Say what? The Guardian:

Elon Musk has unveiled a SpaceX spacecraft designed to carry crew and cargo to the moon, Mars or anywhere else in the solar system and land back on Earth perpendicularly.

What are they talking about? SpaceX has as of now designed a spacecraft that can carry crew anywhere in the solar system? That’s nonsense.

In a live-streamed speech from SpaceX’s launch facility near the southern tip of Texas, Musk said on Saturday that the space venture’s Starship is expected to take off for the first time in about one or two months and reach 19,800 meters (65,000ft) before returning to Earth and landing.

So they’re working on being able to reach 65,000 feet and return. That’s not exactly the same as carrying a crew to Pluto.

Reporting on the realities of space flight can be wildly misleading.

Trump crazier than ever.

Like every American, I deserve to meet my accuser, especially when this accuser, the so-called “Whistleblower,” represented a perfect conversation with a foreign leader in a totally inaccurate and fraudulent way. Then Schiff made up what I actually said by lying to Congress……His lies were made in perhaps the most blatant and sinister manner ever seen in the great Chamber. He wrote down and read terrible things, then said it was from the mouth of the President of the United States. I want Schiff questioned at the highest level for Fraud & Treason………In addition, I want to meet not only my accuser, who presented SECOND & THIRD HAND INFORMATION, but also the person who illegally gave this information, which was largely incorrect, to the “Whistleblower.” Was this person SPYING on the U.S. President? Big Consequences!

These Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrats, are doing great harm to our Country. They are lying & cheating like never before in our Country’s history in order to destabilize the United States of America & it’s upcoming 2020 Election. They & the Fake News Media are Dangerous & Bad!

Laurence Tribe:

Trump’s implication that he wants @RepAdamSchiff executed for treason is unhinged, disgusting, and beyond intolerable. The president is acting like a raving lunatic.

Walter Shaub:

Trump saying he wants Schiff “questioned at the highest level for Fraud & Treason” is terrifying—not for Schiff, mind you, but for Trump’s allies. It’s like the final thing you’d expect Hans Gruber to shout back up at John McClane while falling, if they were both politicians.

25th. He’s a danger to us all.

That’s funny.

Trump and other aides are frustrated with Mulvaney because he did not have a strategy for defending and explaining the Ukraine call.

Actually it’s hilarious. The problem is not committing an outlandish crime grotesquely festooned with sub-crimes which are in turn festooned with more crimes – the problem is not having worked up a set of lies to deal with exposure of the outlandish crime grotesquely festooned with sub-crimes which are in turn festooned with more crimes. It’s all the fault of the guy who didn’t lie fast enough!

The tweet links to a CNN piece:

Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney is on shaky ground in the wake of a bad week for President Trump, according to multiple sources with knowledge of discussions surrounding the whistleblower fallout.

The sources say the President is not upset with Mulvaney for the White House releasing the summary of his July 25 call with Ukraine’s leader or the whistleblower complaint because he had been convinced that it was necessary.

What Trump and other aides are frustrated with, according to the sources, is that Mulvaney did not have a strategy for defending and explaining the contents of those documents as soon as they were publicly released.

What’s he there for, am I right? He’s supposed to have a strategy for defending and explaining all of Trump’s crimes, corrupt deals, blunders, treasons, lies, insults, pratfalls as soon as they become public knowledge.

One of the sources says it’s not just the President, but also widespread frustration in the White House about the lack of a response plan to deal with the fallout after the release of the whistleblower complaint ignited more controversy surrounding the President.

Ok but seriously now – what kind of plan are they thinking of? What kind of plan could there be? Just the usual Trump routine of lying yourself blue in the face and then moving on to the next thing? But that’s where Trump has always been so confused: transparent lies are transparent. It’s sadly true that that fact hasn’t stopped him getting his filthy hands on the top job, but it does mean his reputation for nonstop lying precedes him wherever he goes.

Sarah Chayes in the Atlantic on Hunter Biden’s legal and socially acceptable corruption:

The whistle-blower scandal that has prompted the fourth presidential impeachment process in American history has put a spectacle from earlier this decade back on display: the jaw-smacking feast of scavengers who circled around Ukraine as Viktor Yanukovych, a Moscow-linked kleptocrat, was driven from power. Ukraine’s crisis was the latest to energize a club whose culture has come to be treated as normal—a culture in which top-tier lawyers, former U.S. public officials, and policy experts (and their progeny) cash in by trading on their connections and their access to insider policy information—usually by providing services to kleptocrats like Yanukovych. The renewed focus on Ukraine raises jangling questions: How did dealing in influence to burnish the fortunes of repugnant world leaders for large payoffs become a business model? How could America’s leading lights convince themselves—and us—that this is acceptable?

How indeed? I didn’t know any of this. Chayes is a former foreign correspondent for NPR, so that’s useful.

She dispenses quickly with the “Trump is worse” objection – of course he is, but that doesn’t make this shit ok.

All too often, the scandal isn’t that the conduct in question is forbidden by federal law, but rather, how much scandalous conduct is perfectly legal—and broadly accepted.

Let’s start with Hunter Biden. In April 2014, he became a director of Burisma, the largest natural-gas producer in Ukraine. He had no prior experience in the gas industry, nor with Ukrainian regulatory affairs, his ostensible purview at Burisma. He did have one priceless qualification: his unique position as the son of the vice president of the United States, newborn Ukraine’s most crucial ally. Weeks before Biden came on, Ukraine’s government had collapsed amid a popular revolution, giving its gas a newly strategic importance as an alternative to Russia’s, housed in a potentially democratic country. Hunter’s father was comfortably into his second term as vice president—and was a prospective future president himself.

There was already a template, in those days, for how insiders in a gas-rich kleptocracy could exploit such a crisis using Western “advisers” to facilitate and legitimize their plunder—and how those Westerners could profit handsomely from it. A dozen-plus years earlier, amid the collapse of the U.S.S.R. of which Ukraine was a part, a clutch of oligarchs rifled the crown jewels of a vast nation. We know some of their names, in some cases because of the work of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office: Oleg Deripaska, Viktor Vekselberg, Dmitry Rybolovlev, Leonard Blavatnik. That heist also was assisted by U.S. consultants, many of whom had posts at Harvard and at least one of whom was a protégé of future Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.

I did not know that either. How revolting.

Scratch into the bios of many former U.S. officials who were in charge of foreign or security policy in administrations of either party, and you will find “consulting” firms and hedge-fund gigs monetizing their names and connections.

Some of these gigs require more ethical compromises than others. When allegations of ethical lapses or wrongdoing surface against people on one side of the aisle, they can always claim that someone on the other side has done far worse. But taken together, all of these examples have contributed to a toxic norm. Joe Biden is the man who, as a senator, walked out of a dinner with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Biden was one of the most vocal champions of anticorruption efforts in the Obama administration. So when this same Biden takes his son with him to China aboard Air Force Two, and within days Hunter joins the board of an investment advisory firm with stakes in China, it does not matter what father and son discussed. Joe Biden has enabled this brand of practice, made it bipartisan orthodoxy. And the ethical standard in these cases—people’s basic understanding of right and wrong—becomes whatever federal law allows. Which is a lot.

It’s not a million miles from Ivanka’s profiteering. It would be nice if it were but it’s not.

The Washington Post reports:

The Trump administration is investigating the email records of dozens of current and former senior State Department officials who sent messages to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email, reviving a politically toxic matter that overshadowed the 2016 election, current and former officials said.

As many as 130 officials have been contacted in recent weeks by State Department investigators — a list that includes senior officials who reported directly to Clinton as well as others in lower-level jobs whose emails were at some point relayed to her inbox, said current and former State Department officials. Those targeted were notified that emails they sent years ago have been retroactively classified and now constitute potential security violations, according to letters reviewed by The Washington Post.

Got that? The emails weren’t classified when they sent them but the Trump administration helpfully classified them now, so uh oh potential security violations. That’s totally fair.

To many of those under scrutiny, including some of the Democratic Party’s top foreign policy experts, the recent flurry of activity surrounding the Clinton email case represents a new front on which the Trump administration could be accused of employing the powers of the executive branch against perceived political adversaries.

He should ask her where she was born, too. He should start saying she was born in Paris, or Stockholm, or some weird treasony place like that.

A former senior U.S. official familiar with the email investigation described it as a way for Republicans “to keep the Clinton email issue alive.” The former official said the probe was “a way to tarnish a whole bunch of Democratic foreign policy people” and discourage if not prevent them from returning to government service.

The probe is being carried out by investigators from the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security. Republican lawmakers, led by Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), have been pressing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to complete the review of classified information sent to Clinton’s private emails and report back to Congress.

State Department officials said they were bound by law to adjudicate any violations.

Former Obama administration officials, however, described the probe as a remarkably aggressive crackdown by an administration with its own troubled record of handling classified material. Trump has improperly disclosed classified information to foreign officials and used phones that national security officials warned were vulnerable to foreign surveillance, according to current and former officials.

At the same time, Trump overrode the concerns of his former White House chief of staff and U.S. intelligence officials to give his son-in-law and senior White House adviser Jared Kushner access to highly classified materials, officials said.

But that’s completely different because reasons.

Those targeted began receiving letters in August, saying, “You have been identified as possibly bearing some culpability” in supposedly newly uncovered “security incidents,” according to a copy of one letter obtained by The Washington Post.

Brand new! Never before seen! Found when they had to replace the dishwasher.

Those communications are now being “upclassified” or “reclassified,” according to several officials involved in the investigation, meaning that they have been retroactively assessed to contain material so sensitive that they should have been sent only on State Department classified systems.

Except that nobody thought so at the time, so how could that even work? Retroactively criminalizing is not a thing.

Many of those who have been targeted by the probe and found “not culpable,” described it as an effort to harass diplomats for the routine conduct of their job.

“It is such an obscene abuse of power and time involving so many people for so many years,” one former U.S. official said of the inquiry. “This has just sucked up people’s lives for years and years.”

All for political sadism. I’m so sick of these people.

At the Atlantic, Elaina Plott reports on a phone chat with Giuliani:

Even among the president’s closest allies, Giuliani is now the subject of scorn. When I reached him by phone this morning, following House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff’s release of the full whistle-blower complaint at the center of the Ukraine scandal, he was, put simply, very angry.

“It is impossible that the whistle-blower is a hero and I’m not. And I will be the hero! These morons—when this is over, I will be the hero,” Giuliani told me.

“I’m not acting as a lawyer. I’m acting as someone who has devoted most of his life to straightening out government,” he continued, sounding out of breath. “Anything I did should be praised.”

Giuliani unleashed a rant about the Bidens, Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, Barack Obama, the media, and the “deep state.”

The Freemasons! The Jews! Fluoride! Vaccines! Impurities! The Jews!

This morning, a former senior White House official told me this “entire thing,” referring to the Ukraine scandal, was “Rudy putting shit in Trump’s head.” A senior House Republican aide bashed Giuliani, telling me he was a “moron.” Both individuals spoke on condition of anonymity in order to be candid.

“They’re a bunch of cowards,” Giuliani told me in response. “I didn’t do anything wrong. The president knows they’re a bunch of cowards.”

As opposed to Captain Bone Spurs, who has the courage of a lion?

Giuliani said he’s looking forward to watching the State Department “sink themselves” as officials try to create distance from him. In the complaint, the whistle-blower wrote that officials, including Ambassadors Kurt Volker and Gordon Sondland, “had spoken with Mr. Giuliani in an attempt to ‘contain the damage’ to U.S. national security,” and that the ambassadors had tried to help the Ukrainian administration “understand and respond to the differing messages they were receiving from official U.S. channels on the one hand, and from Mr. Giuliani on the other.”

When I asked him about this specifically, Giuliani nearly began shouting into the telephone. “The State Department is concerned about my activities? I gotta believe [the whistle-blower] is totally out of the loop, or just a liar,” he said.

We definitely want him helping Donald Trump to destroy everything. Definitely.

Woman’s Place UK has a statement on what happened around that meeting in Brighton Monday which they want us to share widely:

On Monday 23rd September, Woman’s Place UK held its 24th public meeting in two years: A Woman’s Place is at Conference. It was timed to coincide with the Labour Party’s annual conference and to publicise our manifesto which contains demands we believe would significantly improve the quality of women’s lives, as well as address the structural oppression and discrimination that we face.

Members of our local organising team liaised closely with the venue and made sure they were fully informed about our campaign, and that previous meetings had been protested.

We also liaised with the local police who assured us they had resources in place to manage any protest should it occur.

At 4.30pm, the original venue cancelled our meeting saying they could not guarantee the security of the building in light of the scale of the planned protest.

Fortunately, we had booked an alternative venue and were able to switch the details before the email with the location went out.

As the organisers arrived at the venue, they were met by a small group of protestors who took photos of them. The only way these protestors could have found the location of the venue is from someone who had purchased a ticket. They must have shared this information despite our clear statement that it is confidential to ticket holders.

The protest grew substantially in size until at least 100 people were outside the building. The security team we had hired was extremely efficient at ensuring the venue itself was secure but ticket holders had to brave a narrow corridor surrounded by aggressive protestors taking photos, shouting ‘SCUM! SCUM! SCUM!’, ‘TERF! TERF! TERF’ and ‘SHAME ON YOU’ in peoples’ faces.

Two women reported water being thrown at them. Others reported being touched or manhandled.

Amongst the audience were survivors of sexual and domestic violence and several women were in tears as they entered the building.

Sheets had to be pinned up at the door to stop protestors taking photos of women within the building.

Read on.

Reuters tells us:

A senior lawyer called on Tuesday for the top United Nations human rights body to investigate evidence that China is murdering members of the Falun Gong spiritual group and harvesting their organs for transplant.

Hamid Sabi called for urgent action as he presented the findings of the China Tribunal, an independent panel set up to examine the issue, which concluded in June that China’s organ harvesting amounted to crimes against humanity.

Beijing has repeatedly denied accusations by human rights researchers and scholars that it forcibly takes organs from prisoners of conscience and said it stopped using organs from executed prisoners in 2015.

Apparently China offers organ transplants to overseas patients customers at a very stiff price but a…”greatly reduced waiting time.”

That doesn’t sound reassuring.

The very sane and normal president of the US.

One particularly crisp summary, from Susan Hennessey:

Just to clarify what is going on here, the White House appears to be engaged in massive, systemic abuse of the classification system and underlying presidential authorities in order to cover up egregious wrongdoing including impeachable conduct. This is a historic scandal.

Also self-incriminating. They can’t use any “we didn’t realize it was wrong” defense because they hid the records. Watergate all over again: chorus: It’s not the crime it’s the cover-up.

And in another part of the forest…Benjamin Wittes:

And we come to the part of the story where the Kremlin literally pays the president’s lawyer…

TPM:

As the House prepares to consider whether to impeach President Trump over an unprecedented plot to turn Ukraine into an opposition research factory, his personal attorney and associate Rudy Giuliani has decided to keep busy: he is scheduled to attend a pro-Russian conference in Armenia next month with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

And to be paid for it, according to Wittes and others, but I haven’t seen a journalistic source for that so far.

Oy.

Trump is begging the NRA to help him not be impeached, and the NRA is demanding more fanatical support for More and More Guns as the price. It’s hard to know which half of that sentence is the most disgusting.

Susan Hennessey:

The President of the United States trading legislation the American public is demanding to stop the weekly slaughter of gun violence in exchange for money for his personal legal defense.

Talking Points Memo:

The squeeze is on.

With President Donald Trump facing impeachment, the NRA is reportedly looking to leverage the political moment to lock in his opposition to new gun control measures.

Trump and NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre met Friday to discuss the the NRA providing financial support for Trump’s impeachment defense, the New York Times reported Friday.

The support comes at a price.

“Mr. LaPierre asked that the White House ‘stop the games’ over gun control legislation, people familiar with the meeting said,” the Times said.

This elevator goes only down. Down, down, down.

NBC News looks into the facts about Bidens and Ukraine and money.

As vice president, the elder Biden lead the U.S. diplomatic efforts to bolster the country’s fledgling democracy and root out corruption after mass protests ousted the country’s pro-Russia president, Viktor Yanukovych.

Biden spoke frequently with Ukrainian leaders and in April 2014, he traveled to Ukraine, bringing financial support and warning the Russians — who had recently annexed Crimea — to stop intervening in Ukrainian sovereignty.

That all seems good. But the next paragraphs…

In May 2014, Hunter Biden was hired by a Ukrainian gas company, Burisma Holdings, as a board member reportedly making $50,000 a month. He stopped working with the company earlier this year.

The company had ties to Yanukovych, raising eyebrows among White House aides and others who saw potential for a conflict of interest. The Obama White House said at the time that the younger Biden was a private citizen, and that there was no conflict of interest.

Come on. Of course there’s a conflict of interest! There’s also the matter of appearances. People in government must not only be incorruptible they must be seen to be incorruptible. Joe Biden’s kid taking a wildly lucrative position with a Ukrainian company the same year his father the VP was active in Ukraine does not look incorruptible. It looks, at the very least, like Biden Junior eagerly cashing in on his father’s job – and why would anyone in the administration want that?

I know next to nothing about business and being on boards and so on, but surely 50 k a month is a hell of a lavish salary for being on a board, which I take to be not the same as an actual full-time job? I take it Biden Junior didn’t move to Ukraine? Presumably he just Skyped it in when there were meetings?

And the other point is, why would a Ukrainian company hire some random American lawyer to be on their board? They wouldn’t. They hired a Biden because he’s a Biden. Yes, Virginia, that fucking is a conflict of interest.

It seems we’ve gotten so used to this miserable pay for play routine that we can’t even see it any more. Clinton charged $$$ for access to him when he was president, and bragged about it –  he said money couldn’t buy his vote but it could buy access to him. He said that out in the open, as if it were obviously fair and reasonable and not at all corrupt.

But there’s little evidence he acted to help his son: Earlier this year, Bloomberg News, citing documents and an interview with a former Ukrainian official, reported the Burisma investigation had been dormant for more than a year by the time Biden called for the crackdown on corruption. The then-Ukrainian prosecutor general told the news agency he found no evidence of wrongdoing by Biden and his son. And PolitiFact reported it found no evidence to “support the idea that Joe Biden advocated with his son’s interests in mind.”

Additionally, the most recent former prosecutor general of Ukraine, Yuriy Lutsenko, told Bloomberg he had no evidence of wrongdoing by either Biden.

That’s all good, but it doesn’t make the arrangement okay.