AT LEAST $1 BILLION OF CLIENT FUNDS MISSING AT FAILED CRYPTO FIRM FTX:

Customer withdrawals had surged last Sunday after Changpeng Zhao, CEO of giant crypto exchange Binance, said Binance would sell its entire stake in FTX’s digital token, worth at least $580 million, “due to recent revelations.” Four days before, news outlet CoinDesk reported that much of Alameda’s $14.6 billion in assets were held in the token.

That Sunday, [Sam] Bankman-Fried held a meeting with several executives in the Bahamas capital Nassau to calculate how much outside funding he needed to cover FTX’s shortfall, the two people with knowledge of FTX’s finances said.

Bankman-Fried confirmed to Reuters that the meeting took place.

Bankman-Fried showed several spreadsheets to the heads of the company’s regulatory and legal teams that revealed FTX had moved around $10 billion in client funds from FTX to Alameda, the two people said. The spreadsheets displayed how much money FTX loaned to Alameda and what it was used for, they said.

The documents showed that between $1 billion and $2 billion of these funds were not accounted for among Alameda’s assets, the sources said. The spreadsheets did not indicate where this money was moved, and the sources said they don’t know what became of it.

And as a result: FTX Customers Face a Long Road to Try to Get Their Money Back. The exchange paused customer withdrawals at its international unit this week; ‘If you can’t trust exchanges, the whole premise of cryptocurrency doesn’t work:’

Gianluca Giuffra, a 25-year-old investor from Lima, Peru, used FTX to trade digital assets and picked the exchange because he thought it was a safe bet.

“Sam looks like a very honest person,” he said, “He doesn’t look like the type of guy that would do crazy stuff behind users’ backs.”

Errr:

This creepy crook became a hero to the ESG grifters & those genuinely dumb enough to believe his BS. @SBF_FTX belongs in jail. pic.twitter.com/ZJ6NDn7H7I

— Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) November 13, 2022

“‘Earning to give’ is thinking about which causes, which charities save the most lives per dollar:” Collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX had ties to Ukrainian government, WEF, and top Biden adviser.

UPDATE: FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried Lists Bahamas Penthouse For $40 Million.

IN 2022, SHARK JUMPS YOU! Watch: Hooked Mako Shark Jumps into Boat in New Zealand (Video).

BIDEN’S ILLEGAL STUDENT-LOAN BAILOUT BOUGHT OFF GEN Z — AND STAVED OFF A RED WAVE.

GETTING CLOSER: Here’s Where the House Race Stands With Yet Another GOP Flip.

FTX FACES CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION IN BAHAMAS AFTER CRYPTO EXCHANGE COLLAPSES, POLICE SAY.

UPDATE:

https://twitter.com/TomBrady/status/1543965253523881986?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1543965253523881986%7Ctwgr%5E8cc124ced12dc81c86d66d8d30c8fba148cdae19%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ffortune.com%2Fcrypto%2F2022%2F07%2F06%2Ftom-brady-ftx-crypto-exchange-advertisement-crypto-winter-flamethrower-bitcoin%2F

STEPHEN KRUISER: Election Hangover: My Democracy Doesn’t Feel Saved at All.

That’s brought us to the point where we have a senile vegetable in the Oval Office who is being handled by a cabal that’s driven by extreme leftist fringe interests. These people wake up every morning bright and early thinking of new ways to get their puppet president to shred the United States Constitution.

In case you missed it, President LOLEightyonemillion is feeling pretty frisky after last Tuesday. Robert wrote on Friday that Ol’ Gropes has vowed to not change a thing now that the red wave didn’t make it to shore.

That means that his handlers have free rein to continue the executive abuses of power we’ve been suffering under since January of last year. In September I wondered how long the country could survive a rogue Justice Department and an attorney general hell-bent on revenge. Well, boys and girls, we’re about to find out.

It’s not just the Biden administration that’s ready to flex. Ryan has a post about Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts threatening Elon Musk with congressional action because Musk mocked him in a tweet.

Nothing unhinged about that at all.

Read the whole thing.

BARRY SMOLLETT? Noose Nonsense at Obama Presidential Center. “Definitely a hate crime. I can’t imagine any other reason why a rope would be on a construction site. Also, this is Chicago. It’s not a place known for hate crime hoaxes.”

MARK JUDGE: The New #MeToo Movie Tár Makes Conservatives Into Monsters.

How this opening scene plays out tells you everything you need to know about the next two-plus hours. Something related to time or turning back to something thought forgotten in the past is going to occur (teshuvah), and that will trigger the need for repentance (kavanagh). There’s also this wrinkle, which gives the game away. When Lydia Tár mentions “kavanagh” in her interview, she quickly adds that “to this audience that word might mean something else.” By this she means that they audience will probably think of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. As if on cue, the audience lustily boos.

Regular readers of The Stream know that I have spent the last few years writing about the Kavanaugh battle and my involvement in it that sprang from my friendship with Brett going back to high school. I won’t rehash it here. You can read about it in my forthcoming book. I can only say that it was a bit bizarre to step into a movie theater to see a well-acted drama and hear Mahler’s Ninth Symphony only to be confronted with a hostile New York audience booing my high school buddy, who was falsely accused of sexual assault.

The booing scene instantly made clear what I was about to watch. Tár would be another angry story about what heartless monsters conservatives are.

Hollywood just can’t help embedding a leftist sucker punch.

WHITHER TARTARIA?

Imagine a postapocalyptic world. Beside the ruined buildings of our own civilization – St. Peter’s Basilica, the Taj Mahal, those really great Art Deco skyscrapers – dwell savages in mud huts. The savages see the buildings every day, but they never compose legends about how they were built by the gods in a lost golden age. No, they say they themselves could totally build things just as good or better. They just choose to build mud huts instead, because they’re more stylish.

This is the setup for my all-time favorite conspiracy theory, Tartaria. Its true believers say we are those savages. We live in the shadow of the Taj Mahal, Art Deco skyscrapers, etc. But our buildings look like this*:

So (continues the conspiracy) probably we suffered some kind of apocalypse a hundred-ish years ago. Our elites are keeping it quiet, and have altered the records, but they haven’t been able to destroy all the buildings of the lost world. Their cover story is that technology and wealth level haven’t regressed or anything, those kinds of buildings have just “gone out of style”.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, as a heavily illustrated Twitter thread collated with the Thread Reader app notes:

How old do you think this building is?

Well, it’s not as old as you might guess: it was built in 1967.

Here’s its story (and why architectural style is always a choice…)

It’s the great Cloth Hall of Ypres, a town in Belgium, built between 1933 and 1967.

But that doesn’t tell the full story, of course. It’s actually a stone-for-stone reconstruction of the original Cloth Hall, completed in 1304.

* * * * * * * *

Perhaps the most interesting thing about these reconstructions is that they were even possible.

Much modern architecture is wonderful – but, as with any style, much of it isn’t. Nonetheless, we get the impression that other, older styles just aren’t feasible any more.

The Tartarian empire does indeed still live, if you know where to look for it.

* Author’s photo of Google’s HQ building replaced with a photo we have the rights to use.

OUT ON A LIMB: Confirmed: Soccer Is the Greatest* Threat to Freedom and Democracy. FIFA bans “human rights for all” practice jerseys at World Cup.

What happened: FIFA, the international soccer federation, refused to let the Danish national team practice in shirts promoting “human rights for all” at the World Cup, which begins later this month in Qatar.

Seriously? Yes. The chief executive of Denmark’s soccer association said FIFA rejected the team’s request “due to technical reasons.” The seemingly innocuous phrase was presumably deemed too “political” due to the host country’s appalling human rights record and ties to terrorist organizations.

Wait, what? Human rights groups have condemned Qatar for using forced labor to build the infrastructure required to host the World Cup. More than 6,500 migrant workers are believed to have died there since 2020. The country is a longstanding supporter of Hamas, the Taliban, al Qaeda, and other Islamic terrorist groups.

So why is Qatar hosting the World Cup? Because FIFA is an irredeemably corrupt organization that represents an irredeemably corrupt sport. A U.S. Justice Department investigation found that Qatar and Russia, site of the 2018 World Cup, secured hosting rights by bribing FIFA officials.

* To be fair, the NBA might want to put in a word here.

GOODER AND HARDER, NEW YORK: New York can’t teach kids to read on $30,000 a year. From Reason TV:

CURLY, LARRY AND MOE APPROVE THIS MESSAGE: Dana White launches ‘Power Slap,’ competitive open-handed striking sport.

UFC President Dana White on Friday announced the launch of “Power Slap,” a combat sport focused on competitive open-handed striking.

According to a news release, “Power Slap” is both sanctioned and regulated.

The release says Pilgrim Media Group will produce “Power Slap,” which “will feature competitors from across the globe competing on the ultimate stage to showcase their power, technique and resolve.”

According to the release, airing on TBS in early 2023, “Power Slap” will launch with an eight episode series in which “athletes will compete to earn a spot in the cast house, the first Power Slap rankings, in future Power Slap matches and world recognition.”

Preview of the pilot episode of Power Slap, which helped to sell the series to TBS:

MARTIN SCORSESE AT 80: FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA, STEVE MCQUEEN, TIM BURTON AND WOODY ALLEN ON THE ‘GREATEST DIRECTOR ALIVE.’

Steven Spielberg might want a word here, but Scorsese’s best works have been brilliant. Still not sure about The Irishman’s excruciating 287-hour running time, though.

FINALLY: Twitter verifies account for Jesus Christ.

HOW IT STARTED: The Rise of the Latte Town.

I’m holding up traffic. I’m walking down the street in Burlington, Vermont, and I come to a corner and see a car approaching so I stop. The car stops. Meanwhile, I’ve been distracted by some hippies playing Frisbee in the park, and I stand there daydreaming for what must be 15 or 20 seconds. The car waits.

In a normal city, cars roll through these situations; if they see an opening, they take it. But this is Burlington, one of the most socially enlightened cities in America, and drivers here are aware that America has degenerated into a car-obsessed culture, where developers pave over paradise to put up parking lots; where driving threatens to crush the natural rhythms of foot traffic and face-to-face community with superhighways and arid suburbia; where fossil-fuel-burning machines choke the air and displace the renewable energy sources of human locomotion. This driver knows that while sitting behind the wheel, he is ethically inferior to a pedestrian like me. And to demonstrate his civic ideals, he is going to make damn sure that I get the right of way. No matter how long it takes.

Finally, he honks politely, and I wake up from my reverie and belatedly cross the street. But by the time I reach the next corner, I’m lost in my thoughts again and, seeing a car coming, I stop. This car stops too. And waits. I have to go through this ritual about a dozen times before I finally adapt to local mores and trudge straight into the intersections. In Burlington, pedestrians have inherited the earth. Social enlightenment rules.

Burlington is a Latte Town.

Latte Towns — the term is Alan Ehrenhalt’s — are upscale liberal communities, often in magnificent natural settings, often university-based, that have become the gestation centers for America’s new upscale culture. They are the birthplaces of the coffee shops, gourmet bread stores, micro- breweries, organic grocery stores, and the rest of the sensibility-drenched enterprises that marry natural goodness, high craftsmanship, cosmopolitan taste, social concern, and inflated prices to create a 1990s version of genteel culture. Boulder, Colorado, is a Latte Town, as are Madison, Wisconsin; Napa, California; Northampton, Massachusetts; Missoula, Montana; Wilmington, North Carolina; Ithaca, New York; and on and on. You know you’re in a Latte Town when you can hop right off a bike path, browse in a used bookstore with shelves and shelves of tomes on Marxism the owner can no longer get rid of, and then drink coffee at a place with a punnish name that must have the word “Grounds” in it, before sauntering through an African drum store or a feminist lingerie shop.

The ideal Latte Town has a Swedish-style government, German-style pedestrian malls, Victorian houses, Native American crafts, Berkeley human- rights groups, and Beverly Hills income levels. There should be some abandoned industrial mills that can be converted into lofts, software startups, and organic-brownie factories. The Latte Town in Utopia would have Rocky Mountain views to the west, Redwood forests downtown, a New England lake along the waterfront, and a major city with a really good alternative weekly within a few hours’ drive.

—David Brooks, the Weekly Standard, September 15th, 1997.

How it’s going: Defund the police comes to Burlington, Vermont.

Defund police departments and crime goes up. Does that surprise anyone? No. But the real problem isn’t the lack of police but of the tolerance of drug addled transients. They know full well if they get arrested they’ll just be out the next day. They’ll never pay a fine and never do more time. There are no consequences whatsoever. That’s the real problem.

A reader from Vermont:

An important factor to understand is how police departments are staffed. Originally at roughly 95 in 2018, that was made up of 50 patrol officers and then 45 supervisors, detectives, domestic violence officers, etc. All most all of the police leaving have come from patrol officers. Now at about 60 total, only 15 are patrol officers, so it’s actually a 70% drop from 50 to 15.
This is fairly typical across the country – when you hear of departments being down such and such, the impact is actually far far greater than immediately apparent.

Lots more reactions like these but this reader just says what the Times only insinuates.

Read this article carefully and the take away is the citizens are effectively resorting to vigilantism to solve the bike theft problem. Sure, they are not physically harming anyone now, but it is clear if the police will not or cannot protect lives and property — in this case property — people will take matters into their own hands. If you think this is better than effective law enforcement, think again.

As Glenn warned in August of 2020, when “defund the police” fever was in full bloom in latte towns across America, “the breakdown of law and order won’t go as [leftists] hope. Ultimately, the police are there to protect criminals from the populace, not the other way around. Get rid of the police, and armed vigilantism is what you’ll get. And what you’ll deserve.”

HOW IT STARTED: “Defund the Police.”

How it’s going: California sheriff’s office stops all daytime patrols due to ‘catastrophic staffing shortage.’

A California county sheriff’s office announced that it will stop its daytime police patrol due to a “catastrophic staffing shortage throughout the agency.”

Tehama County, which is located north of Sacramento and has a population of 65,000, will suspend daytime patrol services starting November 20.

Ending the patrols could prove dangerous considering that Red Bluff, the county’s most populated city, has a violent crime rate higher than 97% of other U.S. cities, according to Neighborhood Scout.

The Tehama County Sheriff’s Office released a statement announcing the decision and noted, “Over the past several years, the Sheriff’s Office has had difficulties with recruitment and retention of employees, which has been directly linked to pay disparities. A drastic rise in attrition, coupled with the inability to present enticing recruitment efforts have resulted in an unprecedented staffing shortage.”

According to KRCR-TV, the Tehama County Jail is currently around 60% of its staffing capacity. Over the past year, the sheriff’s office has lost 20 employees.

Gooder and harder, California.

THE BATTLE FOR CONTROL OF THE HOUSE: Where Things Stand. “So where do things stand now? Currently, at the time of this writing, Democrats have won 198 House seats compared to the GOP’s 210 seats. That leaves 27 seats that have yet to be called, and the Republican Party only needs to win eight of them to reach the 218 seats needed for the majority.”

TWO WORLD WAR II AIRPLANES COLLIDE AND CRASH DURING WINGS OVER DALLAS AIR SHOW:

Two World War II-era airplanes collided and crashed while performing a flyover at a commemorative event in Texas on Saturday, the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement. Six people were onboard the two planes at the time of the crash, the Commemorative Air Force said.

A Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress and a Bell P-63 Kingcobra were participating in the Air Force’s Wings Over Dallas air show when they collided mid-air near the Dallas Executive Airport just before 1:30 p.m. local time, the FAA said.

According to the event’s website, several planes were scheduled to do a flyover demonstration Saturday afternoon. Social media posts showed hundreds of people gathered to watch the flyover. The 3-day event is in honor of Veterans Day, which was Friday.

Anthony Montoya saw the two planes collide.

“I just stood there. I was in complete shock and disbelief,” said Montoya, 27, who attended the air show with a friend. “Everybody around was gasping. Everybody was bursting into tears. Everybody was in shock.”

Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson called it a “terrible tragedy.”

Here’s video of the crash, which was caught by multiple people on their phone cameras:

⚠️ GRAPHIC VIDEO: A mid-air collision involving two planes near the Dallas Executive Airport, today. The accident took place during the Wings Over Dallas WWII Airshow at 1:25 p.m., according to Dallas Fire-Rescue. A @FOX4 viewer took this video. @FOX4 is working for more details. pic.twitter.com/jdA6Cpb9Ot

— David Sentendrey (@DavidSFOX4) November 12, 2022

THE FALL GUY: Biden border chief Chris Magnus resigns amid pressure from Homeland Security.

He said he believed he was doing the job Mr. Biden asked of him in the direction he was taking CBP.

That direction has been the worst border numbers on record, with more illegal immigrants encountered and more fentanyl and terrorism suspects detected than ever before.

Mr. Magnus, who had been chief of police in Tucson, Arizona, took over at CBP when numbers were already bad. They started deteriorating at the beginning of the Biden administration.

But during 11 months on the job, Mr. Magnus made little headway in bringing the numbers down.

Border Patrol agents and Republicans on Capitol Hill blame Mr. Mayorkas — indeed, if the GOP takes control of the House there will likely be an effort to impeach the secretary.

Mr. Mayorkas, though, seemed to finger Mr. Magnus as the hurdle to better border security.

Mr. Mayorkas is slated to appear on Capitol Hill for testimony next week, and the border situation is likely to come up.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Mr. Biden had accepted Mr. Magnus’s resignation and ”appreciates” his lengthy law enforcement career.

As Ed Morrissey wrote on Friday, before Magnus resigned, “This also raises another question of whether Biden and Mayorkas want to push out Magnus as a way to blame him for everything that’s gone wrong, to discredit Magnus in case he goes to Congress with what he knows about the border crisis, or both…At some point, the silly impotence of trying to push Magnus out will end as it should have last month, before the nasty leaks and innuendo. Biden will formally fire Magnus, and Magnus will then start chatting up House Republicans about his future testimony. If Biden and Mayorkas don’t like that, then they should adopt better border-control policies and keep Magnus inside the tent. If they did that, perhaps Magnus won’t be inclined to burn it all down.”

HOPES OF GOP SENATE MAJORITY DIE IN NEVADA AS CORTEZ MASTO DECLARED WINNER.

FTX: The fall of Sam Bankman-Fried is crypto’s Enron moment.

In recent weeks, the world’s richest man and his flailing attempts to figure out what to do with Twitter have dominated the news cycle. However, his unhinged management-by-tweets reality show are nothing compared to an almighty tussle between two crypto-bros.

Internet magic money (aka crypto) billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, better known as SBF, is the man behind FTX, a crypto exchange. He seems to have angered fellow magic money billionaire and fremeny, Changpeng Zhao, better known as CZ and CEO of the rival exchange Binance. It might have to do with FTX cozying up to regulators to get the regulations beneficial to the FTX but not its rivals.

Last week, the FTX balance sheet was leaked to crypto news site Coindesk, which effectively caused a run on the exchange by exposing the financial ties between FTX and Alameda Research, a crypto trading firm also owned by SBF. The balance sheet showed that FTX’s finances were a paper tiger and ripe for plundering.

There followed a jujitsu move by which the Binance chief created a market run on FTX. His firm dumped the FTX tokens they were holding, essentially telling the market they had no faith in them. “CZ outsmarted SBF, plain and simple,” a friend who is deeply involved in this industry told me of the clashing egos. “CZ helped SBF create FTX, let him grow it, and then when it got too big, he destroyed it.”

CZ, in an ironic Robinhood act that SBF himself pioneered with other failing crypto firms, announced that he was buying SBF’s empire in a move to “save” FTX. A day later he declared, “no deal” as FTX is a big hairball and not worth the hassle. Now that’s a proper decimation of a competitor. The whole thing is quite messy – much like the whole crypto ecosystem, which is supposed to be open and transparent but is more opaque than a dog with glaucoma.

If this whole thing looks like a Ponzi scheme involving magic Internet money, then it just might be – as the Substack Dirty Bubble Media outlines in this post. Feel free to follow VC-twitter and read their threads. Whatever you do, beware of those promising endless good times, unicorns and money raining from the skies.

And a fair amount of money aimed at (mostly) Democrat politicians: FTX Founder Spent $40 Million As Democrat Midterm Megadonor.

Leading up to Sam Bankman-Fried’s spectacular implosion – in which his firm FTX evaporated billions in wealth after the now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange allegedly commingled client assets with his trading firm into a liquidity crunch – he became the sixth-largest donor in this year’s midterm election cycle, giving some $40 million to mostly Democratic candidates and causes.

According to Forbes, Bankman-Fried was second only to George Soros among billionaire donors to Democratic groups during the 2022 midterm election cycle.

FTX allegedly loaned Alameda Research – a trading firm founded by Bankman-Fried – roughly $10 billion in client assets, which has landed him under federal investigation by the SEC, CTFC, and the Justice Department – the latter of which already had been working on a months-long investigation, according to the Wall Street Journal. The CTFC, meanwhile, is tasked with regulating certain elements of the crypto markets – including digital assets that are as commodities, and crypto exchanges and clearinghouses.

In late September, Bankman-Fried admitted that his political donations were mostly to Democrats, and Republican recipients were ‘targeted’.

The fallout could be enormous: Canadian teachers could have a $95 million hole in their pensions due to the FTX crypto implosion.

The crisis at cryptocurrency exchange FTX is having ramifications far and wide. Now Canada’s third largest pension plan is revealing details about its exposure to the troubled company led by 30-year-old crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried.

On Thursday, the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan (OTPP) released a statement saying that in October 2021 it invested $75 million in both FTX International and its U.S. entity FTX.US. Additionally, it said, it made a follow-on investment of $20 million in FTX.US in January this year. The potential losses it could face are still unknown.

The OTTP wasn’t the only one burned by FTX’s collapse. Sequoia Capital, one of the most successful venture capital firms of all time, said it will mark down its investment of $214 million in FTX to zero. “We are in the business of taking risk,” it wrote to investors. “Some investments will surprise to the upside, and some will surprise to the downside.”

Other blue-chip backers of the platform include BlackRock, SoftBank, and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temasek.

If only investors had listened to Larry David: Larry David predicted FTX’s implosion.

Larry David made a prediction about this week’s crypto meltdown that was prettaaay prettaaay good.

In a Super Bowl ad for the FTX crypto exchange in February, Larry David sarcastically predicted that FTX wasn’t going to make it. The ad shows David’s character throughout history, naysaying humanity’s greatest inventions, including the wheel, the lightbulb, coffee and democracy.

At the end of the ad, David learns about FTX, “a safe and easy way to get into crypto.” A dismissive David says, “Ehhh, I don’t think so. And I’m never wrong about this stuff — never.”

“Don’t be like Larry,” the FTX ad closes.

The ad resurfaced on social media this week after FTX imploded. David’s character was, it turns out, right to be skeptical.

FTX filed for bankruptcy proceedings in the United States on Friday, marking a stunning downfall for one of the biggest and most powerful players in the crypto industry. CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, the 30-year-old founder of the exchange, resigned.

To be fair, he was bound to be right eventually:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH5-rSxilxo

Besides bribed politicians and investor losses, there’s more fallout from FDX’s implosion: FTX Owes Miami $16.5M For Arena Sponsorship Cancellation. “Late Friday, the County and the Miami Heat announced that they had terminated the relationship with FTX because of its bankruptcy.”

So what’s next for Sam Bankman-Fried? FTX founder Bankman-Fried denies fleeing to South America amid crypto collapse.

Decline is a choice, America:

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Pink Ripple Edition.

SNOWFLAKE NIGHT LIVE: Campus Culture Comes to SNL Over Chappelle Hosting Gig.

There’s unrest at 30 Rock, Page Six hears, over the decision to sign up Dave Chappelle to host “Saturday Night Live” this weekend.

We’re told that some staff writers are so furious that the comedy superstar — who has made transphobic and homophobic jokes — has been chosen to helm the iconic show that they’re sitting out the episode.

“They’re not going to do the show,” an insider told Page Six. “But none of the actors are boycotting.”

But Chappelle’s rep told us that there was nothing to suggest that there was a boycott when they attended writers’ meetings this week.

This completely gives away the left’s game at SNL. I have contended for years that SNL no longer functions as a comedy show, but rather as a Democrat super PAC. The show viciously mocks Republicans week after week, but when a comedian who has told a few trans jokes is set to host, staff writers are suddenly concerned about the danger of comedy.

One of the staffers who is ‘nonbinary’ reportedly said that transphobia is like “murder.”

Along similar lines, the number of comedy writers who would kill to write for SNL must be enormous. Why isn’t Lorne Michaels firing his writing staff, and bringing in writers who aren’t snowflakes?

CIVIL RIGHTS STUMBLE: Oregon’s new gun control law punishes poor people. Poverty should not be a death sentence, and one’s rights should never be conditioned upon their ability to pay.

EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL: AP thinks abortion was a constitutional right: Justices cheered at conservative group’s anniversary dinner.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Four of the five Supreme Court justices who overturned the constitutional right to abortion showed up at the conservative Federalist Society’s black-tie dinner marking its 40th anniversary.

Screen cap for if/when AP updates the lede:

(Classical reference in headline.)