The right-wingers are stepping up efforts to suppress the Mueller investigation.

Shortly before a federal grand jury reportedly filed the first charges in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, conservatives were renewing their calls for the attorney to resign.

Mueller, who is leading the Justice Department’s investigation as special prosecutor, is a former FBI director, which critics say creates a conflict of interest in the case.

Plus he has worked with Comey in the past, which the right-wingers claim makes them BFFs and thus Conflict of Interest.

The GOP has long complained about Mueller’s supposed lack of objectivity. But this week, demands urging him to quit escalated in the wake of reports that the

Puerto Rico is telling Whitefish it’s all over between them.

The Puerto Rico electric power company said Sunday that it is canceling a controversial $300 million contract it had signed with a small Montana-based company and tasked with a central role in repairing the territory’s hurricane-ravaged electric grid.

The move came after Gov. Ricardo Rosselló said the contract was a distraction and should be canceled after critics in the electric power industry, Congress and the Federal Emergency Management Agency raised questions about whether the company, Whitefish Energy, was well equipped to respond to the hurricane damage.

And whether it got the contract because of cronyism, or worse.

Whitefish Energy, which had just two employees the day Hurricane Maria hit

It’s a good thing Trump is such a populist, isn’t it. Good thing he’s the savior of the forgotten working class and a drainer of the swamp.

The Education Department is considering only partially forgiving federal loans for students defrauded by for-profit colleges, according to department officials, abandoning the Obama administration’s policy of erasing that debt.

Under President Barack Obama, tens of thousands of students deceived by now-defunct for-profit schools had over $550 million in such loans canceled.

But President Donald Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, is working on a plan that could grant such students just partial relief, according to department officials. The department may look at the average earnings of students in similar programs and schools to

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on There might be some coal under there.

For everyone out there who doesn’t understand the problem, I have a message for you: The economy is man-made. The environment is not. Which one do you think we could manage to remake if they conflict? And which one can we absolutely not live without?

Exactly. Beautifully formulated. Or to paraphrase Bill McKibben, as difficult as it may be to change the economic system, it’s almost certainly going to be easier than persuading the laws of physics to change their minds. My first question to anyone who argues that protecting the environment is going to harm the economy is “Compared to what?” After all, there … Read the rest

John McWhorter at the Aspen Ideas Festival last June, answering questions about students and free speech.

The whole white privilege paradigm is very interesting because I think it should be part of an education for students to learn that there is something, and I’ll title it white privilege, that’s fine. These are things that must be considered, such that a student wouldn’t look at a disadvantaged part of the city and just say, “Well what’s wrong with them?” The idea is to understand that a lot of what the person sees is that people start out at different places––and that whiteness is a privilege. However, our problem once again these days is that it is being taken in a direction

Ugly.

On Thursday’s edition of Hannity, former White House deputy assistant to the president Sebastian Gorka suggested that Hillary Clinton deserves to be tried for treason and executed.

“If this had happened in the 1950s, there would be people up on treason charges right now,” Gorka said. “The Rosenbergs, okay, this is equivalent to what the Rosenbergs did, and those people got the chair. Think about it — giving away nuclear capability to our enemies, that’s what we’re talking about.”

But it wasn’t hers to “give away.”

As secretary of state, Clinton was one of nine cabinet members sitting on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which is tasked with reviewing deals like Uranium One.

The difficulties of writing dialogue for characters who share an idiom foreign to the writer – specifically, UKnians writing Yank and Yanks writing UKnian.

[I]t’s fairly common for British writers to create ostensibly American characters who give themselves away in dialogue. The writer need not even be British, necessarily: Lionel Shriver is an American writer who has lived in the U.K. for many years. Her most recent novel, “The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047,” imagines a financial apocalypse set entirely in the United States, albeit in the future. All of the major characters are American. And yet a father assures his son that a set of silverware “could come in useful.” A woman signs off a telephone conversation

Let’s have a feel-good story, because why not.

Two women with their two dogs were lost in the Pacific in a small sailboat for five months, and then the Navy found them and rescued them.

The moment the two women and their dogs were finally rescued is captured on video, taken from the deck of a Navy boat.

The camera wobbles as the motorboat cuts across the ocean, some 900 miles southeast of Japan, toward the lone sailboat that had been sending distress signals for months after its engine died.

One of the women is on the deck, her arms outstretched.

She feverishly blows kisses toward the rescue boat. This is the reaction of someone who had been lost

From the ACLU:

For almost a year, Kris Kobach, the secretary of state of Kansas, has struggled to hide the truth about his efforts to lobby the Trump administration to make it much harder for Americans to vote. Part of that struggle ended today when a federal court ordered excerpts of Kris Kobach’s testimony disclosed along with other documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union in our challenge to his restrictive voter registration regime.

The unsealed materials confirm what many have suspected: Kobach has a ready-made plan to gut core voting rights protections enshrined in federal law. And he has been covertly lobbying Trump’s team and other officials from day one to sell them the falsehood that noncitizens

To the surprise of no one, Harvey Weinstein wasn’t the only hotshot guy preying on women.

Following The New York Times and The New Yorker’s revelations about the film executive and alleged serial sexual harasser Harvey Weinstein, Lockhart Steele of Vox Media, the screenwriter James Toback, the critic Leon Wieseltier, and, on Thursday, Mark Halperin of MSNBC have found themselves outed and, in some cases, fired for alleged past behavior. Preceding Weinstein were reports about alleged harassment at Tinder and Uber, and the alleged predatory behavior of Bill O’Reilly, Donald Trump, and Bill Cosby, among others. Many more disclosures are likely to come, as the politics, technology, news, and entertainment industries come to terms

It’s almost as if assault is actually a crime.

Three suspects are being sought by police after a woman was punched and kicked during a brawl between transgender activists and radical feminists.

The 60-year-old victim was punched in the face, knocked to the ground and kicked after one of the suspects tried to grab her camera as she was filming at a gender recognition talk, the Metropolitan police said.

Officers are trying to trace a man and two others, who are believed to be transgender, over the attack at around 9.30pm on Wednesday 13 September at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park.

Those three.… Read the rest

Harvey Weinstein’s topple has dragged Leon Wieseltier down now.

Leon Wieseltier, a prominent editor at The New Republic for three decades who was preparing to unveil a new magazine next week, apologized on Tuesday for “offenses against some of my colleagues in the past” after several women accused him of sexual harassment and inappropriate advances.

As those allegations came to light, Laurene Powell Jobs, a leading philanthropist whose for-profit organization, Emerson Collective, was backing Mr. Wieseltier’s endeavor, decided to pull the plug on it.

Bad luck for him that his backer is a woman, I guess.

A spokesman said Emerson Collective would not elaborate further on the nature or source of the information it had received. But stories about

Two more people in Puerto Rico have died of leptospirosis.

Puerto Rico has announced at least 76 cases of suspected and confirmed leptospirosis, including several deaths, in the month after Hurricane Maria, according to Dr. Carmen Deseda, the state epidemiologist for Puerto Rico.

The spiral-shaped Leptospira bacteria, which are found in the urine of rodents and other animals, can spread after floods through drinking water or infection of open wounds, according to the World Health Organization.

…

Since the hurricane hit in September, many in Puerto Rico have not had access to clean drinking water or electricity. As of Wednesday, a quarter of households did not have access to clean drinking water, according to data from Puerto Rico’s