…don’t tell me [DOT 27/9/22]

…there’s always tomorrow

Ahead of what could be their final investigative hearing, scheduled for Wednesday afternoon, members of the House Jan. 6 committee on Sunday offered a small preview of what is to come as they rapidly approach the end of their timeline.

…& speaking of tomorrows…”final investigative hearing” might be more of a “season finale” than a “series finale”…in that some of them seem to have said they’re done but one or two seem to have suggested there might be an encore before they get to releasing their report…though that’s jumping the gun for now

“We’re not disclosing yet what the focus will be. I can say that, as this may be the last hearing of this nature — that is, one that is focused on sort of the factual record — I think it’ll be potentially more sweeping than some of the other hearings,” Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
[…]
After the committee’s vice-chair, Rep. Liz Cheney, said Saturday that she believes the group will move forward unanimously, Schiff agreed and went a bit further when asked if there was going to be an unanimous criminal referral made about the former president’s conduct. (Trump has repeatedly said he did nothing wrong and cast the committee, which includes two Republicans, as partisan.)

“It will be … my recommendation, my feeling, that we should make referrals,” Schiff said. “But we will get to a decision as a committee, and we will all abide by that decision, and I will join our committee members if they feel differently.”

…it’s not like there aren’t still gaps

“We are still investigating how that came about [the deleted messages] and why that came about. And I hope and believe the Justice Department, on that issue, is also looking at whether laws were broken in the destruction of that evidence,” Schiff said on CNN. “But we do have a mountain of information that we need to go through. But I think it’s fair to say that it won’t be a complete substitute for some of the most important evidence, which would have been on those phones.”
[…]
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and was asked about the likelihood that the Jan. 6 committee will have testimony from Ginni Thomas and Newt Gingrich before Wednesday’s hearing.

“I doubt that. But I think that there is an agreement in place with Ginni Thomas to come and talk and I know the committee is very interested,” Raskin said, referring to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife, a noted conservative activist who was in touch with Trump’s team as he pushed to overturn the 2020 results.
[…]
He was also asked if that report will be finished by the midterm elections.

“I don’t know whether it will be done then, but our commitment is to get it done by the end of this Congress [by January],” Raskin said. “The House of Representatives, unlike the Senate, ends every two years. A completely new Congress comes in. So that’s the end of our lease on life and we have to get it out to the people.”
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/jan-hearing-sweeping-schiff-committee-weighs-criminal-referral/

…but one thing that’s got out might not be quite as damning as it sounds…which isn’t to say it’s not damning…because…damn

The revelation was offered with seemingly practiced casualness. Speaking to “60 Minutes” as he promoted a new book, former Virginia congressman Denver Riggleman (R), whose post-Congress work included analysis for the House select committee investigating the Capitol riot, claimed that there was some communication between the White House and a rioter on Jan. 6, 2021.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/26/trump-jan-6-insurrection-criminal-probes/

…but…consider the source, I guess

Denver Riggleman, a former Republican congressman, is set to publish “The Breach” on Tuesday, just one day before the final public hearing of the Jan. 6 panel, which has gone to extraordinary lengths to prevent unauthorized leaks, as well as keep its sources and methods of investigation under wraps.
[…]
Senior staff previously confronted Riggleman after rumors circulated that he was working on a book about his work for the committee, according to a person close to the panel. In one exchange, Riggleman told colleagues he was writing a book on a topic unrelated to his committee work. In a later conversation, before his departure from the committee staff, Riggleman said he had been approached about writing a book related to the committee but that it would not be published before the end of this year.

The ex-congressman gave notice in April after assisting the panel for eight months, saying he was leaving to work at an unspecified nonprofit group related to Ukraine. Riggleman and his book agent did not respond to requests for comment.

…I’m not saying he’s got nothing…but…I might be inclined to hold him up to the same standard he seems to have been interested in

Riggleman also bragged about the committee’s work publicly and gave interviews — an unusual move for a congressional staffer. Earlier this year, he told a crowd of “Never Trump” Republicans at the National Press Club that he would show through his committee work that the effort to overturn the election was “all about money,” and mocked several of the people under investigation.
[…]
“It’s all about the money,” he said. “I’m going to rip apart their ecosystem.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/25/ex-staffers-unauthorized-book-about-jan-6-committee-rankles-members/

…& sure…follow the money is often good advice…but that’s not the part that might prove a little overblown after this particular book-flogging exercise

On the afternoon of Jan. 6, 2021, shortly after President Donald J. Trump took to Twitter to tell the mob of his supporters assaulting the Capitol that “you have to go home now,” someone used a White House landline to call the phone of one of the rioters, according to a new book from a former staff member of the House Jan. 6 committee.
[…]
The call lasted nine seconds and took place at 4:34 p.m.
[…]
In an appearance on Sunday night on “60 Minutes” on CBS, Mr. Riggleman referred to the incident as an “aha moment” — but in the interview Monday he said he was not willing to call it a “smoking gun” showing a connection between rioters and the Trump White House.
[…]
“Anton Lunyk has said he doesn’t know about the call and things of that nature. That’s fine,” Mr. Riggleman said. “The data validates that the call happened.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/26/us/politics/jan-6-call-anton-lunyk.html

…it happened…it happened after they finally got him to tell his band of seditiously inclined miscreants to go home…& it’s not like they lost all the burners & called stewart rhodes on his personal cell through the main switchboard while they were smashing windows with stolen riot shields & hunting for legislative representatives in a wholly pre-meditated fashion…& the guy that says he didn’t take the call is…well

The call, as CNN subsequently revealed, went to “a 26-year-old Trump supporter from Brooklyn, New York named Anton Lunyk,” lasted 9 seconds, and came about an hour after Lunyk and his buddies had left the Capitol. (Lunyk pleaded guilty earlier this year and was sentenced to a year of probation; the judge had told him that he and his friends were “real knuckleheads.”)

…that knucklehead part might go for more than just lunyk & his crowd of co-opted, criminally-misinformed co-defendants

“In his role on the Select Committee staff, Mr. Riggleman had limited knowledge of the Committee’s investigation,” the committee said in a statement. “He departed from the staff in April prior to our hearings and much of our most important investigative work. He told the Committee he was departing in order to help the people of Ukraine in their war against Russia. Since his departure, the Committee has run down all the leads and digested and analyzed all the information that arose from his work. We will be presenting additional evidence to the public in our next hearing this coming Wednesday, and a thorough report will be published by the end of the year.”
[…]
Somewhat unrelatedly: Allow us to use the occasion of Denver Riggleman’s name being in the news again—as it is roughly once per year for an entirely different reason each time—to run through the hits. As they say in Riggleman’s native Virginia: This is a proper picaresque, fellas!
[…]
The first time that most people heard of Riggleman was during his 2018 race for Congress. He was running for an open seat after Rep. Tom Garrett, a bad boss, announced he wouldn’t run for reelection. In the general election, Riggleman’s Democratic opponent tagged him as a “devotee of Bigfoot Erotica” and shared screenshots of Instagram drawings Riggleman had posted depicting Bigfoot with a big ol’ penis—including one where Riggleman’s face was cropped onto Bigfoot’s head. Riggleman, who is admittedly fascinated with Bigfoot and has written or co-written a couple of books on the subject (including one that came out while he was in Congress), denied that he was a “devotee of Bigfoot erotica.” To this day, he will get up in your mentions if you describe him as such.
[…]
During his tenure in Congress, Riggleman did what most members of the House Republican minority did: Sat around and tried not to get primaried. And though he ultimately voted with Trump 92 percent of the time, he did officiate a same-sex wedding in 2019 for two friends. This, and other supposed “liberal tendencies,” earned Riggleman a primary challenge from Bob Good, an evangelical Christian and Liberty University athletics director who described himself as a “bright-red biblical and constitutional conservative.” (Bob “Life of the Party” Good recently got in a shouting match with Rep. Abigail Spanberger, in front of Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, about whether teachers were “grooming” children to transition their gender.)

Riggleman lost to Good in a drive-thru nominating convention during the worst COVID times of 2020. He spent the remaining months of his term, and a lot of time since, going hard against QAnon and other patterns of disinformation within conservative circles.
[…]
And now, this book.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/09/jan-6-committee-denver-riggleman-book-phone-call-white-house.html

…it’s for sure a problem to keep people paying attention to a thing that takes longer to wrap up than people want it to

[…]even as Russia’s international standing takes further hits, Ukraine may have reason to worry about shifting winds in the West’s democracies. Analysts have long fretted over the West’s stamina in the defense of Ukraine, aware of mounting concerns over surging energy prices and old suspicions of the liberal establishment in Brussels and Washington. That resolve has largely endured as we enter the eighth month of the conflict. But polls show flagging interest among some voters for supporting Ukraine, not least as economic challenges build up closer to home.

Electorally, Europe is seeing a mini-surge for traditionally Euroskeptic, Russia-friendly political factions. The far right has emerged as kingmakers in ongoing coalition talks in Sweden. And on Sunday, Italian voters elected what will likely be a coalition of right-wing parties led by the far-right Brothers of Italy and the charismatic politico Giorgia Meloni.

Meloni herself has rhetorically backed Kyiv in recent months, but key allies have made no secret of their affinity for the Kremlin. Matteo Salvini, head of the nativist League, has questioned the efficacy of sanctions on Russia. Silvio Berlusconi, the former Italian prime minister, took to Italian TV this month to defend Putin, a longtime buddy on the world stage.
[…]
To be sure, polling in Europe after the Feb. 24 invasion shows significant drops in approval for Russia and Putin among right-wing populist parties, especially in Italy. But, as a recent Pew survey noted, these right-wing parties still remain far more positive toward the Russian regime than the rest of the public in their societies. Such sentiments underlay a controversial planned “fact-finding” trip by politicians in Germany’s far-right AfD party to Russian-controlled areas in Ukraine, which was called off last week only after a massive backlash at the possibility of elected German officials directly boosting Putin’s propaganda machine.

As the war drags on, there are fears among both Ukrainians and Western strategists that public skepticism over the toll of sanctions on Russia — which has seen energy prices spike in Europe — and the significant financial outlay to support Kyiv may mount. […]

There’s also the risk of growing indifference. Pew recently found that fewer Americans are concerned about the prospect of Ukrainian defeat than they were in the spring and a significant majority believe now that current aid to Ukraine is sufficient.

[…]Pew also found that U.S. Republicans are more likely to believe their government is giving too much to Ukraine than too little. Distaste for the costs of the war are influencing the upcoming midterm elections, while a segment of the Republican base — championed by former president Donald Trump and cultivated by notoriously Putin-friendly Fox News host Tucker Carlson — has long harbored sympathy for Putin’s Russia.
[…]
Experts believe the latest round of congressionally sanctioned funding for Ukraine could be the last to pass smoothly through the American legislature. “It would be too simplistic to say it is one issue more than another at this point. But voters are speaking up to conservative members of Congress,” Mackenzie Eaglen, a defense expert at the right-of-center American Enterprise Institute, told Politico. “This is really driven from the grass roots to Washington and not the other way around.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/26/ukraine-west-right-wing-fatigue-italy/

…thing is…it’s all very well to talk about “grass roots”…but…on the one hand you got the kinds of grass that do stuff like hold coastlines together as the ocean tries to wash them away with tide after tide…& then you got…well…weeds, I guess is where this analogy is headed…along with an apology for bringing this god-awful mess up

The report, by the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s new Quant Lab, is the culmination of an investigation that analyzed more than 1 million posts on the site. It found a marked spike in conversations about mass murder and growing approval of sexually assaulting prepubescent girls.

The report also says that platforms including YouTube and Google, as well as internet infrastructure companies like Cloudflare are facilitating the growth of the forum, which the report said is visited by 2.6 million people every month. “These businesses should make a principled decision to withdraw their services from sites causing such significant harm,” the report says.

“This is a novel, new violent extremist movement born in the internet age, which defies the usual characteristics of violent extremist movements that law enforcement and the intelligence community are usually used to,” said Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of CCDH, a U.S.-based nonprofit. “Our study shows that it is organized, has a cogent ideology and has clearly concluded that raping women, killing women, and raping children is a clear part of the practice of their ideology.”

Incels blame women for their failings in life. The term originated decades ago, and while the first incel forum was founded by a woman in the mid 1990s, incel communities have since become almost exclusively male. Incel ideology has been linked to dozens of murders and assaults over the past decade, the most prominent one involving Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old self-described incel who murdered six people in a stabbing and shooting rampage in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 2014. Before killing himself, he posted a long manifesto and YouTube videos promoting incel ideology.

In March, the U.S. Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center released a report warning that anti-woman violence was a growing terrorism threat.

…it goes into detail…or at any rate more detail than I could get through without it putting me off my cornflakes, as it were…so I’ll skip that part

“Analysis of their discourse shows this core group poses a clear and present danger to women, other young men, and reveals an emerging threat to our children,” the report says.

CCDH said its analysis also had found a rising interest in mass murder on the site. Posts mentioning incel mass murders increased 59 percent between 2021 and 2022, the study said, and praise was common for Elliot Rodger. The word “kill” was mentioned 1,181 times on the forum in just one month, equivalent to once every 37 minutes. “Shoot” and “murder” are also popular words on the forum.

“We are in no doubt after conducting this study that this community of angry, belligerent and unapologetic men are dangerous to each other, with malignant social dynamics whereby they encourage each other to worse and worse extremes,” the report said. “Unchecked, incel communities have the potential to radicalize further.”
[…]
Teenage boys are among the forum’s most active and extreme users, according to the CCDH. In one instance, a boy who said he was 17 was recorded as being on the forum for an average of 10 hours per day during the period of the report, posting an average of 40 times per day, the report said. Another, who claimed to be 15, spent an average of five hours per day on the site, posting repeatedly about his desire to commit a mass shooting.

The forum enables their participation, the analysis said, by encouraging users to hide the site from prying parents or teachers by using a feature that disguises it as a banana marketing website.

…wait…what? …should we be doing that…is that how we get down with the youth? …read our shit because it’s the sort of shit you shouldn’t let anyone know you’re reading or it’ll kick up a shitstorm? …still…I’m pretty sure we don’t have anything to do with cloudflare, either…so…I figure maybe we just aren’t in the same game over in this little internet cul-de-sac

The report criticizes Cloudflare, an internet services company that provides services to the forum and to other Galante and Small sites. Cloudflare recently dropped Kiwi Farms, a forum where users coordinated harassment campaigns against women and members of the LGBTQ community, after a protest launched targeting its mainstream clients. “Cloudflare is profiting from its role as an infrastructure provider to all four incelosphere forums and has been praised by the incel forum’s official Twitter account,” the report says.

The CCDH urged government regulators also to find ways to combat incel ideology and restrict the site. “This should not be left to the goodwill of Big Tech, who profit from the creation and spread of this content and are not properly incentivized or required to be proactively transparent on the key metrics or to invest in the desired safety outcomes,” the report says.

“This forum is a violent ideological manifesto, but for the 21st century,” Ahmed said. “Instead of being a book, it’s essentially a wiki that is continuously being evolved by the readers themselves. Left alone, this community has been radicalized further and their ideology is becoming more dangerous by the day.”
The online incel movement is getting more violent and extreme, report says [WaPo]

…makes you wonder, though…what is the common denominator between those assholes & the likes of mrs supreme court justice over here?

We know that Ginni Thomas texted Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, between November 2020 and January 2021 urging measures to undermine Biden’s win and keep Trump in power. After Congress certified the election for Biden, she criticized former vice-president Mike Pence in a message to Meadows for refusing to disrupt the counting of electoral college votes, writing, “We are living through what feels like the end of America.”

The messages contain sly references to a “best friend”, which Ginni and Clarence Thomas have been known to call each other. In a viral Facebook post on 6 January 2020, now removed, she wrote, “LOVE MAGA people!!!!” Thomas attended the Capitol rally that day, though she has said she left before Trump’s speech at noon.

We also now know that Thomas emailed Arizona lawmakers in November and December of 2020, pushing them to devise a slate of presidential electors in defiance of Arizona voters’ choice for Biden. In an email in November, she urged Arizona legislators to “stand strong in the face of political and media pressure”, claiming (wrongly) that the choice of electors was “yours and yours alone”.
[…]
Thomas allegedly waged a similar pressure campaign in Wisconsin. “Please stand strong in the face of media and political pressure,” she emailed two Republican lawmakers on 9 November, shortly after news outlets called the election for Biden. “Please reflect on the awesome authority granted to you by our constitution. And then please take action to ensure that a clean slate of electors is chosen for our state.”

Earlier this year, the New Yorker detailed Ginni Thomas’s deep connections to multiple rightwing groups that seek to influence the supreme court. Thomas, herself a lawyer who runs a small lobbying firm, Liberty Consulting, is on record as declaring America to be in danger due to a “deep state” and a “fascist left” peopled by “transexual fascists”. She posted about Trump’s loss on a private listserv, Thomas Clerk World, which includes approximately 120 former Clarence Thomas clerks. Artemus Ward, a political scientist at Northern Illinois University, has called the group “an elite rightwing commando movement”.

Thomas is also a director of CNP Action, a dark-money group that the New Yorker described as “connect[ing] wealthy donors with some of the most radical rightwing figures in America”, and on the advisory board of Turning Point USA, a conservative non-profit that sent busloads of protesters to the Capitol on January 6. And in 2019, she announced her partnership in Crowdsourcers, along with James O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, an outfit known for producing embarrassing videos of progressives.
[…]
According to the New York Times, the January 6 committee is most interested in asking Thomas about her communications with John Eastman, a conservative lawyer who infamously penned a six-step scheme for Pence to block or delay the counting of electoral college votes. According to the committee’s leaders, Eastman also “worked to develop alternative slates of electors to stop the electoral count”.
[…]
The Thomases’ conflicts of interest have prompted calls for a supreme court code of conduct, which would require justices to recuse themselves from cases that might otherwise give rise to even an appearance of partiality. But it is not at all clear that Ginni Thomas is beyond the sights of criminal liability, either.
[…]
For his part, Clarence Thomas was the only dissenting vote in a January 2021 ruling on an emergency application from Trump asking the supreme court to block the release of White House records to the January 6 Committee regarding the attack on the Capitol – records that in theory could have included messages between his wife and Meadows. He gave no reasons for his dissent.

Thomas also dissented, along with Justice Samuel Alito, from the court’s refusal to entertain a lawsuit by Texas asking that it toss out the election results in four other states – a legal “claim” that, to date, does not even exist as a matter of federal law.

Perhaps most disturbing is the court’s agreement to hear Moore v Harper this term, a case that strikes at the heart of the January 6 committee’s work. It raises a novel constitutional argument which Trump lost repeatedly in 2020: that the constitution lodges power over elections exclusively in state legislatures. If the court rules that legislatures have full power and control, it could cement unfairness in the electoral system as a matter of constitutional law, as many states are already gerrymandered to lock in power for one political party, mostly Republican.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/26/january-6-committee-ginni-thomas-clarence-thomas

…I don’t know if it’s the lowest common denominator…but I’m pretty sure we can’t just crash something really expensive into it & hope to keep it out of our orbit

An unprecedented and long-awaited deep-space venture will take place almost 7m miles from Earth on Monday night when a Nasa spacecraft will be deliberately crashed into an asteroid in an attempt to show humanity can avert an Armageddon-style impact to Earth.
[…]
The acronym stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, the first “planetary defense” experiment conducted by the US space agency, in association with scientists at Johns Hopkins University, to see if it can alter the trajectory of an asteroid in deep space if one ever comes close enough to threaten Earth.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/sep/26/nasa-dart-asteroid-crash-mission-how-to-watch

…but…I’m not sure a scalpel’s gonna cut it?

“It’s the biggest federalism issue in a long time,” Chief Justice Nathan L. Hecht of the Texas Supreme Court said on the phone the other day. “Maybe ever.”

He was explaining why the Conference of Chief Justices, a group representing the top state judicial officers in the nation, had decided to file a brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in a politically charged election-law case. The brief urged the court to reject a legal theory pressed by Republicans that would give state legislatures extraordinary power.
[…]
If the Supreme Court adopts the theory, it will radically reshape how federal elections are conducted by giving state lawmakers independent authority, not subject to review by state courts, to set election rules in conflict with state constitutions.
[…]
The case, Moore v. Harper, No. 21-1271, will be argued in the coming months. It concerns a congressional voting map drawn by the North Carolina Legislature favoring Republicans that was rejected as a partisan gerrymander by the state’s Supreme Court. Republican lawmakers seeking to restore the legislative map argued that the state court had been powerless to act.

Four conservative members of the U.S. Supreme Court have issued opinions indicating that they may be ready to endorse the independent state legislature theory. Professor Stephanopoulos said the conference’s decision to raise its voice was telling.
[…]
The independent state legislature theory is based on a literal reading of two similar provisions of the U.S. Constitution. The one at issue in the North Carolina case, the Elections Clause, says: “The times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.”

That means, North Carolina Republicans argued, that state legislatures have sole responsibility among state institutions for drawing congressional districts and that state courts have no role to play in applying their states’ constitutions.

The North Carolina Supreme Court rejected that argument, saying that was “repugnant to the sovereignty of states, the authority of state constitutions and the independence of state courts, and would produce absurd and dangerous consequences.”
[…]
Chief Justice Hecht said the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in the case was unlikely to be limited to redistricting and could open the floodgates for all sorts of election challenges in federal courts.

“The Constitution’s language is very broad about time, place and manner of elections,” he said. “So that’s mail-in ballots, what it takes to register, what ID you have to show, how late the polls are open, how the ballots are counted, who gets to sit and watch when they do. The state courts get scores of these cases in virtually every election.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/26/us/politics/supreme-court-state-legislatures-elections.html

Around a dozen election-denying Republican candidates secured their party’s nomination for secretary of state this fall. This is the reality, two years on, that Donald Trump’s election lies have created.

There are three types of election-denying candidates, and each one poses distinct problems for civic integrity. […]

[…]Election-denying candidates in very red states aren’t getting as much attention now, but they likely will come January, when they are officeholders. They will help set policies in their states — many of which will also have Republican-led legislatures and governors — where extremist ideas could become law.

[…]Election deniers in blue states can uniquely exacerbate Mr. Trump’s undermining of faith in our elections, and they, like their winning counterparts in red states, can set the stage for local election-denying candidates to win now or in the future.
[…]
Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at U.C.L.A. and a leading election law expert, cautioned anyone who might ignore such candidacies. “First of all, just running these races politicizes even further the office of secretary of state,” he told me. Additionally, Mr. Hasen said that having a candidate on a statewide ballot making “constant false claims of massive voter fraud can’t help but create more doubt about election integrity in the minds of a lot of people.”
[…]
The point that harm doesn’t just build up but also trickles down is what most worries Sam Oliker-Friedland, who previously worked on voting rights cases at the Justice Department and is now the executive director at the Institute for Responsive Government.

He said his concern in a state like Connecticut is the effect the candidacy “will have on lower races, especially races for local election officials.” While the secretary of state is the formal head of elections, it’s the registrars of voters and town clerks in Connecticut who are doing “the day-to-day work of running elections.” Many more people are involved in carrying out elections than just the top officials in a given state, and while their roles are important, they’re also much lower profile. Those officials and their races going forward “will be influenced by this discourse coming from the person running for the top elections post in the state,” Mr. Oliker-Friedland warned, adding that the discourse will also affect primary elections in those races going forward and the way those people do their jobs once elected.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/26/opinion/dominic-rapini-secretary-state-trump.html

…so…take a deep breath, I guess

Repressive regimes such as Iran and Russia operate under the premise that if they admit any error, allow any dissent or countenance any protest, their society might crumble. But what we are seeing in Russia and Iran reveals something equally true: Regimes that push their people to the breaking point risk a full-scale rebellion.
[…]
At the United Nations General Assembly meetings last week, the Biden administration was scathing in its denunciation of Iran. President Biden on Wednesday declared, “Today we stand with the brave citizens and the brave women of Iran who right now are demonstrating to secure their basic rights.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen all denounced the regime’s brutality, and the Treasury Department announced new sanctions against the morality police. (Iran is under a slew of sanctions already.) On Friday, The Post reported, Treasury “modified U.S. sanctions to let technology companies counter the Iranian government’s internet lockdown and surveillance.”
[…]
Then there is Russia. In its unprovoked war on Ukraine, Russia’s military continues to suffer grievous losses. The Kremlin has staged what Western leaders have called phony referendums in areas of eastern and southern Ukraine, designed to signal the occupied regions’ supposed desire to join Russia. And Russian President Vladimir Putin has called up as many as 300,000 reservists — which more than anything else has moved Russians to take to the streets to express their ire at the country’s assault on Ukraine.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/25/russia-iran-protests-mahsa-amini-ukraine/

…because we may not have found a smoking gun…but there’s enough hot air & blown smoke to suggest that there may very well be a raging dumpster fire somewhere in the mix

Some of the awkward revelations during an event at a factory outside Pittsburgh came from friendly questioners, including a vaccine skeptic who won loud cheers. Even Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a hero to the Trumpist far right, thought it wise to take a pass on that one, saying, “I’m not against the vaccines.” He pivoted quickly to boilerplate conservative victimhood, declaring that “the left may control everything,” but not “we the people.”

Rep. Lisa C. McClain (R-Mich.) made you wonder why she serves in government at all. “What does government produce?” she asked. “Nothing.” I guess we can forget about roads, bridges, schools, universities, water systems, health research, national parks and airports, among other things.
[…]
You have to squint to find the only reference to abortion. It’s beneath a subhead of a subhead and amounts to nine vague words: a pledge to “protect the lives of unborn children and their mothers.” Somehow, I don’t think that’s a promise of universal prenatal care.
[…]
And the Commitment’s promise of a “Parents’ Bill of Rights” in the schools suggests that the GOP’s surveys show a persistence of parental frustration with the difficulties created for kids during the pandemic.
[…]
Here’s another thing the Republicans made clear: If they take the majority, they plan to use their power to harass the Biden administration with one hearing after another. Jordan was positively gleeful in describing the long list of subjects the GOP would investigate, urging voters “to make a change in our government so that we can hold those people who’ve been coming after us, hold them accountable like we’re supposed to.”
The GOP’s ‘Commitment’ is to total political warfare [WaPo]

…so…here we are…on tuesday…& who can say what tomorrow brings?

[…I’ll scare up a tune or three once I find myself enough coffee to point me in a suitable direction]