WIDER WAR: At least 12 people were killed and as many as 300 wounded Saturday in a missile attack carried out by Houthi rebels in Yemen against the airport in Riyadh in central Saudi Arabia. One American citizen was among the dead.

  The airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s second busiest, remains closed following a total of three fatal attacks.

  Saudi authorities said the Saturday attack targeted a passenger terminal and vowed revenge. Saudi Arabia has already been pounding the Houthis in Yemen but, as has been proven since World War II, bombing alone never vanquishes an enemy, or eradicates an ideology.

  Analysis in The NY Times by  Vivian Nereim and Lisa Friedman says the Houthis “have hit at the heart of Prince Mohammed’s ambitions to transform Saudi Arabia from an insular, oil-dependent nation into a global hub for business and tourism.”

FRENEMIES: Sometimes the only thing worse than being Donald Trump’s enemy is being his friend.

  Trump has turned once again against Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, accusing Ukraine of contributing to the rise in fuel prices by attacking Russian oil facilities and saying Ukraine needs “a new president.”

  Trump broke the sanctions against Russian oil making a deal for diesel fuel in an attempt to lower prices before the mid-term elections. By doing so he is supporting Russia in its fight against Ukraine, the country that the US has backing throughout the war that Russia started in the winter of 2022.

  Yesterday Trump posted. “Effective immediately, there is an ENERGY CEASEFIRE in the War between Russia and Ukraine. Both parties have agreed.”

  Neither country has confirmed that and Russia attacked a power plant within hours.

ARTFICIAL POLITICS: Trump complains about “fake news,” but a lot of what’s fake on television these days are the political ads created with artificial intelligence. The ads have renderings of real candidates saying and doing things they never did.

  The Wesleyan Media Project says campaigns have spent at least $80 million on 164 political ads created with artificial intelligence, 80 percent of them on behalf of Republican candidates. The Media Project reports that, “Sixty-nine percent of the ads and 78 percent of the spending did not have a disclaimer that disclosed the use of AI tools.”

MONEYBALL: Tesla billionaire Elon Musk has donated more than $276 million to Republican groups and his super PAC since the start of July in an effort to save the Republican majority. 

INFINITE SCROLL:

— In his now traditional poison pen holiday greeting, President Trump posted, “HAPPY COLUMBUS DAY TO ALL, in particular our great Italian American Community which was forced to suffer as the Radical Left Dumocrats, Socialists, and Communists rampaged through our cities and towns ripping down almost all of the beautiful statues of Christopher Columbus.” 

— The Justice Department notified the major television news networks that they are under investigation for possible violation of anti-trust laws because for a few days they collectively refused to serve the White House press pool after CNN was banned.

   It could be a hard case to make, although that wouldn’t stop the Justice Department from bringing it. The press pool itself, which operates every day, requires cooperation by otherwise competing news organizations. 

— Heading to Tennessee where he spoke at a rally that featured plenty of empty seats, President Trump posted that, “The Dumocrats, along with their partners in crime, the Fake News Media, are trying to create the false narrative that, Donald Trump is so ‘unpopular,’ the Republicans are going to lose.” 

  The polling indicates that Democrats will take control of the House and have an edge to take the Senate. The prediction markets … now we have to consider the sentiments of the gambler … give the Democrats a 63 percent chance of winning both houses of Congress. 

THE BRIEFING ROOM: The online news outlet The Bulwark exposed some of the social media musings and public comments of Katie Zacharia, the incoming White House press secretary who has a solid record as a Trumpy. Some samples:

• “Suspend habeas corpus.” (That’s the fundamental right to challenge your arrest.)
• “The price of a stolen 2020 election and subsequent autopen presidency is American Blood.”
• “The federal government under @realDonald Trump should take over all of California.”
• She called Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed—who was born and raised in the United States—“an indictment of our immigration system under Democrats.” 
• Zacharia said during a podcast interview that abortion is a depopulation effort and that, “The abortion pill has the same chemicals they used in the externment (sic) camps in Nazi Germany.”

 THE SPIN RACK: Tennessee prisoner Christa Pike was released from the hospital after surviving two lethal injections in an attempt to execute her for murder. She is reported to be struggling with concentration and memory, but she’s been sent back to prison. — A man was mauled to death by a Siberian tiger after he entered the tiger enclosure to have his picture taken at the Yorkshire Wildlife Park in England. — Eight people, including a pregnant woman and two young children were killed in a mass shooting Friday evening in Erie, Pennsylvania. The shooter also was found dead. — How long can you hold it? An American Airlines flight bound from Madrid to Dallas over the weekend had to divert to New York because six of the eight bathrooms on board were malfunctioning.

BELOW THE FOLD: President Donald Trump on Saturday floated the idea of renaming more bodies of water after renaming the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario.

 “Now, somebody said, you need a river … We need a river. We need an ocean,” Trump said, speaking in Tennessee. 

  When he says, “Somebody said,” it’s him.

 “We call it ‘Trump Ocean’ or, or, ‘Ocean of the Americas,’ something like that,” “Before I get out, I think we should have an ocean. And we need a great river.”

   He’s never really joking.

-30-