More: In what would be a seismic shift, the Trump administration is quietly moving to strip a core protection of the Endangered Species Act, according to an internal memo obtained by The New York Times.

Under a new interpretation of the law's language outlined in the memo, the accidental killing or injury of an animal would no longer be considered illegal; only actions specifically intending to target an animal would.

The change would be transformative because, in the United States, the killing of endangered animals almost always happens incidentally, in the course of economic activity. Until now, industries and individuals could be held accountable for those foreseeable deaths and, as a result, they have been incentivized to avoid them.

ACAB

The vote is unfortunately meaningless if DOJ won't pursue the charges, and there is no way this DOJ will do that.

More: The House is going home again"this time to avoid a vote on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's impeachment.

House GOP leadership announced Wednesday morning that they will end their current slate of votes early and head home until the midterms, a nearly two-month break.

"Members are further advised that upon completion of today's legislative business, votes are no longer expected in the House tomorrow, September 17th," a message from the office of House Majority Whip Tom Emmer read. "The last votes for the week are expected at approximately 4:45 p.m. this afternoon. This is a change from the previously announced schedule."

The House will now move up votes on cutting Environmental Protection Agency regulations to Wednesday.

People actually fall for this BS?

More: The remarks, made during testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, stood at odds with earlier comments indicating that he did not intend to send federal agents to polling places around the country. However, when Senator Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont, pressed the issue, Mr. Patel seemed to reverse course.

"I thought you weren't going to be sending people to the polls," Mr. Welch said.

"When did you hear that? Just another lie," Mr. Patel declared, raising his voice.

Mr. Welch revisited the issue. "So you are sending F.B.I. agents to the polls?"

"We have election crisis coordinators manned at all 56 field offices," Mr. Patel replied, appearing to refer to what are known as election crime coordinators. "Election integrity is of paramount importance. This F.B.I. will not shy away from that effort."

Under the law, armed federal officers or military personnel are barred from being deployed "at any place where a general or special election is held." The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a letter to a Democratic senator last month that there were "no plans" for the armed forces to deploy troops to polling stations for the midterm elections.

Guess they got what they voted for.

"Broken hearts and dirty windows make life difficult to see." - John Prine.

More: Kremlev footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with three people familiar with the event. The oligarch paid to rent out one of the private islands, where a reception was held and where guests slept. He also covered other big-ticket items, like the fireworks show, and his team helped plan the event. Kremlev is the head of the International Boxing Association, a scandal-plagued sports group that has been financed by the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. The wedding payments came from an IBA-affiliated entity in Dubai that the boxing association uses for financial transactions.

Kremlev's previously unreported relationship with Trump Jr. represents an extraordinary development: a member of Putin's circle financially supporting the president's son and gaining intimate access to the Trump family. For a decade, Putin's government, regarded as a chief adversary of the U.S., has been accused of efforts to influence American elections. Attempts by Russia to make inroads with the Trumps before the 2016 election exploded into controversy that dogged much of the president's first term.

In the days leading up to Trump Jr.'s wedding, Kremlev was in China as part of the delegation accompanying Putin, according to Chinese state media. The month before, Putin had bestowed him with a state honor, the Order of Friendship. The Ukrainian government has imposed sanctions on Kremlev personally, citing his closeness to Putin and Russian security services.

It's not clear why Kremlev helped pay for Trump Jr.'s wedding. The men appear to have met only recently. Public reporting suggests Trump Jr. could have afforded it himself, with Forbes recently estimating his net worth at roughly $300 million.

America's ship of state has never been controlled by pirates like the Trump family before.

Sure seems like something HIPPA should prohibit.

More: The 80-year-old president issued dark warnings at this week's GOP midterm convention about the nation's future if Republicans lost the November elections, and he even asked his followers to pledge to cheat if necessary or risk hellfire, and politics and history professor Alan Elrod published a column for Liberal Currents offered a disturbing theory about his plans.

"Trump's speech came off more like a sermon from Jonestown, and observers noticed," Elrod wrote. "My own overriding thought was: 'This speech was like some sort of performance art piece of a live entombing of a mad king and his most loyal followers.'"

--

"My colleague Samantha Hancox-Li has an elegantly simple theory for why Trump has become even more obsessed with legacy and with slapping his name on buildings and projects than he already was over his lifelong career as a shameless self-promoter: fear of death," Elrod wrote.

"As she put it: 'My current theory of Donald Trump is that he is utterly gripped by the terror of death, and is desperately attempting to leave some mark on the world that history cannot erase " this is the point of the wars, the annexation threats, the D.C. vandalism. I think right now he is genuinely fixated on adding new American territory as the brass ring, the thing they'll never be able to take away from his memory.'"

Elrod found himself inclined to agree as he watched the president's rambling, self-aggrandizing speech.

"It's a macabre but convincing psychological assessment," he wrote. "Rather than making America great again, Trump is inflicting grievous harm on it with tariffs, now upgraded to import bans against select Canadian goods; an illegal war; and a total ransacking of our public and private sectors for the enrichment of his courtiers and his family. And he is going to bury us all with him in a tomb of his own design " a ballroom."

Is now a good time to bring up Trump's Saudi nuclear deal?

More: Cooke, who has criticized the president on multiple previous occasions, first noted the "obvious moral problem that the money in question does not belong to those to whom Trump is promising it."

It is also a "reckless, shapeless, irritable spasm, divorced from the nature and purpose of our government and from the Constitution that created it," he said.

The idea is "deeply irresponsible," he added, because of the additional federal debt it would heap on the U.S.

And politically, argued Cooke, it would essentially confirm "for all time that the second Trump administration has been a failure" because he had to resort to what's been dubbed by critics as bribery of voters.

More: "The cost of diesel gets into just about everything," KPMG chief economist Diane Swonk said in a recent interview.

"From running a farm ... [to the] cost of food, but also everything across the economy that's shipped," she said. When diesel prices rise, everything "gets that extra fee tacked onto it."

Swonk predicted that the high cost of diesel will be an "inflationary problem" for months to come.

Since late July, diesel prices have been rising higher and faster overall than the cost of regular unleaded gas.

That's because key refineries that produce it have been knocked offline or destroyed, both in Eastern Europe " where the Ukraine-Russia war still rages " and in the Middle East.

#5,

You sure he didn't rename it "America?" That would explain a lot.

why not give it to us right now?

That would be socialism. /s

Also, it will have identified the loop holes that Trump was able to wiggle through and as a result of their identification, legislation can be enacted to close those loop holes.

I can't imagine Congress doing anything about it though, especially if Republicans are in charge.

Public executions are a hallmark of conservative governments around the world. They'd have them all across the American South if they could get away with it.

Let's call it the Minorities Report.

Mail ballots can't be hacked.

You can't keep a mail ballot in line all day.

You can't send men with guns to intimidate a mail ballot.

You can't erase a mail ballot with a power outage.

You can't tell a mail ballot the machines aren't working.

Is this making more sense now? This is why Trump is desperate to get rid of mail-in voting even though HE uses it every time he votes.

More: Key findings from the documents, which were reviewed by The New York Times before Tuesday's announcement, include:

Asbestos and other contaminants were found at levels that exceeded acceptable levels in dust and air in part of lower Manhattan, based on measurements taken by city agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency and privately contracted laboratories.

A draft document of data compiled by the city Department of Environmental Protection listed locations throughout lower Manhattan where asbestos levels in dust samples exceeded hazardous limits in the days after September 11.

A November 2011 audit, prepared by a private company and submitted to the EPA, showed the amount of the carcinogen benzene was still spiking in the air around the towers' footprints.

That audit also showed that the concentration of asbestos in the air at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island has increased after the attacks.

A woman who lived in lower Manhattan wrote a letter to the DEP in Feburary that detailed alleged missteps by officials in removing contaminants from in and around her building, where workers dug up grass and dirt from a small roundabout in the neighborhood several weeks after 9/11.

The documents were discovered last year after being hidden from the public in 68 boxes stashed in a government office, city officials told the NYT.

Milei is so deeply unpopular and his economic policies have all turned out to be so bad that this is the only card he has left to play.

More: The North Carolina State Board of Elections Friday voted 3-2 along party lines to pass two numbered memos, despite voter opposition, that make it harder for voters to return their absentee ballots and easier for counties to throw those ballots out.

The Board revisited the measures after more than 10 people formally objected and requested legislative review. But with the election nearly underway, the Board circumvented the General Assembly to quickly greenlight the restrictions.

The memos were not publicized until 7:09 a.m. today " just hours before mail-in ballots are set to go out at noon.