…they say life imitates art…& as far as russia is concerned…or at least creepy uncle vlad…damn

A fireball consumed two sections of the only bridge linking the occupied Crimean Peninsula to Russia on Saturday, disrupting the most important supply line for Russian troops fighting in southern Ukraine and dealing an embarrassing blow to the Kremlin, which is facing continued losses on the battlefield and mounting criticism at home.

The blast and fire sent part of the 12-mile Kerch Strait Bridge tumbling into the sea and killed at least three people, according to the Russian authorities. A senior Ukrainian official corroborated Russian reports that Ukraine was behind the attack. The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of a government ban on discussing the blast, added that Ukraine’s intelligence services had orchestrated the explosion, using a bomb loaded onto a truck being driven across the bridge.
[…]
The explosion is emblematic of a Russian military in disarray. Russian forces were unable to protect the bridge, despite its centrality to the war effort, its personal importance to Mr. Putin and its potent symbolism as the literal connection between Russia and Crimea.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/08/world/europe/ukraine-crimea-bridge-explosion.html

…if it’ll open for you the times has video of the explosion…& I guess technically it may not have been the bridge itself that burned for a while so much as a train or two & whatever was left after the truck blew up…but the thing about crimea is that it’s pretty close to being an island…it’s geologically connected to the southern edge of ukraine in a couple or so places but that bridge is the only physical link between it and russian territory…so…that’s gotta burn…meanwhile…in more metaphorical bridge terms

Several large US and international banks would lose $500m or more if they proceed with obligations to fund Elon Musk’s $44bn takeover of Twitter, according to a report on Saturday.

The banks, led by Morgan Stanley and six others, including Barclays and Bank of America, committed six months ago to raise $13bn in debt to finance Musk’s purchase – an agreement that does not hinge on whether they are able to sell the debt on to investors.

According to Bloomberg calculations published on Saturday, the banks’ losses would collectively amount “to $500m or more if the debt were to be sold now”.

…I don’t think I ever read up on the financing enough to know what parts of the stuff that was pledged to cover it might have exceeded their expiration date due to his jerking the deal around but it sure sounds like he’s maybe hoping that the financing falling through despite his “good faith” efforts to belatedly complete the sale could qualify him for the just-cough-up-the-one-billion loophole…but…however much it feels like it’d fuck the rest of us over in the short tern & quite possibly prove to be the death of twitter in the longer term…the board seem keen to try to legally compel him to make good on his offer…&…however rich the man is on paper it doesn’t look like his pockets are that deep if he has to pull that price out of them?

Musk told the Financial Times on Saturday that his interest in the company has never been primarily financial.

“I’m not doing Twitter for the money. It’s not like I’m trying to buy some yacht and I can’t afford it. I don’t own any boats. But I think it’s important that people have a maximally trusted and inclusive means of exchanging ideas and that it should be as trusted and transparent as possible.”

…says the man trying to persuade the other side of a deal he’s comprehensively fucked with to drop their suit to compel him to hold up his end before anyone formally says they won’t finance it…I won’t even get into the part where he wants to make something akin to wechat because…well…because he basically wants to pull off roughly the same thing zuckerberg wants to do…sort of like AR vs. VR…but with similar doses of egotistical hubris & a rough equivalence in terms of avarice

Twitter said the attempt to halt the litigation was “an invitation to further mischief and delay”.

On Thursday, the judge presiding over the case, Kathaleen McCormick, granted Musk’s request to delay a trial scheduled for 17 October. Musk’s attorney said they could get the deal could done by 28 October “pending receipt of the proceeds of the debt financing.”

But some warn that there are few ways for the banks to get out of providing financing, for both legal and reputational reasons, even if that means booking substantial losses. “Generally it would be hard to have deals go forward if they were contingent on bank financing and that bank financing was not rock solid,” Fischer told the outlet.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/08/banks-loss-elon-musk-twitter-takeover

…I dunno…could be I’m wrong on all counts…but it sure looks a lot like he’s taken a run at just about every excuse that might get him that $1billion break clause ever since the news of this deal caused those tesla shares of his to take a bath…& by way of corroboration on the hubris thing…if you’re a dude…even a techbro kind of a dude…who got in some significant shit over a gag involving a stock price & a weed reference…tacking that same 4.20 on to a share price that scales up into the tens of billions? …it’s sunday morning & my math isn’t strong…but that is one expensive gesture…it adds what…the best part of the $4billion on top of the $40billion & “change” it’d be at $50 a pop? …however you cut it seems like it screams “it seemed like a cool idea when I was high” a lot louder than “this is a financial masterstroke executed by a business savant at the top of his game”…which…yeah…not sure I’m that big of a fan of where that sort of thing has been known to go, either?

In November 1959 Edward Teller, “the father of the hydrogen bomb,” told a group of oil company executives and scientists gathered at Columbia University that continued burning of fossil fuels would warm the planet, potentially melting the ice caps and submerging New York and other coastal cities — posing a threat to civilization comparable to a global nuclear war.

Teller’s remarkably prescient words are quoted in investigative journalist Geoff Dembicki’s new book “The Petroleum Papers: Inside the Far-Right Conspiracy to Cover Up Climate Change.” But it turns out that the renowned physicist was not the only one to know about climate change well before awareness of the issue became widespread. We learn that Exxon, the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, quietly studied climate science as a top priority during the 1970s, transforming one of its supertankers into a floating lab to measure carbon dioxide levels at sea. James Black, a company scientist, briefed executives about the immense danger to humankind from the unrestricted combustion of fossil fuels, advising them to act quickly.

Likewise, a working group at Shell warned that, if we waited for global warming to be easily detectable before we acted, “it could be too late.” In the 1990s, British Petroleum produced a series of documentaries that predicted “devastating consequences” from rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, including sea level rise that would render low-lying countries like Bangladesh defenseless against floods.
[…]
The companies knew that “stopping climate change was not only possible, but economically feasible,” Dembicki concludes. Nevertheless, they did everything in their power to make sure that “this climate solution never happened.”
[…]
It was not, of course, a war that it could expect to win. Victory, in this case, did not mean winning the argument: The science has been beyond dispute for more than half a century. It was enough to plant sufficient doubt and uncertainty in the public mind to prevent effective climate policies from being implemented.

Big Oil pursued this goal through anonymous front groups with virtuous-sounding names like the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, a “one-stop shop for any corporate backer looking to dismiss scientific findings that were bad for their business model.” This shadowy confederation of fake grass-roots groups and far-right think tanks was financed most notably by the industrialist Koch brothers, and by leading fossil fuel companies (which frequently funneled their largesse through middlemen such as the American Petroleum Institute and the National Association of Manufacturers to hide their hand.)

The agenda evolved over time. When the effort to discredit the science was no longer deemed credible, companies turned to greenwashing — employing the language of sustainability and environmental responsibility — at the same time that they lobbied against emissions-limiting policies they claimed would cost jobs and violate the sanctity of the free market. Equally damaging, Dembicki says, is how Big Oil pushed for the development of vast, untapped sources of fossil fuels called “carbon bombs” that, if unleashed, would make even the most modest global emissions targets unattainable.

…that the same goes for politicians is surely no surprise

What makes the current state of affairs doubly tragic is that there was a time when America seemed poised to act. The author writes almost wistfully of a 2008 TV advertisement in which Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi jointly called for action on climate change. (Gingrich later reversed himself, calling the ad “probably the dumbest single thing I’ve done in recent years.”)

The era of bipartisan support for climate action did not last long. In 1992, 88 percent of Americans believed that global warming was a serious problem. By 1997, only 42 percent agreed with that statement. Dembicki blames what might well be the best-financed disinformation campaign in history for this startling turnaround. But the impact on American politics didn’t end there. He goes on to implicate Koch and fossil-fuel company money in the rise of the tea party movement, as well as the election of Donald Trump.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/06/petroleum-papers-dembicki-review/

…& I know people like to link “the price of gas” to incumbent political fortunes in the US…but it’s hard to exaggerate the scale of volatility that’s going around when it comes to the international economy

The world faces growing recession risks and a “fundamental shift” away from relative stability to an age of breakdown in international relations and more frequent natural disasters, the head of the International Monetary Fund has warned.
[…]
In her curtain-raiser speech before the Washington-based fund’s annual meeting of up to 190 member countries next week, [Kristalina Georgieva, the IMF’s managing director,] said dealing with the impact from Covid-19, Russia’s war in Ukraine and climate disasters was being made more difficult by geopolitical fragmentation.

Warning that the IMF would issue downgrades to its growth forecasts for next year, Georgieva said: “We are experiencing a fundamental shift in the global economy.”

The world was moving from a period of “relative predictability – with a rules-based framework for international economic cooperation, low interest rates, and low inflation” into a new age of heightened economic fragility.

This would mean “greater uncertainty, higher economic volatility, geopolitical confrontations, and more frequent and devastating natural disasters – a world in which any country can be thrown off course more easily and more often”.
[…]
As much as $4tn (£3.6tn) in global output is expected to be lost between now and 2026, equivalent to the size of the German economy, in a big setback for the world. The IMF estimates about one-third of countries around the world will experience two consecutive quarters of falling gross domestic product – the technical definition of a recession – this year or next.

“Even when growth is positive, it will feel like a recession because of shrinking real incomes and rising prices,” Georgieva said.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/oct/06/imf-chief-warns-world-is-heading-towards-an-age-of-breakdown

…speaking of unpromising backdrops

A supermajority of six, unelected ultraconservatives justice – five of which were put on the bench by presidents who did not win the popular vote – have aggressively grabbed yet another batch of cases that will allow them to move American law to the extreme right and threaten US democracy in the process. The leading example of this disturbing shift is a little-known case called Moore v Harper, which could lock in rightwing control of the United States for generations.
[…]
It is disturbing that the supreme court used its increasingly diminished credibility with the public to take on a case that has no real purpose other than what I am describing in this column. In the United States, our highest court only rules on approximately 70 cases a year out of the 7,000 petitions for review that are presented. It is a relatively lazy court. In contrast, the supreme court of Brazil rules on approximately 100,000 cases a year. If the US court agreed to accept the Moore case for review, it almost certainly plans to endorse this rogue ISL theory, that could blow up elections and democracy in the United States as we know it.

Context is important. This situation did not just come out of nowhere, but really is the product of a multi-decade strategy by a coalition of corporations and rightwing religious fundamentalists dating back decades to take control of the US government.

Recent US history shows how spectacularly effective rightwing funders, representing wealthy Americans and corporations, have been in essentially buying control over our political system. These forces correctly perceive that if democracy is allowed to exist in an unfettered and neutral way, then corporate profits will be diminished and the powerful fossil fuel industry will be phased out over time. So they are organizing to prevent that from happening.

This rightwing funding network simply could not exist with the enormous power that it has accumulated without the US supreme court’s Citizens United case, which laid the groundwork for the current takeover of the supreme court. One industrialist just turned over his entire $1.6bn fortune to an organization controlled by Leonard Leo, the brilliant mastermind behind the pro-corporate Federalist Society, which essentially put all six of the ultraconservatives on the court.
[…]
The Moore case would in practice strip people of the right to fair elections by placing electoral power in the hands of a small group of officials at the state level who set district maps. In a presidential election, these officials could determine what slate of electors gets put forth to the electoral college, regardless of the outcome of the state’s popular vote.
[…]
While many are focused on the January 6 proceedings, the real coup has been going on quietly in the supreme court without a single shot being fired. As the judicial branch is set to deliberate a case that could drastically weaken the other branches of government, never has it been more clear that it is time to rein in the power of our least democratic institution.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/06/the-most-terrifying-case-of-all-is-about-to-be-heard-by-the-us-supreme-court

…quiet part…loud part…who can really tell the difference with these people?

Testimony on Tuesday from the government’s first witness – FBI agent Michael Palian – established that Rhodes had been encouraging resistance to a potential Joe Biden electoral college victory in the early hours of 4 November 2020, days before the major news networks had called the race in his favor.
[…]
By 7 November, the day news stations projected Biden had defeated Trump, Rhodes sent a group chat through the encrypted private messenger app, Signal, “What’s the plan? We need to roll,” the Washington Post reported.
[…]
The group chat, Friends of Stone, included Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio and former Trump adviser Roger Stone, though the latter has denied any prior knowledge of the Capitol attack which a bipartisan Senate report linked to at least seven deaths and has not been charged with any crime connected to the insurrection.

In arguably the most consequential reveal of the trial thus far, an Oath Keepers insider who testified Thursday claimed the group had begun plotting what he understood to be a coup during a virtual meeting with more than 100 members on 9 November, which took two hours.

The Oath Keepers West Virginia chapter leader Abdullah Rashid, a heavy equipment mechanic and US marine corps veteran, started recording the session because it sounded to him like the extremist group planned to go to war with the US government, the loosely affiliated antifascist movement known as “Antifa” for short, and the racial justice movement Black Lives Matter.
[…]
As Brandi Buchman of the Daily Kos noted, Rashid testified that – after he recorded the meeting – he reached out to Washington DC’s attorney general, Karl Racine, and the US Capitol police. In a November 2020 email to the Capitol police force, he called Rhodes a “wacko,” and on Thursday he told prosecutors that he thought what Rhodes was proposing was “crazy.”

Responding to questions about what he suspected were Rhodes’ aims for the January 6 attack, Rashid said, “It sounded like we were going to overthrow the US government and start shooting everybody, and beating up Antifa and beating up [Black Lives Matter]. That’s what I understood it to be.”

Rashid also provided a tip to the FBI, which he even resubmitted in March 2021, CNN reported. No one followed up his tip until after the Capitol attack, raising questions about whether authorities had blown a chance to prevent the uprising from happening.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/08/oath-keepers-trial-evidence-civil-war

…you’d think it would be easy…but

A majority of Republican nominees on the ballot this November for the House, Senate and key statewide offices — 299 in all — have denied or questioned the outcome of the last presidential election, according to a Washington Post analysis.

Candidates who have challenged or refused to accept Joe Biden’s victory — 53 percent of the 569 analyzed by The Post — are running in every region of the country and in nearly every state. Republican voters in three states nominated election deniers in all federal and statewide races The Post examined.

Although some are running in heavily Democratic areas and are expected to lose, most of the election deniers nominated are likely to win: Of the nearly 300 on the ballot, 173 are running for safely Republican seats. Another 52 will appear on the ballot in tightly contested races.
[…]
Scholars said the predominance of election deniers in the GOP bears alarming similarities to authoritarian movements in other countries, which often begin with efforts to delegitimize elections. Many of those promoting the stolen-election narrative, they said, know that it is false and are using it to gain power.
[…]
In the short term, scholars said, that party dogma is likely to produce multiple election challenges this fall from deniers who lose. It could poison the 2024 presidential race, as well.

“It’s quite possible in 2022 we’re going to have a serious set of challenges before the new Congress is seated, and then this will escalate as we move toward 2024 and another presidential election, in which the candidates, again, almost required by the Trumpians, will be challenging election outcomes,” said Larry Jacobs, a politics professor at the University of Minnesota whose areas of study include legislative politics.

In the longer term, Jacobs said, the country’s democratic foundations are at risk.

“It is a disease that is spreading through our political process, and its implications are very profound,” Jacobs said. “This is no longer about Donald Trump. This is about the entire electoral system and what constitutes legitimate elections. All of that is now up in the air.”
[…]
Some of the election deniers are themselves in line to oversee elections. Diego Morales, the nominee for Indiana secretary of state, declared on Facebook in 2021: “If we count every legal vote, President Trump won this election.” In Indiana, the secretary of state certifies results.
[…]
The proportion of election deniers on the November ballot is particularly high in three of the battleground states where Trump contested his defeat in 2020: Arizona, Georgia and Michigan. Election deniers have targeted offices in each of those states — as well as in other battleground states, including Wisconsin, Nevada and Pennsylvania — potentially giving Republicans a platform from which to challenge a popular vote they do not agree with in 2024.

The proportion is also higher among candidates for Congress, which holds the power to finalize — or contest — the electoral college count every four years. Among 419 Republican nominees for the U.S. House, 236, or 56 percent, are election deniers. And the vast majority of those, 148, are running in safely Republican districts, with another 33 in competitive races, according to ratings as of Oct. 5 by the Cook Political Report.

There are already scores of election deniers in the House; 139 of them voted against the electoral college count after the violence of Jan. 6, 2021, had finally abated. But with 38 election deniers who are not incumbents running in safely Republican or competitive House districts, that number will almost certainly rise after November.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/06/elections-deniers-midterm-elections-2022/

…how new this is might be up for debate

We tend to equate American democracy with the Constitution, as if the two were synonymous with each other. To defend one is to protect the other and vice versa. But our history makes clear that the two are in tension with each other — and always have been. The Constitution, as I’ve written before, was as much a reaction to the populist enthusiasms and democratic experimentation of the 1780s as it was to the failures of the Articles of Confederation.

The framers meant to force national majorities through an overlapping system of fractured authority; they meant to mediate, and even stymie, the popular will as much as possible and force the government to act with as much consensus as possible.

Unfortunately for the framers, this plan did not work as well as they hoped. With the advent of political parties in the first decade of the new Republic — which the framers failed to anticipate in their design — Americans had essentially circumvented the careful balance of institutions and divided power. Parties could campaign to control each branch of government, and with the advent of the mass party in the 1820s, they could claim to represent “the people” themselves in all their glory.
[…]
And consider this: In the 2020 presidential election, a clear majority of Americans voted against Trump in the highest turnout election of the 21st century so far. But with a few tens of thousands of additional votes in a few states, Trump would have won a second term under the Constitution. “A mechanism for selecting a chief executive among propertied elites in the late eighteenth century persists into the twenty-first,” [the legal scholar Jebediah] Purdy writes, “now as a key choke point in a mass democracy.”

The Constitution subverts democracy in a second, more subtle way. As Purdy notes, the countermajoritarian structure of the American system inhibits lawmaking and slows down politics, “making meaningful initiatives hard to undertake.” One result is that political campaigns have “shifted into a symbolic and defensive mode” where the move is not to promise a better world, but to impress on voters “the urgency of keeping the other candidate and party out of power.”
[…]
Even if you keep MAGA Republicans out of office (including Trump himself), you’re still left with a system the basic structure of which fuels dysfunction and undermines American democracy, from how it enables minority rule to how it helps inculcate a certain kind of political chauvinism — best captured in the hard-right mantra that the United States is a “republic, not a democracy” — among some of the voters who benefit from lopsided representation in the Senate and the Electoral College.

What makes this all the worse is that it has become virtually impossible to amend the Constitution and revise the basics of the American political system. The preamble to the Constitution may begin with “We the People,” but as Purdy writes, “A constitution like the American one deserves democratic authority only if it is realistically open to amendment.” It is only then that we can “know that what has not changed in the old text still commands consent.” Silence can have meaning, he points out, “but only when it is the silence of those free to speak.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/opinion/constitution-democracy-biden-trump.html

…still…the devil may indeed be in the detail

The Department of Justice suspects former President Donald Trump still possesses documents that he took from the White House, people familiar with the matter told NBC News on Friday.
[…]
The New York Times reported Thursday that the department believed Trump had not returned all of the documents he took from the White House. This was also confirmed by The Wall Street Journal.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/justice-department-believes-trump-might-white-house-documents

…& even (or perhaps particularly) the people with an eye for those details seem bedeviled by them

To be clear: I think the evidence shows that the Proud Boys are far more complicit in the attack on democracy on January 6 than the Oath Keepers, who were mostly whack right wingers with delusions of grandeur. But I also recognize that the Proud Boy case has been far more difficult for DOJ to put together than the Oath Keeper one, in significant part because they have been more successful at cultivating authoritarian law enforcement that likes their mob culture.

Remember, several Proud Boys, including Tarrio, worked with Roger Stone to threaten Amy Berman Jackson and Bill Barr’s DOJ treated it as a mere legal technicality. The Proud Boys got sanction, as a mob, from the President’s own mouth, which had ripple effects throughout government on the way they were treated.

So I wanted to look at three indications of the difficulties the Proud Boy prosecution may face that the Oath Keeper prosecutors did not.

…as ever you could do a lot worse than checking out the substance of ms wheeler’s post

It is undoubtedly an important step to get a plea to sedition from someone who wasn’t even present the day of the attack. But that doesn’t alleviate the many things that make this case more complex than the Oath Keeper one.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2022/10/07/the-additional-complexities-of-the-proud-boy-sedition-case/

…but…honestly it was a different rabbit hole I fell down

Given developments in the last two days, here’s how the various schedules pertaining to Trump’s stolen document case intersect (I’ve included the original 11th Circuit deadlines to show the effect of yesterday’s ruling to expedite the merits appeal):

…again…probably worth the click-through for the meat of the thing…but going with the SCOTUS part

The SCOTUS appeal, remember, is for a limited issue: Whether to restore classified records to the matters before Special Master Raymond Dearie and, ultimately, before Judge Aileen Cannon.

Particularly given that even Clarence Thomas, in setting DOJ’s deadline a week out, isn’t treating Trump’s appeal as much of an emergency, I think the most likely scenario is that SCOTUS declines to consider Trump’s appeal. It’s the easiest thing to do, dictated by precedent if SCOTUS feels obliged to follow it, and made more likely by the fact that Cannon has altered the scope of her order. As the timeline above shows, if that were to happen, it might well happen before DOJ’s deadline for its appeal on the merits.

…arguably worth mentioning that another pretty savvy lawyer with opinions (the guy who does the opening arguments podcast) seems to think the more likely trajectory is thomas punting the decision to the full court & it going 8:1 the way he personally wouldn’t call it…& thereby not in favour of his fatuousness…but all the same I think wheeler’s concerns sound legit?

One thing many commentators are claiming that bears correction, however, is the claim the only damage the Supreme Court review can do is delay: that even if SCOTUS permits Dearie and Cannon to review the documents with classification markings, it could do no more damage to the DOJ investigation. That is obviously false.
[…]
But the way in which Cannon could most fuck up any charges for 18 USC 793e (though not obstruction) would by by issuing an opinion that — even if she agreed all the documents were classified — nevertheless deemed Trump’s bullshit story, that he believed he had declassified these documents by packing them in a box and shipping them to his beach resort, reasonable.

Charging a former President under the Espionage Act presents unique challenges, but I think they could be overcome given what we know has transpired. We’re even likely to learn that Trump lied to the lawyers who knew better than to ship classified documents to his beach resort, and those lawyers will make compelling witnesses against Trump.

But if Cannon gets the opportunity to review Trump’s bullshit declassification story and deems it reasonable — even though she has virtually no relevant experience from which to judge that issue, even though she’s just one judge big-footing on a lawful warrant, even though such an opinion would likely be overturned on appeal — it might make charging Trump under the Espionage Act prohibitively difficult. That’s because that opinion from a judge that Trump’s bullshit story was reasonable would likely be enough to sway at least one juror, especially if the case were charged in Florida. And DOJ is not going to charge Trump — they’re definitely not going to charge Trump under the Espionage Act — unless they’re sure that the most credible people making these kinds of arguments are potentially implicated witnesses like Kash Patel. Yes, they might still charge obstruction (and they might only charge obstruction anyway), but if Republicans win back one or both houses, they will use an obstruction-only prosecution to claim it was a politicized prosecution.

So yes, Clarence Thomas could do harm by accepting Trump’s appeal and SCOTUS could do harm by ruling in favor of it. I don’t think that’s the most likely outcome (and such a move would likely to lead to further appeals). But there is a risk of harm beyond a simple delay.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2022/10/06/trumps-scotus-appeal-hypothetically-could-do-damage-beyond-delay/

…a risk of harm beyond simple delay…yeah…seems to be a lot of that going around…not to mention the part where delay on a number of fronts would seem to pose substantial risk on its own…still & all…those sound like monday problems…right?