where whoever wins the fight, you’re not entirely satisfied or entirely disappointed. In a Republican Senate lunch Tuesday, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell very pointedly directed the caucus to not sign on to a new bill by Virginia Missouri Senator Josh Hawley aimed at curbing corporate influence in elections, CNN reports, including hinting that McConnell’s PAC would cut off funding for Senators who jumped ship.

Hawley’s bill, called Ending Corporate Influence on Elections Act, aims at ending the unlimited spending corporations and other groups can do to influence elections and support candidates.  “I think that’s wrong,” Hawley told CNN. “I think it’s wrong as an original matter. I think it’s warping our politics, and I see no reason for conservatives to defend it. It’s wrong as a matter of the original meaning of the Constitution. It is bad for our elections. It’s bad for our voters. And I just think on principle, we ought to be concerned.”

McConnell called out by name a list of Senators his PAC, one of the wealthiest in the Senate, helped support in their races, including Mike Braun of Indiana, Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Joni Ernst of Iowa, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Susan Collins of Maine, Steve Daines of Montana, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Katie Britt of Alabama, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Eric Schmitt of Missouri, Ted Budd of North Carolina, JD Vance of Ohio and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin.  Oh, and Josh Hawley of Missouri.

“And Judge Chutkan is this close to throwing Trump in jail for talking,” willfully ignorant Fox bro host Jesse Watters declares.  “Yeah, you can go to jail now for talking, if you’re running against Joe Biden.”  Well, no, Jess.  You can go to jail for talking when you’re making overt and veiled threats against the witnesses and court officers participating in your trial.  And you don’t have to be running against Joe Biden for that to happen.  In fact, you’re more like to go to jail for those actions if you’re not running against biden.

A new sickle cell anemia treatment that would be the first to use the CRISPR gene-splicing tool could be the first such medication on the market as it gains another step of approval from the FDA, NBC News reports.  Called exa-cel, the treatment eliminates the need for donor cells and instead “edits” the DNA of the patient directly, eliminating the damaged section of the cells’ DNA to essential eliminate the cells’ malfunction.

And FDA advisor board undertook an all-day review of the data related to exa-cel testing.  Instead of reviewing the safety and efficacy, the panel is at the stage of looking at secondary effects from “off-target” gene editing.  “There seems to be a lot of uncertainty, a lot of unknowns, about what these off-target changes might mean,” said committee member Lisa Lee, an epidemiologist and the director of scholarly integrity and research compliance at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.  “Are those unknowns more harmful than not allowing this to go forward?”

The platform formerly known as Twitter has lost more than $25 billion in market value since petulant oligarch Elon Musk bought the company just one year ago after he opened the platform up to hate-mongering extremists and other conservatives who have been previously ejected from the site, Fortune reports.

Musk paid $44 billion for the platform back in October 2022.  Today, the company said in a disclosure of information for a price of $54.20 per share before taking it private.  Since then, he’s lost 15% of users and advertising revenue dropped by 60% after he started to allow various people who had previously been barred by the platform–like Donald Trump, Andrew Tate, Marjorie Taylor-Greene and other far-right, violence promoting extremists.

Trick or Treat from Thanos Gensler: Destroyer of Crypto. For those initiated with Avengers: Infinity War, Thanos, a malevolent megalomaniac, scours the universe for the infinity stones which enable him to snap his fingers to eradicate half of the universe’s population.… pic.twitter.com/aYJ78WcJ6V

— James Koutoulas 🛡️ (@jameskoutoulas) October 27, 2023

“Trick or Treat from Thanos Gensler: Destroyer of Crypto. For those initiated with Avengers: Infinity War, Thanos, a malevolent megalomaniac, scours the universe for the infinity stones which enable him to snap his fingers to eradicate half of the universe’s population. Similarly, SEC Chairman @GaryGensler, has trampled on the constitution to destroy about half the market capitalization of crypto in the name of investor protection. While Gensler’s destruction has caused years of pain to valid crypto projects and hodlers, I am confident that Koutoulas v SEC’s goal of stopping the Commission’s shameful overreach will help restore order to the crypto verse and Gensler’s destruction will ultimately be repaired just as Thanos’s was,” wrote “Let’s Go Brandon coin” douchebag James Koutoulas in the full text of the above tweet last week.

Note the crudely-drawn Star of David-shaped SEC “logo” on Koutoulas’s shirt. And yes, Gensler is Jewish. It’s not clear what Gensler did to the LGB coin crypto that Koutoulas didn’t do on his own, considering that the MAGA-themed fake digital money’s price has dropped 97.27 percent, down to $0.0000000033 a piece, since it debuted in November 2021. Which is probably why Koutoulas had to draw it himself and couldn’t afford a custom-printed iron-on for his costume.

Trump’s fanbase is, in our very roughest estimate, about 80 percent stupid and 20 percent evil, with a robust amount of overlap between the two. You have your dumb hicks who don’t know any better at the wide bottom of the pyramid and your amoral nihilistic pieces of shit in at the top.

Brooklyn, New York man Edward Rodriguez is at the bottom. Way at the bottom. In fact he’s might be literally the dumbest Capitol rioter we’ve ever seen, dumber than famous QAnon t-shirt guy Doug Jensen – who thought he was at the White House when he entered the Capitol on the 6th (Jensen was also the dipshit who got caught watching Mike Lindell’s stupid “Election Symposium” when a pretrial services officer stopped by his house to see if he was abiding by his bail conditions).

According to the sentencing memo by Rodriguez’s lawyer Nora Hirozawa, “During the 24 hours leading up to January 6th, alone, Mr Rodriguez received more than two dozen personalized emails and text messages from President Trump and affiliated groups, imploring him, Edward, to help fight for a ‘fair’ and ‘honest’ election. Mr Rodriguez became convinced that he, personally, had an obligation to go,” which definitely sounds culty but not world champion dumbass quite yet.

It’s not until a footnote in which Hirozawa describes a call she got from Rodriguez after he’d been arrested and awaiting trial that takes the trophy, writing “Most people recognize such emails as mass email invitations, or even spam. Mr Rodriguez, however, did not. Approximately a year after his arrest, Mr Rodriguez contacted defense counsel to ask, ‘Ms Nora, I know you and my parents said to avoid getting involved in anything political, but I just received a personal email invitation to do karaoke with Julia Salazar next week, can I go?’ The event invitation was a similar mass email. Julia Salazar is a New York State Senator for Mr Rodriguez’s neighborhood in [Brooklyn], who identifies as a democratic socialist and was endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).”

“Motion of the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia for Leave to File Brief Amici Curae in Aid of the Court’s Re-Evaluation of its Gag Order as to DONALD J TRUMP: This document is unavailable as the Court denied its filing. ‘Although courts have in rare instances exercised their discretion to permit third-party submissions in criminal cases, neither the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure nor the Local Criminal Rules contemplate the filing of amicus curiae briefs. At this time, the court does not find it necessary to depart from the ordinary procedural course by permitting this filing,'” wrote DC Circuit Court Judge Tanya Chutkan telling the ACLU libs thanks but no thanks on their amicus curae brief protesting the gag order imposed on disgraced former President Trump for trying to intimidate witnesses and prosecutors.

A New Zealand court on Tuesday found tour company Whakaari Management, owners of the Whakaari Volcano, guilty of violating a safety law for allowing tourists to get too close to the fiery crater when it erupted and killed 22 people during a December 2019 excursion, RNZ reports.

Judge Evangelos Thomas ruled that the company had “failed to install facilities that would sufficiently mitigate the risk, failed to ensure that workers and tourists were supplied with appropriate personal protective equipment, and failed to ensure there was an adequate means of evacuation” before a tour group were engulfed in a sudden phreatic eruption, noting that it should’ve been clear enough after a similar eruption in 2016. Which is fair enough, seeing as the 25 survivors, many of them severely burned, and the families of the dead should absolutely receive damages.

Still, you kind of have to ask why the hell the government didn’t step in and shut them down altogether before this. It’s a goddamned active volcano. Put this up against the OceanGate Titan submersible implosion: That Stockton Rush asshole knowingly bullshitted the passengers into believing the vessel was safe, sturdy, and the risks were minimal. They tragically believed him. It’s hard to see how “Hey! Come check out an active volcano up close!” as a value proposition doesn’t already definitionally carry a non-zero probability that you won’t make it off that island. We’re not trying to blame the victims here, but it’s difficult to see how you can assign nearly the same level of moral culpability to the company as you can for Stockton Rush. The government was aware that the tour operators were taking people to that island and didn’t shut it down.

The effort to block disgraced former President Trump from the primary and general ballot in Colorado under Article III of the 14th Amendment continues on day two of the trial on Tuesday.

On a related note, earlier Lawfare’s Roger Parloff shared his group’s state-by-state tracker of the ongoing cases, noting that Team Orange are spinning the wins they’ve had so far as based on the constitutional merits when in reality they’re getting tossed for just being shitty cases, like the one in New Hampshire on Monday where some no-name Republican primary candidate’s complaint was dismissed because the judge ruled he couldn’t demonstrate a specific and justiciable injury.

The impoverished and deeply unstable southern Arabian peninsula country of Yemen on Tuesday officially declared war on Israel, sources on Twitter reported incorrectly as they don’t understand that when the Iranian-backed Shiite Houthi rebels call themselves the “Yemeni Armed Forces,” it doesn’t actually mean that they’re the government of Yemen. The Houthis did launch missiles at Israel on Tuesday, but given the attacks were deflected fairly easily by the Iron Dome, per the IDF.

This is obviously not good news, but it’s very, very short of the apocalyptic escalation people have been fearing in the weeks since the Hamas attack. So don’t freak the fuck out if you see someone posting “YEMEN DECLARES WAR ON ISRAEL!!!11!!” The Houthis are non-state actors.

An excerpt from former CNN media guy Brian Stelter’s upcoming book on Fox News (his second) printed in Vanity Fair on Monday still doesn’t stick to any one single hypothesis for why the network’s now-former top propagandist Tucker Carlson was fired abruptly in April, even casting doubt specifically on the prevailing theory – one supported by the timing – that it was secretly an additional condition imposed by Dominion Voting Systems on top of the $787 million settlement in the 2020 election defamation case. “Though Carlson would later suggest his ouster was a ‘condition’ of the Dominion suit, there’s no evidence to support that theory, and both parties deny it,” Stelter writes before concluding it was simply a confluence of multiple factors, with Tucker’s monumental hubris, arrogance, and internal abrasiveness being by far the largest of them.

Further down in the piece however, and funny as fuck, is one suggested by an unnamed friend of Tucker: That the Dark Lord himself, Rupert Murdoch, dropped the hammer to get revenge on his most recent ex-fiancee, conservative radio host/former dental hygienist/San Francisco Police Department chaplain Ann Lesley Smith, whose hardcore Evangelical views scared Murdoch. The friend thinks that, since Smith believed Tucker was a messenger sent from God, Rupert wanted to “rub it in further” by firing the twisted primetime host after their wedding had been called off.

Like the Dominion theory, this one’s also supported by the timing since Murdoch and Smith broke it off just weeks earlier. April 2023 was a pretty bad month for the Murdochs and Fox News – and MAGAmerica at large. Still, it seems like maaaybe a bit of a stretch. Rupert isn’t that petty, is he?

Danish beer brand Carlsberg’s CEO on Tuesday told reporters that the Russian government simply seized their stake in a local brewer in July after Carlsberg tried to sell it off in response to the Putin Regime’s murderous invasion of Ukraine, Reuters reports. CEO Jacob Aarup-Andersen said the Kremlin goons offered his delicious, foamy, heavenly yellow nectar that makes you feel so charming and invincible company new “terms,” but he refused to take part in the shakedown.

“There is no way around the fact that they have stolen our business in Russia, and we are not going to help them make that look legitimate,” said Aarup-Andersen as he explained why the company ate the $1.4 billion loss on the Baltika brewery. “We’re not going to enter into a transaction with the Russian government that somehow justifies them taking over our business illegally.”

A Manhattan judge on Monday told Fox News to cut the bullshit and stop trying to bring George Soros into the $2.7 billion lawsuit filed by voting machine company Smartmatic, ruling that any connections the outfit has with the pro-democracy philanthropist and MAGA supervillain are irrelevant to the original complaint over whether Fox defamed Smartmatic, CNN reports.

“I base that on the finding that the crux of Smartmatic’s claims is that Fox has asserted they were part of rigging [the election], not that Smartmatic was affiliated with George Soros, Alex Soros, or the [Open Society Foundation],” Manhattan Superior Court Judge David B Cohen said as he dickslapped Fox. “That’s a peripheral matter – at best, it’s a possible rationale for defamation.”

A Fox spokesworm tried to spin the defeat as a win, telling CNN “We are pleased that counsel for Soros and Smartmatic conceded during the hearing today that there are connections between Smartmatic and Soros, as confirmed by documents from Smartmatic and the public record.”

In a hilariously in-depth piece titled “3 Expert Shoemakers Say Ron DeSantis Is Probably Wearing Height Boosters,” Politico Magazine concludes that the angry little bastard wears incredibly elaborate boots to appear a few inches taller than he actually is – even beyond the obvious heels he often wears. “In the photo of him sitting on the wooden stool, you can see where the ball of his foot is protruding on the right boot,” one of the experts, Austin-based custom bootmaker Graham Ebner says while Zapruder-ing images of Ron. “It’s a good inch behind where it should be. It should not be in that position unless the heels were being lifted dramatically.”

Last Army post honoring Confederate renamed for former president https://t.co/oxxQgHRUet

— Fox News (@FoxNews) October 31, 2023

Leon Cooperman, a hedge fund billionaire who has financed campaigns for a number of Republicans, told CNN that he would sit out the next election cycle if Donald Trump becomes the GOP presidential candidate.  “It would be terrible for the country if Donald Trump were reelected. He’s a divisive human being who belongs in jail.”

Told of Cooperman’s statement, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said Trump “will be the nominee and will beat Biden because he’s the only person who can supercharge the economy, secure our border, safeguard communities and put an end to unnecessary wars. … Americans want to return to a prosperous nation and there’s only one person who can do that – President Trump,” apparently unaware that the GDP grew at 4.9% last quarter, more than any non-pandemic quarter of Trump’s only term in office.

The top officer in the Marine Corps and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Eric Smith, was hospitalized Sunday after what Corps officials called a “health emergency,” the Washington Post reports.  Smith has been the Marine commandant since being confirmed in September.

Smith had been nominated in May, but his Senate confirmation was held up by Republican Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, so since July, when Smith’s predecessor retired, Smith has had to handle the responsibilities of the commandant and Smith’s previous position, vice-commandant, another position that has not been filled because of Tuberville’s willingness to risk national security, and apparently, this man’s health.

Speaking on September 6th at the Defense News Conference in Arlington, Virginia, Smith said his schedule had left him exhausted.  “Nobody should feel bad for me,” he responded to a reporter’s question about workload.  “I make plenty of money, and nobody usually yells at me, so that’s good. But it is not a sustainable thing when the last thing you do is flip your computer off at 11:30 at night and you’re getting up at 5 o’clock in the morning.”

“Hold on, did he call it the Webb Telescope?” Fox hostess and demoted Trump advisor Laura Ingraham sneers. “Isn’t it the Hubble? [Her cohort chortles, “Yes,”] Is he thinking of Webb Hubble?” The Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990 into low Earth orbit. The Webb Space Telescope was launched in December 2021 and sits at the second Lagrange point, about four times the distance the moon is to the Earth. But sure, Laura, Biden’s the one who’s senile.