A Bit Of A Scuffle

Some Freedom Caucus congress critters were trying to do a little public gaslighting hold a press conference in DC when a guy named Jake Burdett - identified as a Medicare-4-All activist decided to disrupt it with some loud, combative questions.

Keep in mind, Burdett was just talking - not acting in a threatening manner - annoying to be sure, but in no way violent or dangerous. "Just asking questions".

So I don't know how exactly this kind of protesting should be done, but I do know that the Tea Party clowns in 2010 would show up at practically every gathering of Democrats and raise hell, shouting down any elected official who was trying to interact with their constituents.

And I know that no Democrat grabbed any protester and shoved him away from the proceedings.

I also know that the guy who is now Montana's governor assaulted a reporter in 2017 while campaigning for a seat in Congress:

Montana congressman-elect pleads guilty to assaulting a reporter

BOZEMAN, Mont., June 12 (Reuters) - A Montana congressman-elect pleaded guilty on Monday to a criminal charge of assaulting a reporter, and the Republican was ordered to perform community service and receive anger management training.

Greg Gianforte, a wealthy former technology executive who campaigned on his support for President Donald Trump, attacked a reporter on May 24, the day before he won a special election to fill Montana’s lone seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Gallatin County Judge Rick West sentenced Gianforte to 40 hours of community service and 20 hours of anger management classes.

The judge in Bozeman, Montana, also handed down a six-month deferred jail sentence, which Gianforte would avoid serving if he complies with the court’s orders.

Ben Jacobs, a political correspondent for the U.S. edition of The Guardian newspaper, said Gianforte “body-slammed” him, breaking his eyeglasses, when the reporter posed a question about healthcare during a campaign event in Bozeman.

- more -

GOP Rep. Clay Higgins Faces Calls for Arrest After Dispute With Activist

Social media users, including a retired U.S. Army general, are calling for Representative Clay Higgins to be arrested after a viral video shows the congressman physically removing an activist from a press conference.

A video of the altercation, which occurred during a news briefing on Wednesday with the Louisiana Republican and fellow GOP Representatives Paul Gosar of Arizona and Lauren Boebert of Colorado, shows Higgins pushing activist Jake Burdett, age 25.

Higgins can be heard telling the Medicare activist, "You're out," as he physically moves Burdett, who yells, "Get off me," as the lawmaker pushes him.

Burdett, a Medicare supporter, told Newsweek that he was there by coincidence for a Medicare for All event at 2 p.m., which featured independent Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Pramila Jayapal. He said that after the rally ended, he saw some GOP lawmakers he recognized and decided to stay to ask questions. Some of the questions mocked the lawmakers, including those aimed at Boebert regarding her divorce.

"Despite Rep. Higgins being the one putting his hands on me, dragging me without my consent, the cops all sprung down on me," Burdett said to Newsweek via text message. "They let Rep. Higgins walk away without having a word with the guy, but then told me to go walk across the street to the sidewalk opposite us, so that they could question me about what happened."

Higgins, in a statement to Newsweek, said Burdett was "Threatening. He was escorted out and turned over to Capitol Police."

As Burdett shouted questions to Gosar and Boebert, Higgins asked him to stop. Burdett said he was removed while Boebert was speaking at the podium.

"Higgins seemingly appointed himself to be the bodyguard/security of the press conference, to violently crack down on activists like myself who may dare to ask his extremist buddies tough questions," Burdett said.

Burdett also posted about the ordeal on Twitter earlier Wednesday, sharing that he had been questioned by police, but not arrested after being removed by Higgins.

"I am currently being detained by DC Police for asking tough questions to far right extremist Congressmen @RepGosar and @laurenboebert at a press conference. Rep Clay Higgins proceeded to assault/physically remove me from the press conference. For this, the cops detained me, not him," he tweeted, following up with another post asking if any attorneys would be willing to help him pursue legal action against Higgins.

A Twitter user, whose post garnered thousands of comments and retweets, shared video of Burdett being physically removed by Higgins and questioned the lawmaker's behavior.

"RepClayHiggins pushing an activist for asking tough questions is supposed to be normal," she said, adding in another tweet that she is a friend of the activist in the video.

The clip quickly went viral Wednesday evening, with prominent figures weighing in as Higgins became a trending topic on Twitter.

Retired U.S. Army General Mark Hertling responded to a video clip of the incident, saying he once "fired a junior officer for assaulting a soldier" and called for Higgins to be charged.

"The issue is the subordinate has little recourse when assaulted," he said on Twitter. "Had this guy fought back, he certainly would have been charged for assaulting a congressman. This is BS and @RepClayHiggins should be charged."

Twitter user Jon Cooper echoed Hertling's calls for Higgins to face legal action over the recordings, which show Burdett saying that the congressman is hurting him.

"Why hasn't @RepClayHiggins been arrested for criminal assault or battery," he tweeted.

In a follow-up text, Burdett told Newsweek that he is "consulting with legal counsel" and will file charges if there are solid grounds to do so.

Today's Tweet

We could do with a few more like this guy.

This 19 year old spoke the flaming truth.
I believe he's speaking on how Iowa Republicans were trying to ban same sex marriage. But he spoke fire...... pic.twitter.com/ryl1v6z0Ic

— Gene Trevino (@GenoVeno73) May 10, 2023

She Got Close

Rampell dances right up to the edge of it, but stops short of identifying what I think is the real problem. ie: Republicans are deliberately fucking things up.

They don't want the government to work.

If government works - if we're allowed even to think in terms of "good government" - then their project fails.

Opinion

After breaking itself, Congress tries to break the rest of government, too

The GOP House’s debt-limit-and-spending-cuts bill does a lot of things to sabotage the basic functions of government. It decimates spending on safety-net programs. It creates more red tape to block Americans from accessing services they’re legally eligible for. And it makes it harder for government to fund itself in the first place.

But perhaps the most destructive, least noticed part of the bill is a provision that would force virtually all federal regulatory machinery to grind to a halt.

Tucked into Republicans’ debt-limit-ransom bill is some legislative language that has been kicking around Capitol Hill for a while, known as the Reins Act. If enacted, the law would prevent “major” agency regulations — somewhere around 80 to 100 per year — from going into effect unless Congress first approves each and every one.

To be clear, under current law, Congress already has the ability to rescind regulations it dislikes. This new bill would essentially change the default, so that no major regulation could take effect before Congress gives its blessing.

This change might sound reasonable. After all, tons of American problems have been dumped at the feet of executive branch agencies (guns, immigration, health costs, etc.). It would be great if federal lawmakers got more involved in trying to solve literally any of them.

But if you think about how Congress actually functions (or rather, doesn’t), you’ll realize this is not an earnest attempt to get lawmakers to roll up their sleeves and conquer the Big Issues. It’s about throwing sand in the gears of the executive branch so that no one can solve any issue. Ever.

There are two main reasons Congress currently delegates certain regulatory issues to executive branch agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration or the Securities and Exchange Commission.

First, some policy questions are technically challenging. What amount of arsenic in the air is “safe”? What should be the technical standards for mammography equipment? How should the Volcker Rule be implemented in practice? As talented and hard-working as congressional staff are, they might not have the time or expertise to make informed decisions about such minutiae. Agency scientists or other subject-matter experts are tapped to weigh evidence, solicit input from the public, hold hearings, etc., to execute the objectives Congress has enacted.

The second reason is political.

There are plenty of policy questions that Congress has technical capacity to resolve but might prefer not to. Maybe lawmakers can’t come to an agreement within their caucus. Maybe they know that whatever they choose to do will be unpopular.

So: They punt, and make it some other government functionary’s problem.

For example, Congress has been unable to pass significant immigration reform in more than three decades, leaving the executive branch to address migration-related problems in sometimes legally tenuous ways (see: the legal limbo of so-called dreamers, or former president Donald Trump’s unfunded border wall). Congress has all but abdicated many of its basic responsibilities to other branches of government, such as passing a budget, setting tariffs and deciding on abortion rights.

Or, you know, making sure the federal government doesn’t default on its debt. Apparently even some Republicans are now rooting for President Biden to direct Treasury to mint a new $1 trillion platinum coin to pay off government expenses or adopt some other deus-ex-machination.

Now, are all the rules and regulations put into place by the executive branch perfect, or even good? Obviously not.

But it’s hard to see how inserting Congress into the tail end of the process — given that Congress can barely pass a bill to name a post office — will make our already convoluted, protracted regulatory process better. Instead, it might block any major rule change from happening ever again.

And before my libertarian friends start celebrating the new laissez-faire utopia that awaits, note that the GOP bill would make it harder to deregulate, too. Or to update old regulations when technological change or other new economic conditions warrant. Any significant rule change, in any direction, would require congressional debate and approval.

The GOP’s bill could also create even more regulatory uncertainty, as University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley pointed out.

Agencies might decide not to invest the years, resources and public engagement required to produce new regulations, given that the fruits of their labor might never get through Congress. As a result, regulators might switch to less transparent and ultimately more arbitrary methods for assessing corporate behavior. For example, they might move toward making decisions case by case, rather than laying out crisp, clear rules. That would make it more difficult for businesses to figure out how to reliably stay on the right side of the law.

In other words, apparently not content with breaking Congress, Congress now wants to break the rest of government, too.

Today's Tweet

It's still nigh on to impossible for the Ukrainians to get at the Russian submarines - though I wouldn't get too cocky about that. Zelenskyy's people are getting awfully good at this. At any rate, I think we can say good-bye to what's left of the Black Sea surface fleet pretty soon.

#Macron announced the transfer of long-range SCALP missiles (French version of Storm Shadow) to #Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/exTgnWq6oq

— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) May 16, 2023

Light In The Attic

I worry a bit about things like CTE and Dementia and Alzheimer's.

I played some pretty hard football for half a dozen years, so CTE is a fair (though fairly low)  probability, but the prospect of actually losing my mind to something like Alzheimer's Disease kinda freaks me out.

I can only think of a couple of Great Aunts in my family who went a little wacky once they landed north of about 90 - it's just that there's all kinds of weird shit in the environment that could be lookin' to get me one way or another, and Alzheimer's is the really big scary one for me because it can come from practically any direction.

Luckily, they're starting to get a handle on it - they at least know a lot more about the mechanisms - and now there's this new thing that says there may be a gene that can delay the onset of the disease, even if you're pretty much "destined" to get it.

If it pans out, there's a pretty good chance to produce medicines that inoculate against it, or allow for mitigation and management. 

Yay, nerds BTW.

How one man's rare Alzheimer’s mutation delayed the onset of disease

Genetic resilience found in a person predisposed to early-onset dementia could potentially lead to new treatments.

Researchers have identified a man with a rare genetic mutation that protected him from developing dementia at an early age. The finding, published on 15 May in Nature Medicine1, could help researchers to better understand the causes of Alzheimer’s disease and potentially lead to new treatments.

For nearly 40 years, neurologist Francisco Lopera at the University of Antioquia in Medellín, Colombia, has been following an extended family whose members develop Alzheimer’s in their forties or earlier. Many of the approximately 6,000 family members carry a genetic variant called the paisa mutation that inevitably leads to early-onset dementia. But now, Lopera and his collaborators have identified a family member with a second genetic mutation — one that protected him from dementia until age 67.

“Reading that paper made the hair on my arms stand up,” says neuroscientist Catherine Kaczorowski at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “It’s just such an important new avenue to pursue new therapies for Alzheimer’s disease.”

Mutated protein

Lopera and his colleagues analysed the genomes and medical histories of 1,200 Colombians with the paisa mutation, which causes dementia around ages 45—50. They identified the man with the second mutation when he was 67 and had only mild cognitive impairment.

When the researchers scanned his brain, they found high levels of the sticky protein complexes known as amyloid plaques, which are thought to kill neurons and cause dementia, as well as a protein called tau that accumulates as the disease progresses. The brain looked like that of a person with severe dementia, says study co-author Joseph Arboleda, an ophthalmologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston. But one small brain area called the entorhinal cortex, which coordinates skills such as memory and navigation, had low levels of tau.

The researchers found that the man had a mutation in a gene coding for a protein called reelin, which is associated with brain disorders including schizophrenia and autism. Little is known about reelin’s role in Alzheimer’s, so the researchers genetically engineered mice with the same mutation. In mice, the mutated form of reelin caused the tau protein to be chemically modified, limiting its ability to cluster around neurons.

The study challenges the theory that Alzheimer’s disease is primarily driven by amyloid plaques, which are the targets of several drugs recently approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. The drugs effectively remove amyloid from the brain, but lead to only a moderate improvement in rates of cognitive decline.

The fact that the man stayed mentally healthy for so long despite the many amyloid plaques in his brain suggests that Alzheimer’s is more complicated, says Yadong Huang, a neurologist at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, California. He suggests that there could be multiple subtypes of Alzheimer’s, only some of which are driven by amyloid. “We do need different pathways to really finally deal with this disease,” he says. The link to tau, he says, is especially promising because it suggests that tau plays a role in mental decline. Several therapies targeting tau are currently in clinical trials.

Shared mechanisms

Lopera says that the reelin mutation is extremely rare in the general population, but that his team is now looking for this and other mutations among people with the paisa mutation. The man’s sister, who had both the paisa and reelin mutations, began developing cognitive impairment at age 58 and severe dementia at 64 — later than average for someone with the paisa mutation. The authors say that she had experienced head injuries and had other disorders that could have contributed to her developing dementia earlier than her brother.

Arboleda notes that the mutated reelin protein binds to the same receptors as a protein called APOE, which is also associated with Alzheimer’s disease in people who do not have the paisa mutation. In 2019, the same group had identified a woman with the paisa mutation who developed dementia 30 years later than average, owing to a mutation in APOE2. Like the man in the latest study, the woman’s brain contained much higher levels of amyloid than would be expected in someone with so few Alzheimer’s symptoms.

“It’s really cool because it’s telling us there’s some shared mechanisms,” Kaczorowski says. Reelin and APOE compete to bind to the receptor, and the two findings suggest that either a stronger reelin protein or a weaker APOE protein can protect the brain against the disease. Arboleda says this suggests that therapies targeting reelin or APOE might be even more effective in sporadic Alzheimer’s cases, which tend to be less aggressive and progress more slowly than the early-onset type that the Colombian family experiences.

As with many people with Alzheimer’s, the man’s hippocampus — a brain region controlling learning and memory — was smaller than average at the time of his death, suggesting that it was degenerating. But because his cognitive abilities remained relatively intact, Kaczorowski says, neurons in other parts of the brain might have repurposed themselves to make up for the damage. Knowing whether that happens, she adds, could help to inform future therapeutic strategies.

“The vast majority of research focuses on why some people have Alzheimer’s, very few are on conditions where a factor can go against this disease,” says Huang. He says that further research is needed to pin down the mechanism through which reelin and APOE affect tau, and whether targeting these proteins could help people with Alzheimer’s who do not have the paisa mutation. “This is one of those few cases that really opens the door for anti-Alzheimer’s research.”

self-portraits

William Utermohlen

Oy

Just when you think she's achieved Peak Stoopid, she scales the heights anew.

I looked it up - yes, it's real:

(https://twitter.com/laurenboebert/status/1658187015509139463?s=20)

Sending Messages

It's a time-honored tradition that dates back as far as 2,500 years - just an extra little touch that prob'ly means nothing to the guy on the receiving end, but could mean quite a lot to the sender.

And why not make a buck on it while we're at it?

All in a good cause, right?

Ukrainians Send a Message With Their Bombs. On Them, Too.

Ukrainians have a lot to say to Russia, and many have chosen to say it in ink on the sides of rockets, mortar shells and even exploding drones.

The Ukrainian artilleryman was all set to slide the explosive shell into a launcher and send it on its way toward Russian positions — but first he had to take care of one last thing on his checklist.

“For Uman,” he scrawled on the side of the projectile with a felt-tip marker.

Then he ducked away as it roared off on a fiery trajectory to the front line.

Uman is the Ukrainian city where more than two dozen civilians were killed last month in a Russian rocket attack. But it is hardly the only city Russia has attacked, and the message on the shell was also only one of many.

After more than a year of war, Ukrainians have a lot to say to Russia, and many have chosen to say it on the sides of rockets, mortar shells and even exploding drones. Thousands of messages have been sent, ranging from the sardonic to the bitter, among them one from Valentyna Vikhorieva, whose 33-year-old son died in the war.

“For Yura, from Mom,” Ms. Vikhorieva asked an artillery unit to write on a shell. “Burn in hell for our children.”

Ms. Vikhorieva said her son, a Ukrainian soldier, was killed last spring by a Russian artillery shell.

“I will never forget,” she said in an interview. “And he will always be my boy.”

It is more than just venting.

Charity groups and even the military have seized on the desire of Ukrainians to voice their anger as a mechanism to raise funds — never mind that however well-crafted the messages, the Russians are unlikely ever to read them. The shell cases, of course, generally explode into smithereens. And if they hit their target, their intended recipients may be in no condition to appreciate them.

But for some Ukrainians, it still feels like justice, if only symbolically, said Victoria Semko, a psychologist, who works with people who endured the brutal Russian occupation of Irpin, a suburb of Kyiv.

“People are in pain because of the loss, personal and national,” Ms. Semko said. “It is normal when aggression is directed at the guilty parties.”

It is not just Ukrainians who have paid for messages. The groups behind the campaign say people from Eastern Europe still angry over the long years of Soviet rule have also written in. Oleksandr Arhat, a co-founder of one group raising money for the military through the messages, Militarny, offered some examples.

There was the writer from Israel who wanted to avenge the torture death of a grandfather by Soviet Internal Affairs. There was the Czech who wanted to commemorate the Prague Spring of 1968, when the Soviet Army put down protests. “Russians Go Home” wrote a Hungarian denouncing the Soviet invasion of his country in 1956.

One retiree, Yuriy Medynsky, 84, said he had drawn on his meager benefits to send a message not once but repeatedly to honor his grandson, who was 33 when he was killed fighting in the Kharkiv region in the spring of 2022.

“To Katsap hermits for Maksym Medynsky. Grandpa,” he wrote, using an epithet for the Russians.

“I put in my message all the hate I feel for Muscovites,” Mr. Medynsky said. He paid about $13 for each message.

His daughter-in-law, Tetyana Medynska, Maksym’s widow, has also sent repeated messages.

“Personally for me it’s a tiny bit of revenge,” she said. “I do not imagine killing someone particular, as they are all guilty, all Russians who came to Ukraine. They have no faces for me. When I send money for the message on the bombs, I feel some kind of psychological relief.”

Some have struck a tone of irony.

“When my friend got married, she asked to write her maiden name on the mortar, to say farewell to it,” said Private Vladyslav, a soldier at a mortar position outside the town of Toretsk, in eastern Ukraine.

He himself once sent a message: “I congratulated my mom on her birthday this way,” Private Vladyslav said.

At that moment, he was preparing an 82-mm mortar with a message from a comrade, Private Borys Khodorkovsky, who was celebrating his 50th birthday at the front.

“I want those devils to know that I am here, and want them to feel bad,” Private Khodorkovsky said. “Psychologically, I know that this mortar will hit something and fewer of my brothers in arms will die, and fewer Russians will shoot at us.”

But most messages seethe with unvarnished fury.

“For the destroyed childhood,” wrote Dmytro Yakovenko, 38, a pharmacist. He has two daughters, 11 and 14. The family lived through a harrowing bombardment and then evacuation of their hometown, Lozova, in the Kharkiv region.

“My daughters’ childhood is destroyed,” he said. “I want Russians to know why this mortar is flying their way.”

The unit that fired the mortar with a message for Ms. Vikhorieva, whose son was killed fighting, is a small one. Its members say that they have used the money raised by selling messages to repair vehicles, and that they have fired more than 200 personalized mortar shells to date.

“I feel uneasy when a person orders a message for the loss of a loved one, and I know that nothing will change,” said Ihor Slaiko, the commander. “But I still sign them.”

His men dutifully inscribe the words onto the shell — and then send them toward Russian lines with a boom.

About That Report

The much ballyhooed and itch-ily anticipated report from Mr Durham has finally landed.

Trump claimed the Durham probe would uncover the ‘crime of the century.’ Here’s what it really found

WASHINGTON (AP) — An investigation into the origins of the FBI’s probe into ties between Russia and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign has finally been concluded, with the prosecutor leading the inquiry submitting a much-awaited report that found major flaws.

The report, the culmination of a four-year investigation into possible misconduct by U.S. government officials, contained withering criticism for the FBI but few significant revelations. Nonetheless, it will give fodder to Trump supporters who have long denounced the Russia investigation, as well as Trump opponents who say the Durham team’s meager court record shows their probe was a politically motivated farce.

WHO IS JOHN DURHAM?

Durham has spent decades as a Justice Department prosecutor, with past assignments including investigations into the FBI’s cozy relationship with mobsters in Boston and the CIA’s destruction of videotapes of its harsh interrogations of terrorism subjects.

He was appointed in 2019 to investigate potential misconduct by U.S. government officials as they examined Russian election interference in 2016 and whether there was any illegal coordination between the Kremlin and Trump’s presidential campaign.

Despite skimpy results — one guilty plea and two acquittals — that failed to live up to Trump’s expectations, Durham was able to continue his work well into the Biden administration, thanks in part to William Barr appointing Durham as a Justice Department special counsel shortly before Barr’s 2020 resignation as attorney general.

WHY DID THE TRUMP JUSTICE DEPARTMENT THINK SUCH AN APPOINTMENT WAS NECESSARY?

The appointment came weeks after a different special counsel, Robert Mueller, wrapped up his investigation of possible connections between Russia and the Trump campaign. That probe produced more than two dozen criminal cases, including against a half-dozen Trump associates.

Though it did not charge any Trump aide with working with Russia to tip the election, it did find that Russia interfered on Trump’s behalf and that the campaign welcomed, rather than discouraged, the help.

From the start, Barr was deeply skeptical of the investigation’s foundation, telling Congress that “spying did occur” on the campaign.

He enlisted an outside prosecutor to hunt for potential misconduct at the government agencies who were involved in collecting intelligence and conducting the investigation, even flying with Durham to Italy to meet with officials there as part of the probe.

WERE THERE PROBLEMS WITH THE RUSSIA INVESTIGATION?

Yes, and a Justice Department inspector general inquiry already identified many.

The watchdog report found that FBI applications for warrants to eavesdrop on a former Trump campaign aide, Carter Page, contained significant errors and omitted information that would likely have weakened or undermined the premise of the application.

The cumulative effect of those errors, the report said, was to make it “appear that the information supporting probable cause was stronger than was actually the case.”

Still, the inspector general did not find evidence that investigators acted with political bias and said there was a legitimate basis to open a full investigation into potential collusion, though Durham has disagreed.

WHAT CRIMINAL CASES DID HE BRING AND WHAT WAS THE OUTCOME?

Durham brought three prosecution during his tenure, but only one resulted in a conviction — and that was for a case referred to him by the Justice Department inspector general. None of the three undid core findings by Mueller that Russia had interfered with the 2016 election in sweeping fashion and that the Trump campaign had welcomed, rather than discouraged, the help.

A former FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, pleaded guilty in 2020 to altering an email related to the surveillance of ex-Trump campaign aide. He was given probation.

But two other cases, both involving alleged false statements to the FBI, resulted in acquittals by jury.

Michael Sussmann, a lawyer for the Hillary Clinton campaign, was found not guilty of lying to the FBI during a meeting in which he presented computer data information that he wanted the FBI to investigate. A different jury acquitted Igor Danchenko, a Russian-American analyst, of charges that he lied to the FBI about his role in the creation of a discredited dossier about Trump.

WHAT SPECIFICALLY DID DURHAM FIND?

Durham found that the FBI acted too hastily and relied on raw and unconfirmed intelligence when it opened the Trump-Russia investigation.

He said at the time the probe was opened, the FBI had no information about any actual contact between Trump associates and Russian intelligence officials.

He also claimed that FBI investigators fell prone to “confirmation bias,” repeatedly ignoring or rationalizing away information that could have undercut the premise of their investigation, and he noted that the FBI failed to corroborate a single substantive allegation from a dossier of research that it relied on during the course of the probe.

“An objective and honest assessment of these strands of information should have caused the FBI to question not only the predication for Crossfire Hurricane, but also to reflect on whether the FBI was being manipulated for political or other purposes,” the report said, using the FBI’s code name for the Trump-Russia probe. “Unfortunately, it did not.”

HOW DID THE FBI RESPOND?

The FBI pointed out that it had long ago made dozens of corrective actions. Had those measures been in place in 2016, it says, the errors at the center of the report could have been prevented.

It also took pains to note that the conduct in the report took place before the current director, Christopher Wray, took the job in fall 2017.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

It didn’t take long for Republicans in Congress to react. Rep. Jim Jordan, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, said he had invited Durham to testify on Capitol Hill next week. Trump, too, sought to seize on the report, saying it showed how the American public had been “scammed.”

Though the FBI says it’s already taken some steps, Durham did say it’s possible more reform could be needed. One idea, he said, would be to provide additional scrutiny of politically sensitive investigations by identifying an official who would be responsible for challenging the steps taken in a probe.

He said his team had considered but did not ultimately recommend steps that would curtail the FBI’s investigative authorities, including its use of tools under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to eavesdrop on suspected spies or terrorists.

Just Makin' Shit Up

"Our whistleblower has an informant on the inside, and they're telling us about all kinds of bad things the Biden Crime Family is doing!!!!"

"We're not sure where our informant is right now - we're hoping to find them soon."

These clowns would have to improve by several orders of magnitude to match up with The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight.

My guess has to be that Republicans will next try to hint that Biden has done something horrible to their "informant".

àla Seth Rich, Vince Foster, et al. Brace for impact.

Beau Of The Fifth Column

"If you're actually concerned about this type of stuff, create some oversight. You're the Legislative Branch of government - legislate."

Today's Tweet

Lord Jesus Christ then said go forth
and create a debt ceiling
to justify starving the poor/sick/elderly
because Billionaires deserve more tax cuts pic.twitter.com/Vv8QolIbM7

— Joe Murphy 🇺🇦🇺🇸 (@ActionDemocrat) May 15, 2023