President Donald Trump has announced his intention to nominate author and former U.S. Air Force officer Scott O’Grady to be an assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. O’Grady is a Trump adviser who has retweeted QAnon accounts, pushed right-wing conspiracy theories, and promoted other toxic rhetoric.  The White House announced on November 17 that it nominated O’Grady and described him, in part, as “a successful author, speaker, spokesperson, investor, and entrepreneur, having served 12 years as an officer in the United States Air Force. O’Grady’s incredible story of how he survived in hostile territory for 6 days during the Bosnian War is chronicled in his book, Return With Honor.”  O’Grady has frequently appeared as a commentator in the media, and he is co-chairing the Veterans for Trump advisory board. He's also a right-wing conspiracy theorist.  Here is some of O’Grady’s Twitter activity:  In mid-November, O’Grady retweeted a post by a QAnon-supporting account that began by proclaiming “The Great Awakening!” -- a phrase used by QAnon supporters. 

Remarkably, becoming Borat’s patsy was not Giuliani’s most embarrassing moment in 2020. On Tuesday, he made an even bigger fool of himself by representing Donald Trump in his bid to overturn the results of the election. US District Court Judge Matthew Brann treated Giuliani’s arguments with scorn. “At bottom, you are asking this court to invalidate 6.8 million votes, thereby disenfranchising every single voter in the Commonwealth” [of Pennsylvania], Brann said. “Can you tell me how this result can possibly be justified?” At one point, Giuliani said, “I’m not sure what ‘opacity’ means. It probably means you can see.” Brann helpfully explained, “It means you can’t.” This exchange was typical of Giuliani’s hapless performance. Time and again, Trump’s legal team have made arguments that are all but laughed out of court. Four things remain true in the two weeks since the election. (1) Trump and his campaign persist in trying to engineer a coup. (2) This coup has excited support from grassroots Republican activists all over America. (3) This coup is very badly run and will almost certainly fail. (4) Even as it fails, the coup will do lasting damage to American democracy and could set a precedent for future aspiring autocrats.

In a bizarre and deeply disturbing turn of events, a proponent of QAnon has been arrested for allegedly shooting and killing a crank legal theorist who was widely known and respected among a certain subset of QAnon supporters, whom she had relied on for bogus legal advice in an effort to regain custody of her twin daughters.

The top elections official in Arizona called on President Trump and members of Congress on Wednesday to stop “perpetuating misinformation” as she faces threats of violence following this month's election, the first time Arizona has voted for a Democratic presidential nominee since 1996. Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D) said in a statement that the “ongoing and escalating threats of violence” against her, her family and her office are “utterly abhorrent," pledging that the “continued intimidation tactics will not prevent me from performing the duties I swore an oath to do.” She specifically faulted Trump and other elected officials for fueling distrust in the voting system. 

Since the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, there has been a muted undercurrent of recriminations over her deciding not to resign back in 2013 or so, when Democrats still controlled the Senate and the presidency. Many people, reportedly including President Obama, urged her and Stephen Breyer to do so at the time, for obvious reasons — especially given that she had already had cancer twice by 2009. Whoops! However, Ginsburg is far from the only elderly Democrat to stay in office long after she should have made way for fresh blood. Virtually the entire Democratic Party leadership is well past the traditional retirement age, some by over a decade, and many of them are showing their age. It's time to bring retirement back to Democratic politics. Here are the members of the Democratic leadership who are over 65 years old: Presidential nominee Joe Biden is 77, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is 80, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is 81, House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn is 80, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is 69, and Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin is 75. On the four most powerful committees on the House side, Appropriations chair Nita Lowey is 83, Ways and Means chair Richard Neal is 71, Judiciary chair Jerry Nadler is 73, and Foreign Affairs chair Eliot Engel is 73. To be fair, Lowey is not running for re-election this year, and Engel was defeated in his primary by Jamaal Bowman. But (assuming the Democrats retain control of the House) that will only move Marcy Kaptur and Brad Sherman into the top slots, who will be 74 and 66 respectively during the next Congress. On the corresponding Senate committees, Appropriations ranking member Pat Leahy is 80, Finance ranking member Ron Wyden is 71, Judiciary ranking member Dianne Feinstein is 87, and Foreign Relations ranking member Bob Menendez is 66.

Kim Kelly argues that it’s time for the movement to bring back dynamite—if not literally, then in the very least metaphorically, by harnessing the mass worker power of this movement and forcing the change that some leaders are loath to even politely consider.

This morning, my children went to school — school, in an old brick building, where they lined up to go in the scuffed front doors. I went to work out at the gym, the real gym, where I huffed and puffed in a sweaty group class. And a few days ago, my partner and I hosted a dinner party, gathering eight friends around the dining room table for a boisterous night that went too late. Remember those? Where I’m living, we gather without fear. Life is unfolding much as it did a year ago. This magical, virus-free world is just one long day’s drive away from the Empire State Building — in a parallel dimension called Nova Scotia. This is one of the four Atlantic provinces that cling to the coast of Canada, north and east of Maine. In Canada, these are typically known as “have-not provinces,” economically depressed areas dependent on cash transfers from wealthier provinces to the West.

Because of course it is.

cki Falwell while in bed with her. It was around three or four in the morning, Granda recalls, when he woke up and noticed Becki staring at him without blinking. It’s what he’d later come to call “the look” — something that, eight years later, still creeps him out. But Granda is neither squeamish nor skittish. And nor was he, as a 21 year old, primed to let something a little odd like Becki’s “dark, black eyes” fixating on him in the night give him pause. After all, he was waking up at Cheeca Lodge, an exclusive resort on the Florida Keys’s Islamorada, just weeks after having first met Becki poolside at Miami’s glitzy Fontainebleau hotel. Becki and her husband Jerry Jr., who, Granda recalls, was sleeping on the couch that night, had invited Granda to the resort for a good time. Granda was only dimly aware of who he was with: education administrators at a Christian university.

The controversial deal hashed out between the Department of Justice and the maker of Oxycontin provides hundreds of millions of dollars of relief for communities hit hard by the opioid epidemic.

Doctors on the White House Coronavirus Task Force stressed to Vice President Mike Pence on Tuesday that the coronavirus pandemic situation is dire and only getting worse, two senior administration officials familiar with the meeting told CBS News. The doctors fear the U.S. could see an average of 1,500 deaths a day next week, and up to 2,000 a day by Christmas without any changes to mitigation measures.  The doctors on the task force are also concerned the predicted spikes will completely overrun hospitals and force the U.S. back to the hectic early phase of the pandemic. To prevent this from happening, the doctors are recommending that bars close and restaurants stop offering indoor dining. However, they believe schools can stay open because data shows the transmission rates are low. The health officials on the task force are urging either Pence or President Trump to stress to the public from the briefing room podium the importance of taking mitigation measures to slow the spread of the virus. They feel such action would add weight to the message that everyone must take the ongoing pandemic seriously and make it clear the virus is out of control. As of publication, Pence is not scheduled to speak at a coronavirus briefing. 

White supremacists and other extremists have raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars through a youth-targeted, video livestreaming service called DLive, according to a researcher of online, far-right communities. Megan Squire is a professor of computer science at Elon University who has focused on the migration of white supremacists across mainstream social media platforms and fringe websites throughout the Trump era. Squire submitted research to Southern Poverty Law Center that shows a handful of leaders of the global white nationalist movement are raising significant sums of money through DLive. These leaders include pro-Trump pundit Nick Fuentes, Patrick Casey of American Identity Movement (formerly Identity Evropa), British neo-Nazi Mark Collett and Austria’s Martin Sellner of Generation Identity, who became infamous for corresponding with the man who murdered 51 Muslims in a 2019 terror attack in Christchurch, New Zealand. Matthew Q. Gebert, a State Department official who led the Washington, D.C.-area chapter of a white nationalist organization, also recently started livesteaming on DLive. Owen Benjamin, a self-described comedian of the white supremacist-friendly “alt-right” movement who was removed from mainstream websites after making statements praising Adolf Hitler, is also making significant amounts of money from the youth-targeted website. In September, Benjamin called DLive a “great service,” saying that one of the platform’s perks was that “young Zoomers” could see him livestreaming “on the front page because I’m their number-one earner now.”

We also can look at the nasal bone right here. God designed humans very specifically, with this nasal bone, because He knew, because of sin, we’d be wearing glasses and contacts, right? So this helps hold our glasses. Primates have no need to wear glasses, so they were not created with that bone there.

President Donald Trump will seek a recount of ballots in liberal Dane and Milwaukee counties, hoping to overturn the election results in his favor. Trump's campaign paid the state $3 million as of Wednesday morning to start a partial recount, according to the Wisconsin Elections Commission. The campaign said it would seek a recount in the state's two most populous and liberal-leaning counties.  Former Dane County Judge Jim Troupis is representing the campaign in its recount effort. “We will not stop fighting for transparency and integrity in our electoral process to ensure that all Americans can trust the results of a free and fair election in Wisconsin and across the country,” Troupis said in a statement. Trump would have had to pay nearly $8 million to conduct a full statewide recount of Wisconsin, a state he narrowly lost two weeks ago by nearly 21,000 votes. A recount of certain counties costs less.

The Department of Homeland Security's cyber chief, who presided over an elaborate election security effort guarding against foreign interference and fraud, was ousted by President Donald Trump on Tuesday as part of a continuing post-election purge of top national security officials. Trump announced the dismissal in two tweets Tuesday night. Twitter flagged both tweets with labels saying, "This claim about election fraud is disputed." The dismissal of Christopher Krebs, director of DHS's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, follows the agency's declaration that the general election was the most secure in U.S. history. The statement served as a pointed rebuke to a president who continues to make unsubstantiated allegations of voting fraud while Trump's legal team pursues multiple legal challenges in battleground states.

As Donald Trump continues to deny that President-Elect Joe Biden won the election and refuses to concede, some local Republican officials are doing their very best to pull off his much-desired coup. Take what happened on Tuesday night in Michigan, when the two Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers initially voted against certifying the election results in the county, which includes the city of Detroit. Subverting democracy to own the libs! The two Republicans, Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, eventually backtracked after a heated outcry from voters who spoke up via Zoom, but not before they earned an approving, if false, tweet from Donald Trump.

Understanding the difference will be key to Democrats moving past their faltering, one-size-fits-all approach to Hispanics.

The North Carolina Supreme Court has confronted systemic racism, reckoned with the state’s Confederate history, and protected voting rights under the leadership of Cheri Beasley, the first Black woman to serve as its chief justice. Beasley is currently trailing her challenger, Paul Newby, by just 406 votes out of nearly 5.4 million cast. The race will now head into a recount. Newby, a white male Republican who serves on the court alongside Beasley, has loudly and frequently objected to the court’s clear-eyed acknowledgment of racism, using his dissents to attack Beasley, a Democrat, as a judicial activist. If Newby wins, his victory will be a major setback for racial justice in North Carolina.

A couple years ago, Stephen Malkmus walked into a shop and didn't recognize himself,

‘Shadow of Fear’ on Mute Like a late-night transmission from a long-dormant UHF station, a new Cabaret Voltaire LP is beaming from Sheffield on November 20 to succor Dangerous Minds readers during these trying times. Shadow of Fear, the Cabs’ first new release since 1994’s The Conversation, is also the first we’ve heard from the band since founding member Richard H. Kirk resurrected the name for the 2014 Berlin Atonal festival and subsequent live performances in happy European cities. I caught up with RHK by phone last week. Despite a historically bad connection, I managed to learn a few things about Shadow of Fear, the new incarnation of Cabaret Voltaire, and Kirk’s welcome plans to release two more new Cabs albums and a twelve-inch single next year. An edited transcript of our conversation follows. Richard H. Kirk (Courtesy of Mute) How has the last year been? Um, pretty boring. I...