GDP Growth Surges to Strong 3.4%

—Disinformation Expert Ace

There's been some good economic news lately, despite the half-as-high-as-Biden-and-therefore-apocalyptic inflation.

October 1: Unemployment applications fell to the lowest level since July.

The four-week moving average was 200,000, a decrease of 2,500 from the previous week's revised average, the department also said.

Unemployment claims are a proxy indicator for layoffs, and they signal to economists where the job market is headed. So far this year, claims have remained below 220,000, which is a historic low.

American paychecks grew faster than the rate of inflation, which was totally not the case under Biden. So obviously Trump is a disaster.

American households have seen the buying power of their paychecks grow under President Trump, a welcome change from years of watching real compensation fall thanks to runaway inflation.

The average private-sector paycheck has grown faster than prices since President Trump took office, Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show. And in recent months, real pay is growing even faster.

From January 2025, the month Trump was inaugurated, through August 2026, average weekly earnings of all employees on private payrolls rose from $1,222.14 to $1,298.94, a gain of 6.3 percent. The Consumer Price Index rose 4.8 percent over those 19 months. Adjusted for inflation, the weekly paycheck was up 1.5 percent. In January 2025 dollars, that is a gain of about $18 a week, from $1,222 to $1,240.

The most recent three months were stronger. From May to August, the average paycheck rose from $1,285.91 to $1,298.94, or 1.0 percent, while prices were essentially unchanged, up 0.05 percent. Real weekly pay rose 1.0 percent in that span, about $12 a week. August is the latest month for which both earnings and prices are available. The September price index is scheduled for October 14.

Over the four years of the Biden administration, the paycheck shrank after inflation. From January 2021 to January 2025, average weekly earnings rose from $1,047.55 to $1,222.14, a gain of 16.7 percent. Prices rose 21.4 percent. Real weekly pay fell 3.9 percent. In the dollars of January 2025, the paycheck went from about $1,272 at the start of that administration to $1,222 at the end, a loss of about $50 a week.

The service industry grew at its fastest pace in five years. And exports grew, and hiring accelerated.

U.S. service-sector activity expanded in September at the fastest pace in more than five years, with technology businesses leading a broad advance as stronger demand encouraged companies to increase hiring, according to a survey released Monday by S&P Global.

The Services PMI Business Activity Index rose to 58.8 from 56.5 in August, marking its fourth consecutive monthly increase and the strongest expansion since July 2021. Readings above 50 indicate growth compared with the previous month.

Activity increased across all five broad services sectors covered by the survey for the first time in ten months. Information and communication businesses reported by far the strongest expansion, while transportation and storage returned to growth.

...

Export orders also increased for a second consecutive month, although their growth was much slower than the rise in total new business. The pace of export-order growth matched August's 20-month high.

Companies responded to rising workloads by adding workers for a third consecutive month. The pace of services job creation was the strongest since June 2022. Some businesses reported that they had been able to fill previously vacant positions.

The latest advanced estimate for the growth: a high 3.4% increase in the nation's gross domestic product.

Real gross domestic product (GDP) increased at an annual rate of 3.4 percent in the third quarter of 2026 (July, August, and September), according to the advance estimate released today by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). In the second quarter, real GDP increased 2.2 percent.

...

Compared to the second quarter, the acceleration in real GDP in the third quarter primarily reflected an acceleration in investment and an upturn in government spending that were partly offset by a downturn in exports. Imports increased more in the third quarter than in the second quarter.

...

The price index for gross domestic purchases increased 3.0 percent in the third quarter, compared with an increase of 5.6 percent in the second quarter. The personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index increased 2.1 percent, compared with an increase of 5.0 percent, and the PCE price index, excluding food and energy increased 2.5 percent, compared with an increase of 3.3 percent.

The conventional wisdom is that voters form their opinions about the state of the economy six months before an election. They do not update their opinions with late-coming information.

So this will not help us in the midterms. I guess maybe we could guess that people felt this growth before it was officially reported, but Gallup says economic confidence is low and has been for a long while.

The Week In Woke

—Disinformation Expert Ace

Via Instapundit:

The Bulwark, the most conservative and pro-America website on the planet, endorses the open antisemite Muslim Brotherhood supporter Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed and calls opposition to him "racist."

Stephen L. Miller @redsteeze

So just in case you're following along, the mostly public face of The Bulwark is endorsing a Muslim Britherhood adjacent proven Anti-Semite. Ok, sure but that's not even the best part of this.

He's claiming that the opposing candidate will usher in internment camps, which would be a really uncomfortable fact, if his coworker and podcast partner had not floated someone with an actual Nazi internment camp guard symbol on his chest for President in 2028 prior to that candidate dropping out.

AHOY!

It's racist to oppose this.

El-Sayed courted Muslim centers where clerics portrayed U.S as Satan, sought 'revenge' on Zionists

Newly surfaced recordings show the Democratic candidate courting votes at tax-exempt Islamic centers, where clergy and Islamic scholars called America the "House of [Satan]," asked Allah to support the fight against Israel, and prayed for vengeance against Zionists and their backers.

Why are you making a big deal about that you Racists?

Michigan Democrat Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed directly solicited support for his campaign inside Islamic centers whose imams and guest speakers called America the "the House of Shaitan [Satan]" and urged Allah to "take the worst revenge upon" Zionists, according to a review of their videotaped services.

Experts said the video evidence, first uncovered by the Middle East Forum and verified by Just the News, could open the door to potential investigations into the nonprofit status of places of worship and provide a stark reminder to voters in the final days of the 2026 election about El-Sayed's ties to other controversial activists, who include Hasan Piker.

El-Sayed is locked in a close contest with former Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., for Michigan's open Senate seat. The contest is expected to be one of the most competitive of the cycle.

Throughout the contest, El-Sayed has taken flak for his ties to Piker, a prominent Twitch streamer who has said America "deserved" 9/11, among other sensational statements. President Donald Trump has called El-Sayed a "terrorist sympathizer."

The El-Sayed campaign did not respond to a request for comment from Just the News, and has denied his familial relationships to the Muslim Brotherhood and to radical Islam in general, with supporters such as former President Obama calling the issue "Islamophobic."

In March before the Democratic primary, El-Sayed visited the Islamic Center of Detroit, a nonprofit organization that offers both Muslim religious services and engages in charity work in the community.

El-Sayed was welcomed to the pulpit by one of the mosque's leaders during a Ramadan prayer service, during which he solicited signatures from the congregation so that he could qualify for the Michigan Democratic primary, according to a recording reviewed by Just the News.

The host introduced El-Sayed as "our beloved brother Dr. Abdulrahman," using his full first name, and El-Sayed spoke to the room in a livestreamed meeting and asked the congregation for their support.

Meeting ended with call for God to take "revenge" upon the Zionists

"I have to get on the ballot to be able to get your vote, inshallah [God willing]. So my team is here in the back. You'll see us on the outside [...] If you're a registered voter in the state of Michigan, we need your signature to get on the ballot, so I ask that you'll give us a signature," El-Sayed told the congregation. "Please don't leave here without doing that."

Later in the same Ramadan livestream, a leader reads the closing supplication in Arabic, which called for God to take "revenge" upon the Zionists and to foil their plans. It is not clear whether El-Sayed was still in attendance when this closing prayer was sung.

"O our Lord, the Zionists have spread corruption in the land. Your forbearance has deceived them, so show them Your power, O Compeller. They killed our brothers and sisters, so take the worst revenge upon them," the leader sang, according to the video.

"Lie in wait for them, our Lord. Raise no banner for them in the lands of the Muslims [...] and foil their plans in every time and place," he continued.

The Arabic language prayer was translated independently by the Middle East Forum and confirmed by Just the News using Google's translation application.

The Islamic Center of Detroit did not respond to a message submitted to its online contact portal.

The left has destroyed education and their next target is all of society.

Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol

🚨WHAT ON EARTH?!!

A Nashville TEACHER OF THE YEAR walked away from her career because she says the district ORDERED HER TO FABRICATE A STUDENT'S GRADE.

She refused, so they went into the system and CHANGED IT THEMSELVES.

According to the teacher, a student didn't finish a project so Hardcastle (the teacher) gave the grade the student earned... a failing grade.

Then a parent came in and SAT IN THE OFFICE FOR HOURS until that grade changed.

Three administrators huddled up and decided the AWARD-WINNING TEACHER was the problem.

She still refused to change the grade.

So they overrode her and changed it ANYWAY.

She quit in May and put all of it in a three-page resignation letter. It's public. Read it yourself. She calls it GRADE FABRICATION.

The leftwing Groomer Media is very, very sad that it turns out the spike in "queer identification" was a social contagion all along, just like the Bigots said, and are coping over reduced teen identification as LGBTQ.

Are Fewer Teens Identifying as Gay or Bisexual? It's Complicated.

New data have prompted questions about changes in teens' sexual orientations. But researchers disagree on how much the numbers can really tell us.

When they say the answer to a question they want to answer "no" to is "complicated," they mean "yes" but are too cowardly to say it.

Some of the most notable changes between generations have involved gender and sexuality, where there has been a steady increase in young people identifying as L.G.B.T. over the decades. But as culture and attitudes evolve over time, Dr. Twenge has wondered if that trajectory will hold.

Her analysis of new federal numbers on youth and sexual identity suggests there may be a change: In a recent post on her Substack, Generation Tech, Dr. Twenge argued that lesbian, gay and bisexual identification was in a "free fall" among high schoolers, with the clearest declines among ninth-grade girls. After peaking at 26 percent in 2021, the percentage of ninth-grade girls identifying as bisexual dropped to 13 percent in 2025.

Did the social contagion burn itself out resulting in the number of "queer" identifying youth falling by half?

Who knows, it's "complicated."

So now she's going to argue against the findings:

The change caught her eye, Dr. Twenge said, because "pretty much every other indicator for a very long time was going in the direction of more same-sex relationships, more acceptance of same-sex relationships, more identification."

...

"It's a reversal of very longstanding trends," Dr. Twenge said.

No it's not, it's a reversal of a very suspect spike in young people -- in particular, young girls who have historically been the most susceptible to social pressure and social contagions -- suddenly deciding in 2015 that they were "queer."

Anything but straight. Straight is normal and normal is boring. Yuch!

This explosion in "gay" youth is ten years old. This is not a "longstanding trend," unless you're ten years old.

...

Dr. Twenge's analysis immediately prompted speculation about the forces driving the change.

Conservative commentators argued the nation's rightward swing had swayed young people, suggesting that the prior rise in L.G.B.T. identities had been a product of progressive institutions promoting them. "Amazing what happens when you cut the Department of Education and USAID," Terry Schilling, the director of the American Principles Project, posted on X.

Others argued that the findings reflected an increasingly hostile climate for L.G.B.T. people in the United States, making teenagers afraid to disclose their sexual identities, especially in surveys conducted by the federal government.

LOL. Cope harder.

Meanwhile, the longstanding trend of increasing acceptance of the gay lifestyle also reversed, which I'm sure has nothing to do with progressives brainwashing young girls into being "queer" or "trans."

U.S. Support for LGBTQ+ Issues Remains Down From Peak

by Jeffrey M. Jones

Story Highlights

* Support for legal same-sex marriage down six points from 2022-2023 high
* 62% viewing gay/lesbian relations as moral is lowest since 2016
* Perceived morality of changing one's gender down eight points since 2021

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- After two decades of rising support for LGBTQ+ issues, U.S. attitudes have plateaued and begun to slide back modestly. Approval of same-sex marriage, moral acceptance of gay and lesbian relations, and endorsement of gender changes are all down from peaks reached in the early 2020s.

While most Americans still favor legal same-sex marriages, the 65% who do so today is down six percentage points from the peak in 2022 and 2023. Similarly, the percentage viewing gay or lesbian relations as morally acceptable, 62%, has not been lower since 2016. And the share of Americans who consider changing one's gender morally acceptable has declined eight points over the past five years, to 38%.

These items are from Gallup's annual Values and Beliefs survey, conducted May 1-17, 2026.

Between 1996 and 2022, the percentage of U.S. adults in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage increased by 44 points, from 27% to 71%. In 2024, the figure dipped to 69%, and it has shown a marginal decline each year since.

Gallup first asked about the morality of same-sex relations in 2001, when 40% said they were morally acceptable. By 2022, 71% held that view, before a sharp drop to 64% in 2023, holding at about that level during the past three years.

When Gallup first asked about changing one's gender in 2021, 46% found it morally acceptable, and 51% found it morally wrong. Today, those numbers stand at 38% and 57%, respectively.

Most of the recent changes in LGBTQ+ attitudes have occurred among Republicans. For example, in 2021 and 2022, 55% of Republicans said they favored legal same-sex marriage, but today, the figure is 37%. Among independents, support has dropped six points, to 67%, while Democrats' views are the same as in 2022 (87% in favor).

Partisans' views on the morality of gay or lesbian relations have shifted similarly. Since 2022, the high point for Republicans, the share who say such relations are morally acceptable has fallen 21 points to 35%, compared with an eight-point decline among independents to 64% and no meaningful change among Democrats (now at 81%).

As a result of the recent decline, Republicans' views of the morality of same-sex relations are now similar to what they were between 2005 and 2014.

Well, Republicans were willing -- eager, even -- to leave gays alone. But the Gay Movement did not return the favor, not even close.

So here we are now.

They want war.

EXCLUSIVE: 'Decolonize Palestine' organizer for Michigan Dem William Lawrence claims Charlie Kirk 'got what he f*cking got'

"Charlie Kirk incited a lot of violence and he encouraged a lot of violence. And sometimes you get what you f*cking get."

A field organizer for Democratic Socialist of America-aligned (DSA) candidate William Lawrence in Michigan--despite saying that it was "bad" that Charlie Kirk was assassinated--justified the shooting, claiming that Kirk "incited a lot of violence, and sometimes you get what you f*cking get." Lawrence is running in Michigan's 7th Congressional District and has billed himself as an average progressive.

...

"So it's like, my parents, like when I talk to them about it, it's like, 'Well violence is not good. We shouldn't be allowing it.' I'm like yes, but the violence happens. It happens. Sorry it happens. This is a world full of f*cking violence and Charlie Kirk incited a lot of violence and he encouraged a lot of violence. And sometimes you get what you f*cking get."

Remember when they claimed the Joker movie would spur the right into embracing psychotic nihilistic violence? The left is quoting the line Joker says before executing a man on television: "You get what you fucking deserve."

The Spooktacular History of Halloween Traditions and Lore

—Disinformation Expert Ace

Halloween in the 1930s

Why is Halloween the "spooky season" in the first place? How did this nonsense begin?

Well as you've no doubt heard, supposedly this time of year is a "liminal," meaning "on the threshold." ("Subliminal" means "beneath the threshold (of conscious perception).)

Supposedly, during liminal times, the "walls separating the mortal realms from the 'other worlds' (both the spirit realms and the lands of the fairies) are lower."

I guess because this time is at the end of autumn -- in Germanic languages, "the fall" or "autumn" is just literally called 'harvest." Herbst in German, for example.

So this time is between two seasons and therefore between two worlds.

That's an idea with a lot of salience in folktales -- crossroads, for example, are also believed to be space between two worlds, which is why you might see ghosts or even the devil in a crossroads.

Crossroads are viewed in global folklore and legends as liminal "thin places" where the barrier between the living world and the spirit realm weakens.

Folklore and Supernatural Beliefs

* Spirits and Lost Souls: Crossroads are often said to confuse wandering or restless spirits. Historical burials of criminals or people who died by suicide at intersections led to beliefs that their spirits would face four paths and get lost.

* Spectral Animals: The British Isles feature legends of spectral black dogs--such as the Black Shuck or Barghest--which are seen at crossroads as harbingers of death.

Halloween is a contraction of All Hallow's Eve. The following day, November first, is All Saint's Day, so the night before is the eve of all the hallowed, the sainted.

To hallow means "to set apart as holy."

Are the words connected? Yes they are:

The words hallow and holy share a direct and deep etymological connection, both coming from the same ancient root meaning "whole" or "healthy".

Etymological Lineage

* Hallow: From the Old English verb hälgian ("to make holy, consecrate") and the noun hälga ("holy person or saint"). This evolved into Middle English halwe and modern hallow.

* Holy: From the Old English adjective hälig ("holy, sacred, or consecrated"), which developed directly from häl ("whole").

* Proto-Germanic Root: Both trace back to Proto-Germanic hailagaz / *hailagōn (holy, sacred, or set apart).

* Proto-Indo-European Root: Going further back, they stem from the PIE root *kailo- meaning "whole, uninjured, or of good omen".

Of course, this is probably a case of early Church syncretism, or the merging of pagan traditions with Christian ones. Mostly just the dates.

Because November 1st happens to be an ancient festival:

Samhain is an ancient Gaelic festival celebrated on November 1 that marks the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter.

Meaning and Timing

* Pronunciation: Commonly pronounced "sow-in" (rhyming with cow-in or sau-in).

* Dates: Celebrations traditionally begin at sunset on October 31 and continue through November 1, as the Celtic day starts and ends at sunset.

* New Year: It marked the Celtic New Year and the transition into the "darker half" of the year.

The origin of the Jack O'Lantern is interesting and very pagan.

Apparently it was a Druidic custom to light communal bonfires. I assume these bonfires had some religious/cultic purpose. Then, when the fire had died down, the embers or coals from the fire would be transported to the individual hearths of the worshippers, so that the later fires would be descended from the communal ones.

These coals were carried from the communal bonfire to the home hearth in... hollowed out turnips or gourds. Faces began to be carved into these fire-transporting turnips to ward away evil spirits. I don't know when pumpkins were used for this purpose, if ever, but the pumpkin with fire inside is clearly a direct descendant of the coal-toting turnip.

The actual name "Jack O'Lantern" emerged from later, Christian-age Irish folktales about someone who tried to trick the devil.

A grumpy bastard of a blacksmith by the name of Stingy Jack invites the devil for a drink but refuses to pay (hence, the "stingy" descriptor). He convinces the devil to shape-shift into a coin to cover the tab. But when the devil obliges, Jack sticks the coin in his pocket. And much to the devil-coin's dismay, there is a silver cross in that pocket, preventing him from returning to his original form. A deal is struck. Jack sets the devil free and, in return, the devil agrees A) to bar Jack from entering hell when he dies, and B) to leave Jack alone for a year.

A quick aside: This seems like a bad deal. And it is a bad deal -- because guess what? A year later, the devil comes back to mess with Jack. Only Jack is ready for him. He convinces the devil to climb a tree so he might enjoy a delicious piece of fruit.

Note that this tale involves fruit. As you'll see, most Halloween traditions are fruit-based.

Once the devil is up in the tree, Jack carves a cross into the trunk. The devil can't come down. Another (bad) deal is struck, although this one does have the advantage of being slightly less bad than the previous one. Jack frees the devil in exchange for ten years of peace.

Jack dies. (Don't be sad. He was an asshole.) The devil, true to his word, refuses to let Jack into hell. God, meanwhile, refuses to let Jack into heaven. So, what is Jack's fate? To wander forever in eternal darkness, of course. But because the devil is not totally heartless (wait...), he tosses Jack a lump of burning coal from hell so he can have a bit of light. Jack carves out a turnip and sticks the coal inside, creating a lantern. Hence, "Jack of the Lantern," which is later shortened to "Jack O'Lantern."

Kids have been dressing up in costumes for a long, long time.

I don't know when this began, but an early example of it is kids going out "guising" -- wearing disguises.

In the Shetland Islands, kids dressed as "skeklers," wearing dresses made of wheat stalks.

Etymology and Origins

* Skekel / Skekle: The root noun in the Shetland dialect means a masked or disguised person, a guiser, or specifically someone wearing a straw dress at Halloween.

* Norn Roots: The term originates from the historical Norn language (a North Germanic language spoken in Shetland and Orkney until the 18th/19th century before being replaced by Scots).

* Skakling: Recorded in local almanacs to describe the start of the winter half-year around All Saints' Day (November 1st).

Kids dressed up in dresses made of straw is kinda creepy!

This custom involved what evolved into trick or treating:

* Costume: Made from local oat-straw woven into a skirt (gloy), a short cloak, and a tall, pointed straw mask or hat.

* Tradition: Skeklers traveled from house to house (hoosamylla) in small groups between mid-October and late January, dancing and playing music in exchange for food or drink.

* Leadership: The group was traditionally directed or led by a figure known as the scuddler.

Apparently people used to put apples on the thresholds of their doors as an offering to evil spirits, who would be placated by the sweets and not trouble the family inside.

But kids became coming by afterwards and asking for the apples which had not actually been carried off by spirits, which I would imagine was most of them.

And from that: begging for candy in costume.

Bobbing for apples is closely associated with Halloween. Remember, this coincides with the final harvest of the year, so apples are significant. As I mentioned, fruit was central to many Halloween traditions:

In America today, Halloween is most often associated with pumpkins and candy. For centuries in the British Isles, though, this eerie night was linked with apples, nuts, and cabbage, all of which were given secret powers...

Among all the food traditions of Halloween, apples appear most often. There are loose theories for why apples are so special on this day. They've long been thought to have an uncanny magic: in Welsh folklore, for instance, they carry a whiff of immortality. In the Book of Hallowe'en, an early 20th century study of October 31 traditions, Ruth Edna Kelley writes that apples came to Halloween through the colonizing Romans, who linked their fall apple festival with the Celtic Samhain.

But the game didn't start as bobbing for apples in water. Instead, the apples were bobbed for in between fire.

A stick was hanged from the ceiling by its middle so that it was suspended horizontally, and free to spin on the string holding it. On one side was stuck an apple. On the otherside, a lighted candle. Then the stick would be set to spinning and you would, without your hands, bob and bite at the apple as it spun around, trying to avoid being licked in the face by the flame or hit in the eye with hot candle-wax.

This "game" was called "snap-apple," and, if I might channel the noted ethnologist Donald Trump, it's a shit-hole tradition.

Oh, and winning the game -- eating the apple without taking a mouthful of flame -- would mean that you would be the first to marry or marry whatever person you liked.

Another version of the game involved suspending apples on strings from the ceiling, no sticks or candles involved. This is safer, though far less Mëtäl.

Another variation:

Sometimes the apples would be labeled or marked by young men and women before they were put in a tub of water: the person who caught your apple could be your mate. In another version of snap apple, a hoop is suspended from the ceiling, and different treats and tricks, including cake, candies, bread, apples, and peppers, are stationed along its rim. The one a player caught with their teeth would foretell the nature of their love--would it be sweet, spicy, too hot? Would it nourish or burn them?

A lot of fruit, a lot of eating, and a lot of promise of sex.

Even cabbages had sexual bend:

If none of these fortune telling methods went your way, you could still resort to cabbage. One tradition involved pulling kale stalks from a field: the nature of the stalk, its weight, length, girth, and taste, would hint at one's future spouse.

I'm not going to unpack that.

A lot of divinations were of the "ill fortune" type:

Some people would bake a ring and nut into the cake--the finder of the nut would be a widow or widower. In another version, the cake had a coin, a sloe berry and a bit of wood baked in. The coin meant wealth, the sloe meant you'd outlive all your friends and the wood meant you'd die within the year.

Yay!

This being a "liminal time" when the "walls between the worlds were lower" led to Halloween being a time for minor magics like divination of the future.

And this divination usually involved predicting your future spouse.

In one divination game, you would peel an apple all in one big peel, then throw the apple peel over your shoulder. When the peel landed on the floor, it would form a letter, which would be the first letter of the name of the person you would marry.

This magical divination predicts a lot of spouses with names beginning with I, J, G, S, Z, and C, and maybe a D here and there, but anyone whose name began with K, X, Y, R, B or any letter formed by multiple strokes was shit out of luck and would die a lonely spinster.

Another of these "see your future spouse" games involved going into a darkened, lonely room with only a candle for light and looking at a mirror. Supposedly, over your shoulder and behind you, would appear the dark, fuzzy form of the person you would wind up marrying.

Obviously this just relies on darkness and unsteady light and seeing what you want to see.

I read about this "candle in a mirror and your future spouse appears behind you" game in Agatha Christie's Hallowe'en Party, which also featured "snap-apple," but I'm pretty sure it was the safe version without the candle.

Oh, and the victim is killed by being drowned in the tub for bobbing apples. Oh, and also, despite the book being set in the 1960s, they casually mention that the village has a "village witch" like this is a normal thing that most villages have and needs no further explanation.

What? English villages all had a village witch, the same as they had a butcher or postman?

There were other variations.

In many variations, the seeker was forced to walk backward, which aided the tension. From a 1916 story in the Alaska Daily Empire out of Juneau, "Little girls duck for apples till they are wet from head to foot, walk down the cellar stairs backward, hold a candle before a mirror to see their future husbands."

The opportunities for shenanigans are obvious. Friends stealthily followed behind mirror-toting players, or hid in the darkened destinations. At the right moment, they leaped from the shadows, screams stabbing the night before terror collapsed into giggles. Or, there was the potential for romantic assignations. A hopeful young man, yearning to make his feelings known, could plan to reveal himself in a mirror. As another postcard suggested, "of course this affair must be prearranged to be successful for the Witches are busy and can't tend to everybody."

This one, via Google AI (but I've read it elsewhere), is even more dangerous than snap-apple:

Walking Backwards Down Stairs: Some variations required a person to hold a hand-mirror and walk backwards down a dark flight of stairs at midnight to catch a reflection of their future mate.

That is a shithole tradition way to wind up in traction.

We've all noticed that Halloween has become, for older teenagers and young adults, a holiday all about sex. Girls dress like literal streetwalkers. It's a hookup holiday.

But I didn't realize until writing this post... it's literally always been a holiday closely associated with sex. Even stuff like the ripe, full apples suggest sexual maturation and pregnancy.

Sure, magical games to see your future spouse are the socially acceptable way to suggest sex, but it's still mostly about sex. This holiday has always had mating on its mind, from the early pagan days.

So: magic, pagan traditions, "lowering the veils" between the worlds, evil spirits and the devil. And on top of it all: the suggestion of sex.

No wonder religious people have such a problem with it.

Many of the ideas in this post came from this video about the folklore that may have inspired It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.

MaaikeDx @RembrandtsRoom

Oct 31, 2024

Taken in 1936 during a photo session at Raynham Hall in Norfolk. The photographers captured the original lady of the house, Lady Dorothy Townsend, descending the staircase. One of the most famous "ghost photograph" ever

Spooky Talafreako:

@AceofSpadesHQ Happy Halloween https://t.co/41XXk2ODbH

— simplicissimus🇺🇸 (@DrBoecker) October 30, 2026

I had planned on reviewing Backrooms and Obsession but I'm going to skip that. But definitely use the threat to suggest spooky movies for your fellow Morons.

Close it up

Candidate of Germany's Far-Left Party "Die Linke" Confesses that Islamists Control Her Party and That She Fears They Will Kill Her

—Disinformation Expert Ace

Der Spiegel is a leftwing outlet in Germany.

Here's an example of how hard they'll lie on behalf of the Red-Green Alliance.

DER SPIEGEL @derspiegel

Oct 18

Translated from German
Right-wing ideologues claim a connection between the riot over the weekend and the ancestry of many of the troublemakers. That is a racist lie that conceals French failure. Link in X-Bio.

Uh huh.

So it takes an awful lot for them to report that the the far left's candidate for the mayor of Berlin admits that her party is controlled by Muslim extremists and that she feels her family is "in danger" due to them.

She's a candidate for "Die Linke," which just means "the Left."

Karina Mariani @KarinaLMariani

Translated from Spanish

🇩🇪🚨MEGA-SCANDAL: The winner of the BERLIN elections, from the far-left party Die Linke, accidentally confesses that Hamas controls her party and fears for her life💣

A mistake has just triggered an astonishing security crisis. The magazine Der Spiegel--a media outlet, it must be noted, with a marked leftist slant--has brought to light an internal document proving how Die Linke has been hijacked by Islamism.

Its candidate to govern Berlin, Elif Eralp, accidentally sent the newsroom her private notes from an interview where she confesses to being coerced and terrified by Hamas operatives within her own party.

It turns out that after an interview, the candidate's team reviewed the transcript. During this process, Eralp made internal comments that were meant to remain in the strictest confidentiality. However, the document with the un-erased annotations was sent back to the journalists.

The content of those notes is dynamite. When Der Spiegel asked her about Ibrahim Ibrahim--a pro-Palestinian Hamas sympathizer who celebrated the October 7 massacre--the public response was going to be evasive. But in the margin of the leaked document, Eralp wrote the truth: "There is a PROBLEM. [...] my husband no, and neither do I, want to name specific names, he is afraid of these people and so am I."

The leak exposes the raw reality of Islamo-leftism in Germany: Eralp even went so far as to compare the threat level of these pro-Palestinian militants to that of Organized Crime and implores to abort the publication: "I can't put myself and my family in danger for Der SPIEGEL. What do we do now? Do we scrap the whole interview?"

The biggest joke of the entire situation, however, was captured in one of the phrases that Eralp did want to publish. In a display of utter disconnection, the candidate states in the interview: "What I can say with total clarity is that, as governing mayor, I will ensure the safety of all Berlin women and all Berlin men." A promise that rings utterly ridiculous coming from a leader who, in the same document, secretly admits that she can't even protect her own family from the rank-and-file of her party.

The left's response to this is their usual response: They demand censorship of her admission of Islamist control over her party and fearing for the safety of her family,

In the wake of the scandal, Eralp has announced that she will take legal action against Der Spiegel and file a formal complaint with the Press Council for having quoted her internal annotations. This judicial maneuver immediately reveals just how sensitive and utterly overwhelmed these leadership cadres really are when faced with crisis situations.

Berlin's radical left believed it could politically capitalize on Islamic extremism; today, the documents prove that it's the extremism holding them hostage.

So is this real? Well, Google's leftwing propaganda AI says it is:

The "Der Spiegel" and Die Linke Controversy (October 2026)

* The Incident: In late October 2026, Der Spiegel published a report following an interview with Elif Eralp, the leader of Die Linke in Berlin who won the September 2026 Abgeordnetenhaus election.

* The Leak: When Eralp's office sent back the authorized interview draft, internal notes and remarks were accidentally left in the document.

* The Content: The leaked notes showed Eralp requesting to strike a question regarding Ibrahim Ibrahim, a pro-Palestinian activist who praised the October 7 Hamas attack. In her private comments, Eralp wrote that she and her husband were afraid of backlash and could not put their family in danger, stating: "I can't put myself and my family in danger for Der Spiegel" and "I should never have agreed to this interview".

* The Party's Reaction: Die Linke leadership accused Der Spiegel of publishing private notes that endanger the safety of Eralp and her family. The party announced plans to file a complaint with the Deutscher Presserat (German Press Council) and considered legal action.

* Political Impact: The leak has created friction during ongoing coalition negotiations in Berlin between Die Linke, the Greens, and the SPD, while drawing scrutiny over how the party handles antisemitism and radical associations within its ranks.

By the way: The lesson that Der Spiegel takes from this is that the problem is with this candidate, not the Islamists controlling the left:

DER SPIEGEL @derspiegel

Translated from German

Elif Eralp wants to become the governing mayor of Berlin. But in an internal memo, the Left Party politician reveals that she fears terror sympathizers with contacts to Hamas. Can such a person be responsible for security in the capital...

I mean, yes, if she's terrified pro-Hamas Islamists will kill her family she obviously will not crack down on these violent invaders, but aren't you missing the real problem here...?

A Stronk and Empowered Black Female Democrat Judge Routinely Makes Racist Screeds Against Attorneys Before Her, Because She's So Anti-Racist

—Disinformation Expert Ace

Another DEI clown put into a position of authority by the left, and one that seems to have genuine mental health struggles on top of it.

By the way: This isn't new. Josh Blackmun wrote an article, which I'll link later, in which he reports that he has heard all about this nasty racist mentally-ill woman for a long time but didn't say anything, because no one made it official by filing a complaint.

Well now a complaint has been filed.

A lawyer's misconduct complaint against US District Judge Ada Brown stemmed from a hearing during which she repeatedly directed racial insults at him, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg Law.

Attorney Ezra Young, who has represented a Black woman professor suing over a tenure denial, filed a complaint against Brown following the April 2026 hearing in Dallas, he confirmed in an interview with Bloomberg Law...

Throughout the hearing, the judge, a Black woman with Native American ancestry, accused Young of mistreating Black attorney took "judicial notice" of her own background in making findings against Young, and repeatedly referred to Young, who is Latino, as being White. Brown called the hearing months after she revoked Young's ability to practice in her courtroom to weigh whether the lawyer should face sanctions.

"Judicial notice" is when a judge enters a fact into the record without evidence or testimony. It's for simple matters of fact that can be found in, say, a dictionary or a calendar, like "I'm taking judicial notice that July the 25th was a Sunday."

This Nobel Prize Finalist takes "judicial notice" of her own background and the Racial Expertise it gives her in all things, especially in knowing Which Other Races Are Stupid and Evil.

She would have failed out of the Charlie Kelly School of Bird Law.

Filibuster!

"I think what's happening here, quite candidly, is you are very intimidated for some reason, Mr. Young, with Black excellence, in light of your White mediocrity. Yeah. Right?," Brown said, according to the transcript. "You should write that down. I mean, you -- I'm -- you look like a White man, right?"

He's intimidated by Black Excellence? Where might that be, DEI hire?

"Black excellence" is often -- but not always -- a racist meme asserting black supremacy and, here, people's discomfort with seeing the full power of black supremacy.

It doesn't have to mean that. It could just be a little racial boosting, talking up "black excellence."

But here it's plainly an assertion that she is superior due to her melanin ratio.

"I'm not White, Your Honor," Young replied, adding that he's Latino.

"Well, you are White-presenting; is that fair to say?" Brown said, according to the transcript. Young said that he's "fair-skinned," and Brown said that Young had "White privilege" when he argued his client didn't receive key evidence in the case.

I'm so glad that the black leftist political class, full of Black Excellence of the kind you see here, is on the job and ready to instruct us in aggressive anti-racism.

"You're the White savior, come to save all the stupid Black lawyers in Texas who need your help, from New York," Brown later said, according to the transcript.

Well you are in fact a stupid black lawyer who should be disbarred, and it does appear you need help -- both for your job performance and for your obvious mental illness -- so you should accept whatever help this White Latino Savior can offer.

During the hearing, Brown also implied that Young fabricated a quote in the case and indicated she'd gone through Young's public social media profiles before suggesting that the attorney may be tracking her on social media.

I wasn't kidding about the mental illness.

Young said he was "disgusted and mortified" by the suggestion of him having an anti-Black animus, and told Brown that he was concerned about her conduct during the hearing, according to the transcript.

Soon after, Young filed a formal complaint against Brown, saying he believed the judge may be suffering from a mental health condition. The complaint helped launch a judicial investigation that resulted in her temporarily losing her docket earlier this month.

A special judicial committee has ordered Brown to undergo a psychiatric examination as part of that investigation.

Brown, a Donald Trump appointee who joined the court in 2019, didn't return requests for comment.

Yeah, forced on him by Democrats. I don't know why we allow that still.

Oh yeah I do -- because Nostalgia Republicans still think it's 1997.

Brown has said she won't participate in proceedings tied to complaints by Young and Chief Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod of the Fifth Circuit. Brown earlier defended her conduct toward Young in a 76-page written response viewed by Bloomberg Law.

Brown in that response denied having a mental health issue, as raised by Young in his complaint, and denied that any of her actions were inappropriate.

I'd like to have an undelicate conversation with this racist cow about how some extremely uneducated and unfit people get Socially Promoted into jobs they are completely unqualified for.

Andre Davis, a former Fourth Circuit judge who previously served as a federal trial judge in Baltimore, said the purported conduct -- at the hearing and since -- shows "a clear pattern of inappropriate and abusive behavior by Judge Brown that reflects violations of numerous provisions of the Code of Conduct for Federal Judges."

"If the investigation of the matters at issue were to conclude on the current facts, without consideration of any potential information bearing on mitigation, the case for removal of a judge, at the state or federal level, would be compelling," Davis said.
Braced for Conflict

Young, a Columbia Law School graduate and solo-practitioner who's litigated for over a decade, had tense interactions with Brown in the past. She issued two earlier orders raising whether he should face penalties in her court.

In an interview with Bloomberg Law, Young said he was prepared for the April hearing to be "bizarre," but that he found his experience with Brown to be "wildly disturbing."

"This was a degree of conflict and what seemed like a judge using her position of power on top of what I've come to believe is an obvious disability that I think is disqualifying, trying to go out of her way, in my belief, to prevent a civil rights litigant and her lawyer from using the civil rights laws to do what they're supposed to do," Young said.

...

During the April 24, 2026 hearing, Brown accused Young of "racial bullying" toward Black attorneys in the case.

Brown also said that Young was acting like a "Chad," a term Young wasn't familiar with. The judge said it was the male version of a "Karen." "It's someone who calls the manager when they don't get their way. They stomp their foot when the rules are supposed to apply to them, right?" Brown said, according to the transcript.

In an unexpected twist, this angry and stupid black racist is "triggered" by any word she thinks gives her Special Racial Rights to lash out at other people for their racial make-up:

During the April hearing, Brown took issue with an article headline describing the case when it went before the Supreme Court of Texas. The article quoted a brief filed by Young that referenced another law professor apparently comparing what happened in the tenure denial to a "lynching."

So she sees the word "lynching" in an article submitted as evidence and she decides this is a coded dog-whistle against her so now she gets to freak out and scream at people:

The judge accused Young of making up that quote to "get a headline."

"And so when I read a headline -- a sensationalized, very racialized headline that says, 'it's like I've been lynched,' and it's literally got no connection to this case, I have to ask you, Mr. Social Media, Main Character Chad, White Hero, Savior, Loves to Help Black People Be An Ally, where the lynching in this case came from?" Brown said, according to the transcript.

She also apparently gave Young a copy of a 1920 newspaper article that described a lynching. "So we don't find lynching jokes funny down here, sir," Brown said, according to the transcript.

This White Latino continued attempting to pound it into the thick head-bone of this bison-skulled woman that he is not in fact caucasian.

But she didn't understand.

Toward the end of the hearing, Young said that Brown seemed to be "using vicious stereotypes about White people, when I've repeatedly disclosed to this Court I am Latino."

He said that it appeared that Brown "is trying to tar and feather me for anti-Black animus, that has never been raised by anyone but this Court," according to the transcript.

"This Black woman?" Brown replied.

"No, Your Honor. This Court," Young responded.

He tried to tell her he has no anti-black animus and in fact, as a civil rights lawyer, has worked to vindicate the rights of many black people.

This racist lunatic was offended at that:

"Can I pause and just tell you, I appreciate, on behalf of Black people, your White saviordom," Brown said.

"Your Honor, again, I'm not White," Young replied.

Josh Blackmun:

The Bigger Problem With Judge Ada Brown's Woke Tirade: She Said The Quiet Part Out Loud About "White Saviors"

Many lawyers and judges harbor the "anti-racist" views that Judge Brown spewed, but have the mental faculties to keep it private.

For some time, I've heard rumors about unusual behavior from Judge Ada Brown in the Northern District of Texas. I was hesitant to write about the situation, because my information was incomplete and some of it was revealed in confidence. Now, the accusations are public, in part, because Judge Brown personally disclosed items to the press and others.

...

Now, onto the substance. There seems to be something seriously wrong with Judge Brown. Her behavior in court that has been reported in the press is extremely troubling. Her refusal to decide cases seems to be an abdication of her responsibility as a federal judge.

Oh, she doesn't even bother doing her job? Plot twist.

Next thing you'll say something Kah-razy like "she also created a fake charity and collected hundreds of thousand of dollars that she spent on trips and jewelry."

And she's also apparently refusing to participate in the disciplinary hearing over her action. I guess she's just relying on her Black Excellence to carry the day.

And her unwillingness to participate in any disciplinary proceedings suggests something is amiss. I will hold off on opining on these issues in more depth, as I suspect more facts will come out.

Here's the real scandal, as they say: What Brown is saying is not aberrant among the black leftist class.

It is their foundational ideology:

Some people may be shocked at what Judge Ada Brown said in court, but the truth is that she is parroting standard dogma from Anti-Racists and Critical Racial Theorists. The charges may be completely absurd for someone like Ezra Young, but imagine the black plaintiff was represented by a white lawyer. Would that person be a "White Savior"? Think of the most famous white lawyer in American literature. Could even Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird be derided as a "White Savior"? Yes.

Welcome to the world of academia.

Feds Raid Multiple Fraudulent "Autism Services Centers" in, Get This, Minnesota

—Disinformation Expert Ace

Hm. It's almost as if Democrat-run states deliberately allow massive fraud to illegally funnel money to their key constituent groups.

It's the same scam we've seen before: essentially fake "health care providers" bill the federal government for "services" they never provide to "patients" who don't exist or don't even have the ailments they're supposedly being treated for.

This could quickly be stopped by the most basic of verification protocols, but the Democrats always turn those all the way off.

And, as usual, they find a liberal criminal, in this case a 70-year-old Karen, who has some certification which allows her to sign off on the completely-fake billing.

And no further questions are asked.

Federal agents raided multiple Minnesota autism service providers Thursday in the latest law enforcement action involving a state already under intense scrutiny over allegations of widespread fraud in taxpayer-funded programs.

The FBI confirmed that federal and state agencies were conducting "court-authorized investigative activity" at multiple locations across Minnesota, including sites in the Twin Cities and Rochester, according to MPR News.

...

Iska Inc. received more than $16.7 million in Medicaid payments between 2018 and 2025, according to state data reviewed by the Minnesota Star Tribune. The business participated in Minnesota's Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention program, which provides services to children and young people with autism and has faced increasing scrutiny over fraud allegations.

...

The Justice Department also announced charges against 15 defendants in May in connection with alleged health care fraud schemes involving more than $90 million in intended losses. The cases included an alleged $46.6 million scheme targeting Minnesota's autism intervention program, which DOJ said saw Medicaid claims surge from more than $600,000 in 2018 to more than $400 million by 2025.

Meanwhile: Greasy Gavin Newsom is spending millions of taxpayer dollars to provide luxury gourmet food to welfare lifers.

California Sends Luxury Foods to Welfare Recipients

As middle-class families struggle to afford groceries, the state delivers organic produce, salmon, and more to Medi-Cal members.

Salmon, beef, organic produce, and Amy's Kitchen meals: these are just some of the luxury foods that California welfare recipients can get delivered to their homes each week, for free.

Californians like TikTok user "Lupita" are taking full advantage. Earlier this year, she posted a video of herself opening a taxpayer-funded grocery box, apologizing to her manicurist as she unboxed it by hand. Inside, she found carrots, heads of broccoli, apples, oranges, celery, rice, lettuce, and more.

"Yesterday, I was like, 'I need some lettuce,' but the lettuce was like five dollars," she said. "And look at this. Fresh lettuce! Thank you, God."

She can also thank Governor Gavin Newsom. As part of his nearly $12 billion Medicaid reform package, welfare recipients--including illegal immigrants--can receive free, "medically tailored" meals and groceries, delivered straight to their door. They can get foods for free that would cost ordinary people a small fortune.

The food service is part of CalAIM, Newsom's multibillion-dollar Medi-Cal reform package. Signed into law in 2021, CalAIM directs Medicaid dollars to social programs like transitional rent payments and housing deposits. Newsom called it a "once-in-a-generation opportunity to completely transform the Medicaid system in California."

The transformation is working. The most popular of CalAIM's "Community Supports," by far, is "medically tailored meals." That program and a related offering send prepared meals or "tailored" grocery items to qualified Medi-Cal recipients' homes.

The state makes eligibility easy. Applicants need a qualifying Medi-Cal card, a provider's recommendation, and an eligible condition. In a 2024 presentation to a Los Angeles nonprofit, Andrew Barrier, a former executive of a California medically tailored food contractor, told his audience how easy it was to enroll.

"They're not looking to push people away from the program, they're really looking for people to be on it," he said. "Step one is that chronic condition. This is really how most people come in, and they could have diabetes, pre-diabetes, cardiovascular, mental- and behavioral-health disorders--we've seen anxiety, PTSD, depression, ADHD. Again, the list is very, very long."

From there, the food shows up at recipients' doorsteps. Medi-Cal pays contractors to deliver the food for up to 12 weeks, after which eligible recipients can re-enroll. And it's not cheap: across 24 weeks, between food and delivery, a single "medically tailored meals" recipient costs taxpayers more than $1,500.

Here's the Corrupt Karen who signed off on fake billing for fake patients suffering from fake autism and even warned her co-conspirators that they had to CALM DOWN on the truly massive fraud or else "the feds will come in."

THE MORNING RANT: Public Radio is Being Squeezed Thanks to Trump Defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting

—Buck Throckmorton

Before Donald Trump defunded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (“CPB”) in July 2025, Republicans had long argued for doing just that. Most of them were lying to get our votes, of course, and given the chance to do so, they never did. Republican Representative Paul Ryan famously advocated for gutting CPB funding…until Ryan became Speaker of the House and had control of the purse strings. Suddenly he determined that defunding CPB represented only negligible federal spending, or that it would consume too much political capital, or some other lie as he rubbed his betrayal in our faces.

Defunding public broadcasting is yet another of the innumerable acts that Donald Trump did after decades of surrender-cons (e.g. the legacy GOP) claiming it couldn’t be done.

NPR has long argued that it only gets a nominal amount of its funding from taxpayers. In this NPR from April 2023, in which it was reporting on itself, NPR falsely claimed that less than 1% of its funding comes federal sources. But as The Hill reported in a piece a few weeks later, a great deal of NPR’s funding comes from local public stations, who historically received much of their funding from federal spending.

In other words, the money flow was: Taxpayers → Federal Government → CPB → local stations → NPR.

More specifically, the money that flows from local public radio stations to NPR buys propaganda programming such as “All Things Considered” and “Morning Sedition Edition.” In recent years, NPR has been collecting about $230 million per year from local stations.

Thanks to the defunding of CPB, local stations are staring at a budget crisis, and they are going to have start taking drastic actions to reduce expenses – actions such as terminating NPR programming. This following story about the public radio station in Chattanooga is not an isolated occurrence. WUTC lost $126k of annually recurring federal subsidization, which amounted to about 20% of its annual budget.

“WUTC hopes high-dollar donors will step forward to help close $89K shortfall” [Chattanooga Times Free Press – 10/15/2026]

Chattanooga’s public radio station is looking to make up an approximately $89,000 shortfall or it will have to potentially consider cutting programming or other services, according to station leadership.

------------------------------------------------

“I would say funding is what keeps me up at night,” general manager Susan Lazenby said Thursday. “I think we have a lot of positive things going on at the station, but without the federal support, it makes it really complicated to pay bills.”

The financial pressures date to July 2025, when Congress approved President Donald Trump’s request to cut $1.1 billion in previously approved funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributed federal funds to public radio and broadcasting stations nationwide.

For the local affiliate, this amounts to approximately $126,000 in annual revenue that is gone, Lazenby said, and it’s not clear if or when it’s coming back. That equates to 20% of the organization’s total annual budget, she said.

I am not going to do a grave dance, because I am still greatly saddened by the loss of what public radio once was in the days before it sold its soul (and much of its programming time) to NPR.

After I graduated from college in the 1980s, the local public radio station was probably my most-listened to station. It was a companion that provided locally-produced shows featuring music that none of the commercial stations played. There were local DJs who hosted eclectic shows full of new-to-me music, especially acoustic, folk, bluegrass, classical and blues. Some DJs would have music from all those genres in the same show! I was a loyal donor for many years, but the expanding NPR lineup and its left-wing programming was like a cancer chewing up the station’s airtime.

My last check payable to the local public radio station was in the late 1990s, shortly before my favorite Saturday morning acoustic music show was replaced by a smug, know-it-all, NPR show titled “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.” Around the same time, I tuned in one July 4th morning, only to hear NPR airing a show about how awful and racist the U.S. is, and how July 4 is such a difficult day for enlightened Americans.

I don’t know if public radio could have survived long-term in the internet era, but by attaching itself to the radical leftists at NPR, it certainly hastened its own demise.

Thanks again to Donald Trump and the current Republican Congress for defunding NPR by defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

My Appearance on American Spectator’s “Continuing Crisis” Podcast

A subject I have written about several times here at Ace of Spades HQ is how Democrat partisans are pumping money into prediction markets to produce more favorable published probabilities for their candidates. That money isn’t an investment – it’s a campaign contribution.

Melissa Mackenzie and Scott McKay kindly invited me to come on their podcast at The American Spectator to talk about this subject, as well as other topics related to next week’s elections. Here is a link to the podcast which went up yesterday. I’d be honored if you’d give it a listen.

Mid-Morning Art Thread

—CBD

Secrets II
Paul Wiesenfeld

The Morning Report — 10/30 /26

—J.J. Sefton

Good morning kids. Unfortunately we'll start things off on a sad note as we have learned that the iconic actor Patrick Stewart has passed away. Of course he is probably best known for his role as Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek:the Next Generation.

But my first recollection of seeing him was in the visually stunning John Boorman film of the Arthurian legend Excalibur. But Stewart's talents encompassed so many genres and he was terrific in every one. One of his most memorable performances for me was his portrayal of a gay opera star in an episode of Frasier where his romantic advances on the good doctor are totally misinterpreted by Frasier as merely a budding friendship. As a huge fan of the series in general that episode is in my top 5 or so. Hilarious. In any case, thanks for the memories and RIP.

And now on to the news of the day which as we all know is generally chock full o' gloom and doom and straight up insanity. And with the midterm elections appropriately enough just a couple of days past Halloween coming up tomorrow, we have this trick being perpetrated on the good folk of Alaska.

Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy (R) revealed more about “Decoy Dan” J. Sullivan, including that he wanted to fake his middle initial.

Incumbent Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan (R) has the middle name Scott. So the ballot lists him as Dan S. Sullivan.

“Decoy Dan” attempted to use S as his middle initial instead of J. . .

. . .Remember, the Alaska Board of Elections kicked “Decoy Dan” off the ballot over the summer because officials could tell he is a fake. The Alaska Supreme Court put him back on the ballot.

But despite the evidence discovered during that investigation, Dunleavy announced a new investigation into whether members of Democrat Mary Peltola’s Senate campaign should face charges for possible election manipulation regarding “Decoy Dan.”

Ah yes, the courts. Where would we be were it not for our Judiciary? Probably a much freer and more prosperous society, that's not on the brink of national suicide. But hey, why exaggerate, eh?!

The Wisconsin Supreme Court opened an investigation into a judge who helped an illegal immigrant evade capture by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a probe that could lead to her disbarment, according to a letter issued by the court and obtained by The Daily Wire... “I am pleased to find out that the Supreme Court of Wisconsin has taken the step to investigate Hannah Dugan as a result of CASA’s grievance. Not only did her actions make her unfit to be a judge, but they also call into question her fitness as an attorney,” Schube said in a statement shared with The Daily Wire.

Considering the Wisconsin Supreme Court is entirely hardcore Leftist and come this Tuesday there is a chance that this David Crowley commie criminal might very well be the next governor and turn us into the Fromunda Cheese state, I have serious doubts that this Dugan scum will face more than the teensiest of wrist slaps, if that.

Elsewhere, no my inclusion of RFK's remarks vis a vis Islam in the lead is no mistake. I highlight it not because of its veracity but that someone high up and in the public eye has the stones to state it loudly and plainly. Good for him for doing so, and as such opening himself up for rhetorical and real slings arrows bullets and suicide Islamikaze belts.

Democrat media cronies and supporters are frothing at the mouth and fighting back hard, pulling out their tired old smears of “racist.” Even the World Socialist website fulminated against “Trump and Kennedy’s racist tirades against Muslims and Arabs.”

Well you do indeed take the most flak when you're directly over the target. Sadly we go from a hero to an abject piece of dog-turd that's less than a zero!

On the 25th anniversary of the worst attack on America since Pearl Harbor, I watched the somber recollections without seeing the same emotion I have felt since that day -- absolute fury.

I’m not sure what made President George Bush say that Islam is a religion of peace on 9/11, but he certainly did not know what he was talking about. Islam has never been a religion of peace. It was founded in violence and continues to this day to wage war against perceived “infidels.”

 Instead of recognizing the true meaning behind the attack, many community leaders seemed to bend over backward to placate the Muslim community. After 9/11, more than 300 mosques were added in various states, and school boards were adding foot-washing stations and other Muslim accommodations.

Here in New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who was elected to that position shortly after the attack, had no problem allowing a Muslim community center to be located near Ground Zero. While I thought the proposed Arab school was a good idea, did it have to be headed by a radical Islamist connected to the Muslim Brotherhood? 

Meh look who's Mayor of NYC now!

Or for that matter, Pope!!

Just seven months ago Pope Leo XIV declared in a Palm Sunday homily that God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.” I wrote then that this was not only demonstrably and biblically false, but the wrong message to be sending in a climate of intensifying persecution of Christians and a war being waged against Christendom by the unholy Red-Green alliance. Apparently Leo ignored me, because earlier this week, in a video message to an interfaith gathering of religious leaders, the American Pope stated, “There is no such thing as a holy war,” adding, “Only peace is holy.”

And on these and all the other links du jour, I nevertheless bid you all to have a great weekend, a safe and fun Halloween if you are partaking of any events and as always please get out and VOTE EARLY and OFTEN!!!

ABOVE THE FOLD, BREAKING, NOTEWORTHY
• Fierce blowback from the Red-Green Alliance.
  RFK Jr. Video: ‘Muslim Brotherhood Wants to Install Sharia Law’

Daily Tech News 30 October 2026

—Pixy Misa

• The internet may or may not be on fire again and there's not enough information available to determine which: There's a severity 9.8 flaw in the Linux kernel's networking stack which may (or may not) give everyone on the planet root access to every server. (The Hacker News)
  
  The cheerily blasé Anthropic post on the subject indicates that it may be connected specifically to multipath TCP rather than the ordinary variety which may be why East German sources only score it as a 5.9. I just ran around scanning my servers for multipath TCP listeners and that came up clean, but whether that means I am actually safe remains unknown.
  
  And if you're running Ubuntu or RedHat Linux, there is no patch out yet, so all you can really do is panic. Or not panic; RedHat rates it at 5.9, and Amazon who do have a patch out for their home brand Linux rate it at 7.0.

Thursday Overnight Open Thread - October 29, 2026

—Doof

From Aesthetic vibes - near Silverton, Colorado

Howdy Hordelings! Welcome to the Thursday ONT! Mixed bag of content for those who care. Open thread, as always. On time, as always. What's on YOUR mind tonight?

***

Congrats to the Brewers on winning their first World Series.

Milwaukee celebrates in true Milwaukee style

Do know how much legendary status you need to have for fans who’ve never experienced a World Series win to take the time from their celebrations to leave over 100 Miller Lite cans beside Bob Uecker’s statue last night.

Glad to see Brewers fans treated him right last night and gave him his flowers while celebrating

— BaseballHistoryNut (@nut_history) October 29, 2026

JUST IN: Miller Lite says it took beer that was on the line at 10:13 pm CT, when the Brewers won it all, and put it special "Clinch Cans."

4,400 cans will be available online starting 11/2. https://t.co/ZsllSOtE1r

— Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) October 29, 2026

Not everyone wanted to watch the Series, though

-----

So this guy (Walt) had the interwebs abuzz today.

This broke me.

Find this man. Find him and I will personally fundraise for him. https://t.co/hwdHT8hJvI

— Sarah Fields (@SarahisCensored) October 28, 2026

He was concerned he might get fired. Nope! Red Baron has his back.

He’s still here. He’s got a fan club.
Including us. https://t.co/7oppfnDUfx

— Red Baron Pizza (@redbaronpizza) October 29, 2026

Dude stuck a nerve and America responded

🔥 JUST IN: THOUSANDS of Americans are now saying they will be buying Red Baron pizzas and supporting the business after the company PUBLICLY BACKED the hardworking patriot instigated in a now-viral video

"He’s still here. He’s got a fan club. Including us."

HUNDREDS of thousands of dollars have now been raised for him as well 🙏🏻

This is America! 🇺🇸

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) October 29, 2026

-----

Speaking of responding -- I think I know how most of you would answer this

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From one of my favorite X accounts Terrible Maps

The dessert each state brings to a cookout

How'd they do for your state?

-----

Wonder what our resident pinball junkie garrett thinks of this

10 Greatest '80s Pinball Machines, Ranked

The 1980s marked an exciting period for games and pinball, as manufacturers experimented with new gameplay mechanics, increasingly elaborate playfields, and creative themes that gave each machine its own personality. From multiball mayhem to unusual playfield designs, the decade delivered plenty of machines that challenged players to sharpen their reflexes and chase increasingly high scores.

Ranking the greatest pinball machines of the '80s means looking beyond flashy artwork and memorable themes to consider gameplay, mechanical innovation, and lasting influence on the hobby. Whether a machine changed how people played pinball or simply delivered an unforgettable arcade experience, these 10 classics represent some of the best the decade had to offer.

You here tonight, garrett??

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DJ Doof - City Edition

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Close it up

Beaver AMSR Cafe

—Disinformation Expert Ace

Edinburgh Castle as seen from Greyfriar's Cemetery
by Dan Dunlop

Beaver goes munch munch munch.

In Czech Republic, a planned dam had been delayed for seven years do to bureaucratic bungling. A group of beavers built a dam in almost the exact spot the human dam had been planned in a couple of weeks.

A gigantic pumpkin disqualified from a contest for having a soft/rotted part becomes a giant snack for zoo polar bears.

Dogs enjoying water of all kinds.

Woman buys her wienerdog a hotel-style bell, and the dog rings for service every ten seconds. I mean, what did she expect.

Dog raised by bunnies develops some bunny-like behaviors. He likes lettuce. Yuch.

Golden retriever is best friends with bunny.

Poor little dog chases car praying to be adopted.

Baby elephant thinks he's a big man.

The Michael Scofield of hounds.

This weisenheimer's Halloween costume is P. Diddy and a little friend.

Every Tarantino movie explained by the Always Sunny cast.

High-Speed Train Crash Kills At Least 68 People In Spain

—Disinformation Expert Ace

I'm pretty sure that Rome, as it crumbled, experienced many accidents such as this.

Dying nations like dying people experience a lot of injuries before they pass.

Kangmin Lee @kangminlee

10m

Absolutely horrifying footage coming out of Spain.

A Rente high-speed train carrying 397 passengers rear-ended a stationary Iryo train carrying 147, with the death toll currently at 64 and rising and injuring dozens more among the 544 passengers aboard.

This tragedy marks the second major crash on the corridor this year, following a January collision at Adamuz that killed 46.

Accidents like this are easily preventable and utterly unacceptable in the first world. What is going on in Spain? Pray for the victims and their families.

Trump Fires Three-Star General for Leaking to Press, Lying In Three Failed Polygraph Tests

—Disinformation Expert Ace

Alexandra Ingersoll @AlexIngersoll

NEW: On background from a War Department official:

Army Lieutenant General Brett Sylvia, who was part of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was fired by Secretary Hegseth for severe misconduct. Although Sylvia's title was director of the Directorate for Strategy, Plans, and Policy at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, known inside the military as the J5, he was NOT a central planner for the Iran War. That is the responsibility of CENTCOM and its commander Admiral Cooper.

Sylvia is the subject of an investigation for leaking classified information about the Iran War, the war between Russia and Ukraine, and more. Due to the Pentagon's media policy requiring journalists to have escorts in the building, Sylvia began meeting with journalists outside of the Pentagon in order to leak classified information.

Sylvia failed three polygraphs which questioned him about leaking classified information. The investigation into him remains ongoing and has been referred to the Department of Justice for further action. The extent of his leaking became so critical that Secretary Hegseth took immediate action and fired Sylvia in order to protect national security. Urgent action was needed and could not wait another second.

Beege Wellborne saysthis comes after a story leaked to Steve Jobs' Widow's Vanity Magazine The Atlantic, claiming that Pete Hegseth is incompetent.

Fox News:

War Secretary Pete Hegseth fired one of the Pentagon's senior strategic planners amid an investigation into allegations he leaked classified information to journalists about the Iran war, Russia's war in Ukraine and other sensitive matters, a Department of War official told Fox News.

The official said Lt. Gen. Brett Sylvia failed three polygraph examinations related to alleged disclosures of classified information. The investigation has been referred to the Justice Department.

Sylvia is also accused of meeting journalists outside the Pentagon with the alleged intention of leaking classified material after Hegseth imposed new media restrictions requiring reporters to be escorted inside the building.

Fox News Digital has reached out to Sylvia for comment but did not hear back at time of publication. The Justice Department declined to comment specifically on Sylvia but said it has "ongoing investigations related to possible leaks of classified information" and works closely with the Department of War.

Pentagon chief spokesman Sean Parnell said the personnel action followed "an extensive Air Force OSI investigation," though he did not identify Sylvia by name in his statement or provide further details about the investigation.

Parnell issued a pointed warning to those suspected of leaking classified information: "Our commitment was not an empty promise. We vowed to find you, and we meant it."

...

The official stressed that Sylvia was not a central planner of the Iran war, which falls under U.S. Central Command and its commander, Adm. Brad Cooper.

...

Sylvia is the second officer leading the J5 to be removed under Hegseth, following Lt. Gen. Joseph McGee. Hegseth also removed Lt. Gen. Douglas Sims, then director of the Joint Staff, earlier this year.

President Donald Trump told reporters Sylvia is going to have "big problems, long term problems" on Thursday.

Feds Raid "Adult Day Care" Centers In New York That Are Almost Entirely Fraudulent and Used to Steal Money from the American Taxpayer and Send It Back to... the Chinese Communist Party

—Disinformation Expert Ace

NYC's biggest fraud scheme? Feds RAID adult day cares across the city

The feds raided at least two Brooklyn adult day cares on Oct. 20 as part of a sweeping probe into more than 100 sites suspected of Medicaid fraud involving everything from money laundering to kickbacks, officials said.

The crackdown is part of a monthslong "massive effort to combat fraud and abuse" involving taxpayer dollars and some of the state's most vulnerable people, Gov. Kathy Hochul said.

Oh sure I'm certain she's right on top of widespread immigrant looting of the American taxpayer.

Video report here.

Wall Street Apes @WallStreetApes

INSANE 🚨 100% of New York adult daycares that were audited WERE FRAUD

"We audited 15 of these -- There's no record of a single meal, activity, single hour of supervision"

ILLEGAL KICKBACKS were also reported with these adult daycares. How the scam works is the daycares will sign people up and offer them $1,000 per month cash

The adult daycare can bill about $120 per day to taxpayers. So they make about $3,600 per person and give the person $1,000 of it per month back as a kickback

So they pocket $2,600. The person with the Medicaid insurance gets $1,000

Taxpayers are being robbed blind

Audit: New York State is permitting B I L L I O N S in Democrat constituency groups' theft of taxpayer funds.

A new report examining New York state audits found billions of dollars in Medicaid payments lacking required verification, an estimated $11 billion in improper unemployment payments and widespread failures to enforce financial safeguards.

The report, produced by the State Financial Officers Foundation and OpenTheBooks.com, reviewed findings from the New York State Comptroller's Office between 2018 and mid-2026, identifying oversight problems involving Medicaid, unemployment insurance, local governments and affordable housing.

Among the largest findings, New York paid approximately $31.5 billion for Medicaid personal-care services between January 2021 and March 2023, but $14.5 billion -- roughly 46% -- lacked matching electronic records verifying when services occurred or how long they lasted.

A 2024 Comptroller audit found that the state had a system capable of blocking certain payments without the required Electronic Visit Verification records, but the feature was not activated.

Oh, you mean exactly the credit card zip code checker that could immediately block foreigners from donating to Democrats which ActBlue specifically disabled so that all the illegal money would flow in?

Isn't that odd that the same things keep happening, and it's all part of what prosecutors will one cay call "a common scheme or plan." Let foreigners loot the taxpayers, then take kickbacks from those same foreigners illegally donating to the very politicians who enabled their plunder.

...

Auditors separately flagged $21.3 million in potentially improper Medicaid payments, including visits billed while patients were hospitalized or lasting too briefly to qualify for reimbursement.

"This audit found a disturbing lack of oversight and failure to comply with the required service verifications," New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said in the 2024 audit. "The state Department of Health needs to do a better job of protecting the integrity of these services and safeguard Medicaid funds."

Meanwhile, Democrat judges are absolutely insistent that illegal aliens' illegal votes for Democrats be counted.

Jennifer Van Laar:

Judge David Carter of the Central District of California ruled against the Department of Justice's emergency motion to require California and Los Angeles County election officials to sequester ballots returned by those on a list of 20,000 people the federal government had determined to be "likely noncitizens."

In a scathing 26-page order, Carter likened the federal government's effort to prevent illegal aliens from voting to efforts to keep black Americans or women from voting, and to Jim Crow-era laws like "poll taxes, literary tests, and other obstacles to prevent people from casting their vote."

In the introduction, he wrote:

Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch. In bringing this lawsuit, the Executive would have this Court believe that it reigns as a sole sovereign. But California and its people are sovereign, too.

Now the woke judges are all about States' Rights. Sure.

O Captain: Patrick Stewart Dead at 86

—Disinformation Expert Ace

He's been looking more and more frail for years.

Stewart died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles following "a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer's disease and Lewy body dementia," longtime spokesperson Kelly Bush Novak announced.

"He has been held in the warm embrace of family and friends, surrounded by live music, prayer, tears, laughter and the kind of profound emotion that only he could inspire after a lifetime of devotion to us all," Bush Novak wrote. "We will forever cherish the peaceful ease and reflection on his face, an enduring reminder of his invincible grace."

Please feel free to use this thread to talk about off-topic stuff, like movies or shows or books you'd recommend. I had not planned a mid-day entertainment thread, so I have not much to add here. I wasn't a fan of Star Trek: TNG or Stewart for that matter, but I know that many people were.

As everyone always points out, he was one of the first knights to declare for Arthur in Excalibur. Which, as everyone also always says, was filled with no-name actors who would soon become big names: Gabriel Byrne and Liam Neeson, for example. Plus Helen Mirren and the great Nicole Williamson, who had previously dated and absolutely loathed each other and had to be cajoled into working together. But I think they were already kinda well-known, and they didn't become big stars like Byrne and Neeson.

So here's what I'm watching: Elementary, again, and Person of Interest, this time, for the third time.

Both shows are good but Person of Interest continually surprises me with how many genuinely good moments it has and how much smart science fiction stuff. It was commenters who recommended it to me, ten or twelve years ago. I think maybe Garrett said it was "Daredevil in a business suit," which is semi-accurate, but actually downplays how good it is.

If you don't know the premise: An ultra-reclusive computer genius with the fake name "Harold Finch" created an artificial super-intelligence after 9/11 to scan all of the trillions of megabytes of data being hoovered up to find the actual terrorists and their plots. But the ASI, called "The Machine," was too good at its job and didn't just find terror plots, but any kind of premeditated crime like kidnapping and murder. It began alerting the government to these threats, but the government wanted to limit what The Machine did, largely because the entire scheme was unconstitutional and illegal and they didn't want to have to explain how they're suddenly showing up at murder scenes before the murder is committed. They can tell some lies to explain how they foil the occasional terrorist attack, but they don't want to like 1,500 times a year about the murders they thwart.

So they declare all non-terrorism-related threats "irrelevant" and ignore them.

But Harold Finch is haunted by these preventable murders that he could stop but doesn't. So he uses the backdoor he built into the computer to tell it to send him the social security numbers, and only the social security numbers, of people The Machine predicts are either going to be the victim of serious violence, or the perpetrator.

And because he's a pencil-necked geek, he recruits a special forces ex-terrorist-hunter with the pseudonym "John Reese" to be the strongman of the team and actually deal with the threats.

So the premise is: This is a murder mystery show, but we enter the murder mystery before murder happens, and if we can figure out who is being threatened and by whom, we won't just solve the murder, we'll prevent the murder.

It's a great premise.

Many shows would just take this premise and run with it, ignoring the background story of how this is even possible.

But Person of Interest takes it to the next level and also features stories about The Machine itself, and specifically, dangerous foreign nations who have figured out that America now has an ASI and want to seize it for themselves.

Most episodes are about stopping murders and kidnappings, but a fair number are about the fight to keep The Machine secret and safe from the very dangerous people who would like to hijack it.

And the sci-fi and legal framework is solid. For example, the reason the government says it's legal to scan everyone's emails and bank statements is that it's just a computer looking, and it doesn't count as a "search" until a human sees the information. (That's why Finch's machine only supplies social security numbers -- the humans have to do the real digging themselves.)

The point is: this isn't just something they made up for the show. This is the real-world government legal position on the use of computers and artificial intelligence to search and analyze records.

The show doesn't treat you like a moron (mostly). For example, we'll see a POV shot from Reese, where he looks down at a man's pantleg and there's a slight bulge at his ankle. He doesn't say "ankle gun" to the audience. The show relies on you having seen the bulge yourself, so you know why Reese reaches for the man's ankle after punching him in the gut.

And it has a lot of espionage stuff too. It's basically a mix of your four favorite genres: Mystery/detective, spy action-adventure, science-fiction, and street-level superhero.

Highly recommended, including for a rewatch, if you haven't seen it again. It holds up.

DOJ "Aggressively Investigating" Democrat Plot to Defraud the Voters of Alaska as Mary Peltolta Continues Lying About Her Role in the Election Interference

—Disinformation Expert Ace

Yesterday I mentioned a NYT report that establishes that, despite a year of lying about it, Democrat Congresswoman Mary Petolta, now running for Senate (and endorsed by "Republican" swamphag Lisa Murkowski), is behind running a man called "Dan Sullivan" to siphon votes away from the real Dan Sullivan, the incumbent Republican.

The New York Times: Yes, the shifty Democrat socialist whore Mary Petola is behind the recruitment of a nobody loser named "Dan Sullivan" to run against the incumbent Republican Senator Dan Sullivan.

Operatives aligned with Democratic Senate nominee Mary Peltola spent months recruiting candidates in an effort to dilute support for Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan on Alaska's crowded ballot, according to The New York Times.

The effort, internally dubbed the "ballot composition project," included an early directive to a Peltola staffer in the summer of 2025: find as many people named Dan Sullivan as possible in the state.

The goal, the report says, was to land another Dan Sullivan on the ballot to create confusion and siphon votes from the incumbent.

...

The staffer complied, combing through voter records to produce a list of Dan Sullivans from across the state.

This was no random request. Dan S. Sullivan is the name of the state's Republican senator. And if the Peltola campaign or its allies could track down and persuade another Dan Sullivan to run for Senate, the confusion could cost the senator crucial votes on the state's unusual, four-person ballot.

The plan worked. This spring, a retired teacher from a tiny fishing village along the Alaska Panhandle, reachable only by air and sea, announced his candidacy for Senate. His name was Dan J. Sullivan.

The Peltola campaign has repeatedly denied any involvement in his candidacy. But The Times has found, based on interviews and text messages, along with documents prepared for a potential lawsuit against the campaign, that not only did Ms. Peltola's team work with people trying to recruit Mr. Sullivan to run for Senate, but the effort was much broader. The group worked to coax other would-be spoilers into the race, to dilute the incumbent's support and help catapult the Democrat to victory.

Despite being busted by the leftwing New York Times, whose report is based on inter-campaign emails and other documentary evidence, Mary Peltola continues to insist that she didn't Knowingly Know what her entire campaign Doingly Did.

Boy Democrats sure get a lot of mileage out of that "defense," huh?

Her campaign put out this lie:

"The Alaskans for Mary campaign has no involvement with either Sullivan campaign. Like Mary, our campaign is focused on lowering costs and fixing the rigged system in D.C. and did not recruit any candidates into the race," the Peltola campaign said in a statement to NewsNation affiliate The Hill.

The DSCC also told The Hill in a statement it had "no involvement" in recruiting the other Sullivan. Peltola's campaign did not immediately respond to The Hill's request for comment.

She's also getting mileage out of the Democrats' other "defense" -- we shouldn't be talking about my election interference. conspiracies to defraud the government, or family stocked foundation to roof with Muslim Brotherhood terrorists, we should just focus on affordability (for which I have no plan except claiming Trump Did It.

Now comes word that the DOJ has in fact launched a criminal investigation, and that the subpoenas are flying like crows towards peanuts:

Bill Melugin @BillMelugin_

1h

BREAKING: Colleague @davidspunt reports via two sources familiar that there is an ongoing DOJ "aggressive criminal investigation" into Daniel J. Sullivan appearing on the ballot for US Senate in Alaska, and the investigation has intensified in the wake of the bombshell NYT report today.

DOJ sources tell David that multiple grand jury subpoenas will be issued in the coming hours and days, and there are preservation orders to cell phone companies that are being prepared regarding text messages and emails that may build a timeline for how Daniel J. Sullivan was placed on the ballot.

The investigation is being handled by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Alaska and federal prosecutors are interested in potential charges relating to the depravation of rights of Alaska voters. The investigation is expected to go beyond Election Day and has been underway for several months.

Reportedly -- according to Mark Halperin -- the Democrat lawyer/fixer who quaterbacked this criminal conspiracy to defraud the voters of Alaska is...

the guy who attempted to defraud the voters of all America by quaterbacking Hillary Clinton's RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION hoax:

John Reese - Person of Interest @Rickisback_ON_X

Just In: Per Mark Halperin on Megyn Kelly, the Marc Elias law firm was involved in the fake Dan Sullivan Candidate search in the Alaska Senate race.

"Illinois Man" of No Apparent Political Leaning Sends Hoax Anthrax Letters to Four Members of Congress; Quickly Arrested by the FBI

—Disinformation Expert Ace

At least on political affiliation the leftwing Democrat Propaganda Media is willing to report.

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. -- A 37-year-old Illinois man is charged with sending threatening letters to members of Congress containing a white powder, including one with a note reading "HAH enjoy the gift," according to federal court records.

The criminal complaint unsealed Monday claims Matthew Ungelsbee sent at least four plain white envelopes with a powdery substance to elected officials in Chicago. They were postmarked in Springfield, Illinois, on Oct. 19 and had Unglesbee's name handwritten in the return address section.

Unglesbee, of Quincy in southwestern Illinois, is charged with mailing threatening communications and perpetrating a hoax...

FBI agents interviewed Unglesbee at his home on Sunday and he told them all the letters contained salt, court records show. He claimed he'd sent the letters after hearing someone talk about similar mailings in the news earlier this month.

Testing confirmed the white substance was not dangerous. The records did not identify the substance.

A motive was unclear. But Unglesbee said he knew the congress members would "take it serious" because the powder might be perceived as anthrax, which he knew was dangerous and could prompt a response by hazmat teams, according to the complaint.

"Unglesbee claimed he was joking but recognized the recipients would not know he was joking and could perceive it as a threat," the complaint stated.

...

The investigation began after an anonymous tipster reported overhearing Unglesbee in a restaurant talking about mailing a suspicious substance to members of Congress. The tip was received Oct. 16, and the FBI tracked Ungelsbee down after the envelopes arrived at the congressional offices days later.

The failure to state his political affiliation is interesting because you know if he were a Republican, it would be mentioned in the first paragraph. And the second paragraph. And the third paragraph. And then it would be missing from most of the fourth paragraph but make a last-minute 11th hour appearance in the last sentence.

But there's no mention of any party registration.

This guy says that your suspicions about that are completely accurate:

Matt Robinson
@mattrobinson

Registered Democrat Facing Federal Charges After Mailing Hoax White Powder to Multiple Members of Congress

A 37-year-old Quincy, Illinois man identified as Matthew Unglesbee faces federal charges for allegedly mailing threatening letters containing a suspicious white substance to multiple Illinois members of Congress. Reports indicate that Unglesbee is a registered Democrat in Adams County, Illinois.

The federal investigation initiated after the FBI received an anonymous tip from an individual who overheard Unglesbee discussing the letters at a restaurant. In videos published to social media prior to his arrest, Unglesbee spoke explicitly to fellow Democrats, saying, "Let's flip the House and the Senate Democrat" and urging people to vote to change policies. Despite these statements, his specific actions targeted Democratic congressional offices, creating severe disruptions that prompted emergency law enforcement and hazardous materials responses. Envelopes were delivered to the offices of Senator Tammy Duckworth, Representative Mike Quigley, Representative Jan Schakowsky, and Representative Brad Schneider. Subsequent laboratory analysis determined that the enclosed white powder consisted of harmless table salt, accompanied by handwritten notes reading "Haha" or "Ha enjoy the gift".

During interviews with federal investigators, Unglesbee reportedly admitted to sending the items as a copycat action. He acknowledged that recipients would likely perceive the substance as dangerous materials like anthrax and experience concern for their personal safety. Court records show that Unglesbee has an extensive criminal background, including previous convictions for child sexual assault, impersonating law enforcement, and threatening a local police chief. He is currently listed as a registered sex offender.

Madison Cornbread Is the Latest Beneficiary of Corrupt DC Democrat Jury Nullification

—Disinformation Expert Ace

Democrats have been rigging juries for decades, refusing to convict any Democrat politicos and throwing the absolute book out of any poor Republicans caught in James Comey's dragnet.

Madison Cornbread is the latest Democrat partisan let off the hook by No One Is Above the Law DC juries:

The Washington Post @washingtonpost

Breaking news: A grand jury rejected the DOJ's attempt to indict former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson for the account she gave lawmakers of President Trump's actions during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to people familiar with the matter.

Shipwreckedcrew @shipwreckedcrew

18h

This is why they took the case with the 2 FBI Agents before a Magistrate judge yesterday.

The DC Grand Juries are going to nullify any noteworthy case they hear.

Hans Mahncke @HansMahncke

Oct 28

One of the most important priorities of the past two years should have been to break Washington DC's monopoly over the adjudication of virtually anything that can be connected to the capital, however remotely.

The system is totally dysfunctional and fundamentally unfair, whereby anyone who is not a Democrat has no chance of receiving a fair hearing, let alone justice, while Democrats themselves are completely shielded from accountability.

That was painfully clear during Trump's first term, became even more glaring with the January 6 prosecutions, and was illustrated yet again by travesties such as the grotesque $1 million judgment against Mark Steyn for criticizing climate change "research." The constitutional promise of a fair trial and jury of one's peers is completely meaningless in DC for anyone who is not on the far left.

None of this is new. Many of us have been warning about this problem for years and proposing various ways to address it. Yet, predictably, absolutely nothing has been done, and nothing will be done.

Skeptical Stoic @StoicSkeptic

In case you want to know how bad things really are...

For the last several years, left-wing activist groups have hosted information and training sessions for prospective jurors in DC. This is part of an organized effort to nullify the DC jury pool in order to give Democrats and their allies in DC de facto immunity for politically motivated crimes while subjecting anyone they suspect of being a political opponent to a "guilty until proven innocent" standard.

It's a complete perversion and total inversion of what the justice system in this country is supposed to be, but Democrats care more about protecting Democrats and hurting Republicans than they care about the justice system, let alone the country.

No doubt Democrats and the legacy media (but I repeat myself) would be wailing like banshees on crystal meth if the situation were reversed.

The DSA is hosting "trainings" where they teach their communist insurrectionists to vote against the clear weight of evidence in favor of the left and always against the right.

The U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee announced it is investigating "left-wing activist groups in the District of Columbia" who allegedly provide jury nullification initiatives to teach potential jurors how to influence the outcomes of criminal cases and acquit criminals.

"Free DC, in coordination with Harriet's Wildest Dreams, has held jury nullification training sessions to instruct potential jurors in how to navigate juror vetting and subvert lawful prosecutions in the District of Columbia," wrote House Oversight Chairman James Comer. "Leaders at these public sessions brazenly declared radical intentions. At an August 12 training, Qiana Johnson, who serves on the Board of Harriet's Wildest Dreams and is a 'conductor of legal defense' for the organization, told attendees, '[y]ou have this superpower, and that superpower is you are able to nullify that goddamn jury. In conducting these trainings, your organization is blatantly facilitating the violation of the constitutional right to an impartial jury and undermining the rule of law in the District."

In a letter to Free DC Executive Director Keya Chatterjee and Harriet's Wildest Dreams Board Member and Former Co-Conductor Qiana Johnson, Comer raised concerns that "they are training activists to conceal their biases during jury selection, infiltrate juries, and acquit criminals based on political agendas rather than the law and evidence. Chairman Comer is requesting all documents and communications related to their jury nullification training sessions, coordination with outside partners, and funding."

The Oversight Committee added in a new release that, "these sessions instructed activists to falsely present themselves as unbiased and conceal their ties to prison abolitionist groups during jury selection. Free DC has also publicly touted its juror training efforts as a source of power to halt prosecutions. Free DC is fiscally sponsored by organizations financed by left-wing dark money groups that also support other entities conducting jury nullification workshops."

"It is clear that the position of Free DC and Harriet's Wildest Dreams is that potential jurors should not make decisions impartially based on applying the law as instructed to the facts presented before them in the case, but based on their subjective, personal beliefs and activist agendas."

But not a single Republican will propose a law granting prosecutors or defendants the right to change venues in politically-sensitive cases in venues where the last election went by more than 58% (say) for one party.

Republican corporate clockpunchers continue living in fantasy, high on nostalgia for a country that stopped existing by 2008.

Now they're escalating, preparing How To Guides for jury corruption.

NYT: An Obama-Era Investigation Concluded That Ilhan Nur Said Elmi Entered Into a "Sham Marriage" With Her Likely Brother (But Dropped the Investigation, Of Course)

—Disinformation Expert Ace

This is all just a big Right Wing Conspiracy Theory and RUSSIAN Disinformation Campaign, H8rz.

Several current and former law enforcement officials said an Obama-era investigation found some evidence that Ms. Omar had entered into a sham marriage with a man suspected of being her brother.

The federal investigation of Representative Ilhan Omar is focused in part on whether she entered into a sham marriage in 2009 to help a man suspected of being her brother obtain a green card, according to current and former officials familiar with the matter.

The F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security investigated the marriage in summer 2016, during the Obama administration, and found some evidence that it was fraudulent, current and former officials said.

"Some evidence" = "literally all of the evidence so we dropped it like a hot potato so we could later say 'we reached no firm conclusions'"

Speculation that Ms. Omar committed marriage fraud with a brother has shadowed the Minnesota Democrat's political career for more than a decade and President Trump repeated the accusation last week. She has long called it a right-wing conspiracy theory that federal officials debunked during her first race for elected office in 2016.

But that case stalled chiefly because prosecutors concluded that the potential crime, a felony, fell outside a five-year statute of limitations, according to the current and former officials, most of whose law enforcement careers spanned several presidential administrations.

When Ilhan Nur Said Elmi answered the question "did you marry your brother?" with the answer "not to my knowledge," it immediately struck me that she might have been counseled to avoid directly lying, because a lie could be said to be a continuation of the original conspiracy which would therefore extend the statute of limitations clock.

I didn't mention it because it seemed too speculative.

But given that Ilhan Nur Said Elmi must have known she was investigated by Obama's DHS and FBI, and given that she was surely warned by Obama that she could face potential consequences, maybe it's not such a big speculation to say she's avoiding saying things that could be argued to re-start the statute of limitations clock.

Now the Trump administration, whose top leaders have long reviled Ms. Omar, has revived the scrutiny as one element of a sprawling investigation into the Omar family's journey to the United States as refugees from war-torn Somalia. At issue is her marriage in 2009, when she was already a U.S. citizen, to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, a British citizen whom she divorced in 2017.

See, it's not that No One Is Above the Law or that cheaters and immigration fraudsters should face justice -- no, it's all about Trump "reviling" this poor immigrant stronk empowered black Muslim woman and daughter of a schoolteacher.

Be better, Trump. #BeBetter.

Democrats are "distancing themselves" from this smelly pirate hooker.

Dozens of House Democrats are keeping their distance from Rep. Ilhan Omar as the Minnesota "Squad" rep faces a federal investigation -- even as party leaders rally behind her and demand that the Trump administration back off.

A letter led by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and signed by 175 House Democrats accused the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security of weaponizing law enforcement against Omar, whose Washington DC home was searched by federal agents earlier this month.

Around 40 Democrats declined to sign the letter from the 214-member caucus.

"Congresswoman Omar is seeking reelection in Minnesota's 5th congressional district in just one week. News of the search warrant, whether properly predicated or not, could affect voters' decisions, which is exactly why federal law enforcement should not engage in such conduct when voters are casting their ballots. This type of interference strips Minnesotans of their right to a free and fair election guaranteed to them under the Constitution," the letter states.

Trump was seeking re-election as the real president of the United States and Democrats charged him with four absurd non-crimes and arrested him.

I thought No One Is Above the Law. No? Was I misinformed?

However, a number of House Democrats declined to sign the letter, a notable show of distance from Omar, who has frequently drawn controversy over her outspoken criticism of Israel and other positions on foreign policy.

Among the lawmakers who didn't sign were Reps. Tom Suozzi, Laura Gillen and Josh Gottheimer, who all represent a district in either New York or New Jersey, where political calculations could make embracing Omar a liability.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the former Speaker of the House, also chose not to sign the letter even though current Democratic leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) did.

Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Washington Democrat who represents a competitive district, also was not on the letter.

Their absences suggest that while many Democrats are willing to defend Omar against what they characterize as a "politically motivated investigation," others may be wary of tying themselves to the progressive just days before Election Day.

Glenn Beck
@glennbeck

Oct 27

We received an HSI memo from inside the administration revealing federal agents spent 8 months building a case on Ilhan "Omar" before ever knocking on her door.

The leaked document requests her complete, unredacted passport history, targets potential federal violations for false passport statements and false claims of U.S. citizenship, and explicitly raises the prospect of civil denaturalization!

That paper trail explains why two dozen federal agents walked out of her home with her phone, files, and her DNA, and why those grand jury subpoenas went out to her family.

Now, is she going to be convicted, stripped of her citizenship, and deported? Proving this in a courtroom is still a major hill to climb. But if federal law enforcement actually has the receipts to back this memo up... OHHHHH BOY.