Why wait, Pete? Why not stop now?
Hegseth appeared to acknowledge that his relationship with alcohol is a matter of serious concern to GOP senators by pledging Wednesday in meetings on Capitol Hill that he would stop drinking if confirmed to serve as Defense secretary.
The Hill, here.
The bargaining is classic drunk.
CNN here:
The woman who says she had sex when she was a minor with then-Rep. Matt Gaetz told the House Ethics Committee she had two sexual encounters with him at one party in 2017, sources familiar with her testimony tell CNN.
The woman, who was 17 years old at the time, testified that the second sexual encounter, which has not previously been reported, included another adult woman. She also testified to both sexual encounters in a civil deposition as part of a related lawsuit, sources said.
After being asked for comment for this story, Gaetz announced he was backing out as President-elect Donald Trump’s attorney general nominee. ...
Members of the Republican-led House Ethics panel voted along party lines on Wednesday not to release the results of their investigation and instead decided to meet again on December 5 to vote on the final report.
And The Hill here:
Typically, the committee ends its investigations and does not release its findings on members who have departed the House.
Johnson has argued releasing the report would “open a Pandora’s box” and break a long-standing “rule” of the panel to not publish information on former members of Congress.
But there are some previous examples of Ethics investigators releasing information on former members.
In 1987, the panel released its report into former Rep. William Boner (D-Tenn.) after he resigned from the House. And in 2011, the Senate Ethics Committee released its preliminary report into former Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) after he departed the upper chamber.
If all Republicans had shown up and Sen. John Fetterman’s (D-Pa.) absence held, the GOP would have defeated the nomination [of Embry Kidd] temporarily.
If all senators had shown up, including Fetterman, it would likely have forced a tiebreaking vote by Vice President Harris.
Adding to the drama, Harris left Washington for Hawaii on Tuesday, depriving Democrats of a potential ability to break a 50-50 tie.
Despite the math, GOP members were incensed at the no-shows, which stretched into Tuesday as Vance did not show up for the morning vote.
Other senators, including Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), tagged along with Trump to the SpaceX Starship launch in Brownsville, Texas, further exacerbating the situation as Schumer prepared to hold another long night of nomination votes on Tuesday. ...
Vance, who missed all of Monday night’s votes in addition to the first one on Tuesday, received the lion’s share of criticism.
The outgoing Ohio senator initially defended his decision, saying that he was meeting with Trump as part of interviews for potential candidates to become FBI director and for other slots.
“I tend to think it’s more important to get an FBI director who will dismantle the deep state than it is for Republicans to lose a vote 49-46 rather than 49-45,” he added.
However, he backtracked and deleted his post on X. He also showed up for the pair of Senate votes during Tuesday’s afternoon session.
Full story here.
Showing up is the easiest, most important thing senators can do, and they were too busy.
It's unforgivable.
House GOP torpedoes Speaker Johnson’s funding bill :
A diverse group of House Republicans torpedoed Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) proposal to fund the government on Wednesday, dealing an embarrassing blow to the GOP leader and derailing his strategy to avoid a shutdown at the end of the month.
Fourteen Republicans joined virtually every Democrat in voting
against the spending plan — which paired a six-month stopgap bill with a
measure that would require proof of citizenship to vote — bringing the
final tally to 202-220, with two voting present. Three Democrats crossed
the aisle to back the measure. [Davis of North Carolina, Golden of Maine, and Perez of Washington State]
The Speaker faced a troika of GOP opposition, with hard-line conservatives criticizing the use of a continuing resolution; defense hawks voicing concern about the impact the long-term funding bill would have at the Pentagon; and moderates expressing worries about having a shutdown threat so close to the election.
The roll call vote is here. 5 Republicans didn't bother to vote, mostly liberals from New York. Libertarian fool Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Gazpacho Greene voted present. The 14 Nay Republicans included cranks Biggs, Boebert, and Burchett, as well as grandstander Matt Gaetz and Nancy Look At My Big Tits Mace.
Don't blame Donald Trump or Speaker Johnson, or the 199 Republicans who supported them.
There's never a backlash against the Democrat women who do this, however.
MSNBC is the preferred launching pad for the Party of Violence.
Both stories published Friday the 13th.
One in four US Black men under 50 support Trump for president, NAACP poll finds
In August, Trump reiterated his opposition to Florida’s ban on abortions
after six weeks. Asked if he supported an amendment to the state’s
constitution expanding the right to abortion, Trump said,
“I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks.” Faced with a
firestorm of criticism from anti-abortion groups, Trump campaign
officials maintained he “has not yet said how he will vote on the ballot
initiative.” ...
At the end of August, with polls showing a slight lead for Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump announced that “because we want more babies,” his administration would require either the federal government or insurance companies to pay the entire cost (which typically runs in the tens of thousands of dollars per individual) of IVF treatments for all Americans. He did not specify whether his proposal would be implemented through the Affordable Care Act, which he has promised to repeal, or whether he has become an advocate of socialized medicine. Nor did Trump reconcile the plan with the 2024 GOP platform, which has language that seems to support rights of citizenship, under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, to fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses.
More.
Trump has learned nothing.
Walz has shown not only a shocking disregard for free speech values but an equally shocking lack of understanding of the First Amendment.
Walz went on MSNBC to support censoring disinformation and declared, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.”
Ironically, this false claim, repeated by many Democrats, constitutes one of the most dangerous forms of disinformation. ...
The Supreme Court has consistently rejected the claim of Gov. Walz. For example, in the 2016 Matal v. Tam decision, the court stressed that this precise position “strikes at the heart of the First Amendment. Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.'” ...
In her failed 2020 presidential bid, Harris ran on censorship . . ..
President Biden is the most anti-free speech president since John Adams. ...
Democrats now have arguably the most anti-free speech ticket of a major party in more than two centuries.
Good.
The Hill has the story.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/08/business/ban-fracking-biden-trump-job-jobs/index.html
Now Harris has reversed herself, just in time for the election:
Vice President Kamala Harris will not seek to ban fracking if she’s elected president, an official with her campaign told The Hill on Friday.
Harris’s position not to support a ban on fracking differs from where she stood when she was running for president last cycle.
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/4795337-kamala-harris-fracking-ban-stance/
Other security companies have had similar episodes in the past. McAfee's buggy antivirus update in 2010 stalled hundreds of thousands of computers.
“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” George Kurtz, CEO of CrowdStrike, said in a post on the social platform X. “Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted.”
Quoted here.
April 30, 2016: CrowdStrike was contacted by the DNC outside counsel to discuss a suspected breach. This was CrowdStrike’s first involvement in this matter. (p6)
More.
The Hill reports here:
President Biden tested positive for COVID-19 on Wednesday, marking the third time in the past two years the president has tested positive for the virus. ... Biden was seen boarding Air Force One, not wearing a mask, and told reporters he feels “good.”
One law for me, another for thee.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll, published Tuesday,
found 32 percent of Democrats think Biden should give up his reelection
bid just days after he squared off against Trump in the first debate of
the 2024 general election season last week. ...
The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online July 1-2 and surveyed 1,070 U.S. adults nationwide. It has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points, per Reuters.
More.
That'll help 'em win lol.
More in "Firestorm erupts over requiring women to sign up for military draft".
In Michigan and Arizona at least, libertarianism is . . . polarizing!
Meanwhile, Trump has NO coattails in these states. Democrats are favored to win US Senate races in most of them.
Congress has not given the agency explicit authority to ban noncompetes. ... The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest pro-business lobbying group in the country, has said it will sue to block the rule. ... While the dissenting commissioners said they did not support noncompete agreements carte blanche, they did not believe the agency had the authority to issue the rule without an express directive from Congress.
More.
It's a BFD, as Joe would say.
Millions of American workers are not completely free to work where they may because of noncompete, nondisclosure, and confidentiality agreements they must sign as a condition of employment or as a condition of severance on termination of employment.
The FTC vote covers only the noncompete issue and represents an end run around Congress which has failed to pass appropriate legislation.
