Oath Keepers: The Oath Keepers militia on January 6^th, 2021, attempted to interrupt the centuries-old tradition of peaceful transfer of power in the US, a federal prosecutor said during opening statements yesterday in the Oath Keepers’ trial for seditious conspiracy.

  Federal prosecutor Jeffrey Nestler said, “They concocted a plan for an armed rebellion to shatter a bedrock of democracy.”

  Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, and four of his followers are on trial in connection with the January 6^th insurrection.  The prosecutors laid out an encoded message Rhodes sent to his group two days after election day in 2020 in which he told them to resist allowing Joseph Biden to enter the White House and said, “We aren’t getting through this without a civil war.” 

   Rhodes’s lawyer, Phillip Linder, claimed that his client and his militia members never planned to attack the Capitol, but instead were waiting for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and deputize them to use force to support the President. “Even though it may look inflammatory,” Linder told the jury, “they did nothing illegal.”

  Video taken that day puts the lie to the Oath Keeper defense. They can be seen in a military “stack” formation climbing the Capitol steps through the January 6^th mob crowd and entering the building just as the doors were breached. They were not waiting for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act.

Influencer: Professional celebutante Kim Kardashian has agreed to pay a $1.26 million fine for hawking the crypto financial asset EthereumMax on Instagram without disclosing that she was paid a quarter million dollars to do it.

  “This case is a reminder that, when celebrities or influencers endorse investment opportunities, including crypto asset securities, it doesn’t mean that those investment products are right for all investors,” said SEC Chair Gary Gensler. “We encourage investors to consider an investment’s potential risks and opportunities in light of their own financial goals.”

  But, you know, anyone who loses their shirt taking Kim Kardashian’s investment advice has it coming.  

The War Zone: The Russian army is reported to be retreating along a broad front in eastern Ukraine as the Ukrainian defenders press their counter attack. The loss of ground is an embarrassment for Vladimir Putin who has claimed the areas he’s losing are now part of Russia.

  The Russians are in danger of losing control of the Donbas region, an industrial area that was one of the economic gems Vladimir Putin wanted to steal. The situation is so fluid that Russian leaders don’t know what borders they will claim for the annexed areas. 

  “In terms of the borders, we’re going to continue to consult with the population of these regions,” Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, told reporters. That means they’re not in control.

  Pushing on after re-taking the transportation hub of Lyman, the Ukrainians destroyed a Russian armored column near the village of Torske, where the roads were left cluttered with burned tanks and armored vehicles, according to a Ukrainian military spokesman.

  In the south, Russia’s Defense Ministry actually admitted that Ukrainian tanks had pierced its line of defense in part of the Kherson region.

The Aftermath: At least 101 people are confirmed dead in the wake of Hurricane Ian, 54 of them in Lee County, Florida, where controversy is brewing about how  the government issued an evacuation order only 24 hours before the storm hit.

  Search and rescue is still under way. As many as 1,900 people have been rescued.

Trumped Up: Early this year one of Donald Trump’s lawyers, Alex Cannon, declined to tell the National Archives and Records Administration that the former president had returned all the government documents requested by the agency because he wasn’t sure that was true, The NY Times reports.  

  Without returning all the documents Trump issued a statement saying, “The papers were given easily and without conflict and on a very friendly basis, which is different from the accounts being drawn up by the Fake News Media.”

Penalty Kick: A yearlong investigation of professional women’s soccer found rampant mistreatment of the players including verbal abuse, sexual harassment, sexual misconduct, and an overall atmosphere of abuse.

  The investigation found instances of showing pornography swapped for game film and coercing players to have sex.

  “Our investigation has revealed a league in which abuse and misconduct — verbal and emotional abuse and sexual misconduct — had become systemic, spanning multiple teams, coaches and victims,” Sally Yates, the lead investigator and former US Attorney, wrote in the report’s executive summary. “Abuse in the N.W.S.L. is rooted in a deeper culture in women’s soccer, beginning in youth leagues, that normalizes verbally abusive coaching and blurs boundaries between coaches and players.”  

The Spin Rack: North Korea today fired a long-range missile over the main island of Japan in a frightening test of a nuclear capable missile. — The Daily Beast reports that former NFL star Herschel Walker, the anti-abortion Republican candidate for senator from Georgia, paid for his then girlfriend’s abortion in 2009. Walker called the claim “a flat-out lie.” As proof, the woman provided a copy of Walker’s $700 check, a receipt from the abortion clinic, and a “get well” card from Walker. 

Fish Story: The tired old joke about fisherman is that they exaggerate the size of the fish they caught and threw back.

  But over the weekend at the lake Erie Walleye Tournament, two men in Ohio were about to be awarded $29,000 for catching the most weight in fish when the tournament director decided something was fishy. He did a little math and figured that the winners’ fish weighed at least seven pounds each when the normal walleye is about four.

  Jason Fischer cut open the fish and shouted, “We got weights in fish,” after finding the catch stuffed with lead balls. The crowd went wild on the two cheaters who were told to leave immediately before they got hurt. The cheaters ended up being the catch of the day.

-30-