And we get blown awaaaaaaaay....

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FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) — Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear banned the use of “conversion therapy” on minors in Kentucky on Wednesday, calling his executive order a necessary step to protect children from a widely discredited practice that tries to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity through counseling.

The governor took action using his executive powers after efforts to enact a law banning the practice repeatedly failed in the state’s Republican-dominated legislature. Beshear signed the executive order during a statehouse ceremony attended by activists for LGBTQ+ rights.

“Let’s be clear: conversion therapy has no basis in medicine or science, and it has been shown to increase rates of suicide and depression,” Beshear said in a statement. “This is about doing what is right and protecting our children. Hate is not who we are as Kentuckians.”

The executive order signed by Beshear bans the practice and makes it illegal to use state or federal funds to provide the therapy on minors. It also gives the state’s board of licensure the authority to take action against anyone found to have practiced conversion therapy on minors and gives the board the authority to bring disciplinary action against anyone found in violation of the order.

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Retired military generals have described Donald Trump as a “danger” to America’s security as they endorsed Kamala Harris.

On the eve of a critical debate between Ms Harris and her Republican rival, 10 former top US military chiefs released a letter calling the vice-president the only candidate “who is fit to serve” in the country’s highest office.

While Ms Harris had “demonstrated her ability to take on the most difficult national security challenges in the Situation Room and on the international stage”, they wrote, Trump posed “a danger to our national security and democracy”.

The letter, signed by retired General Larry Ellis and retired Rear Admiral Michael Smith, among others, accused Trump of disparaging service members and putting them in “harm’s way”, including with his deal to free 5,000 Taliban fighters.

It coincided with a new Harris campaign advert placed in Palm Beach featuring Trump’s most senior former officials warning of the risks of his White House return.

The attack advert shows a montage of scathing comments about the Republican ex-president by some of his most senior former cabinet officials in what appears to be an effort to goad him ahead of their televised live showdown on Tuesday night.

“In 2016, Donald Trump said he would choose only the best people to work in his White House,” the attack advert’s narrator said. “Now those people have a warning for America: Trump is not fit to be president again.”

What a difference two-and-a-half months make.

It was just late June when Donald Trump and Joe Biden faced off in the first presidential debate of the season. As it turns out, thanks to his disastrous performance, it was Biden’s last presidential debate ever.

Tomorrow is the second presidential debate, but it might as well be the first. Kamala Harris will be making her debate debut as a presidential candidate. She and Trump have never faced off before. Indeed, the two have never even met because Trump skipped the 2021 inauguration festivities after his failed coup attempt.

Debates are all about expectations and spin. The expectation for the June debate was that Biden would show Trump up for the blowhard he is, which is why the Biden campaign pushed for a debate so early in the election cycle. We all know how that worked out.

However, it’s hard to imagine that Harris isn’t in a much better position going into the debate than Trump is. For one thing, Trump can’t stop himself from vomiting his inner dialogue, which rightly disgusts a lot of voters. He digresses, he rambles, he struggles to put a coherent thought together. Biden’s poor performance was the spectacle at the last debate. This time out Trump won’t have that foil.

At the same time, Harris is used to arguing her case. After all, she was a prosecutor, where her job was to convince a jury. She knows how to lay out her argument and draw people into it. She knows that this time the voting public is her jury, and she will argue accordingly.

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Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, said in the wake of the deadly school shooting in Georgia that the massacres are sadly a “fact of life” and offered ways to fortify schools to make them safer against gun violence.

Kamala Harris put out a statement with Vance’s comments and called for “action to keep our children safe and keep guns out of the hands of criminals.”

And it appeared to strike a nerve with team Trump that she used Vance’s comments against them.

“Kamala’s interns just released a statement pushing FAKE NEWS,” Trump War Room posted to X with its more than 2 million followers. “Watch the full video and you’ll clearly see that JD Vance does not say what they claim he said. These morons do nothing but lie every single day.”

Except Harris’ campaign shared the same video.

Here’s what Vance had to say:

“I don’t like that this is a fact of life,” he said. “But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. And we have got to bolster security at our schools. We’ve got to bolster security so if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children they’re not able.”

Vance said he doesn’t like the idea of his own kids going to a school with hardened security, “but that’s increasingly the reality that we live in.”

All of that was in what Harris’ campaign shared with her joint statement on the shooting with running mate Tim Walz. Vance said what team Trump said Vance didn’t say and accused the Harris campaign of distorting.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. government has charged a Russian-born U.S. citizen and former adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign with working for a sanctioned Russian state television network and laundering the proceeds.

Indictments announced Thursday by the Department of Justice allege that Dimitri Simes and his wife received over $1 million dollars and a personal car and driver in exchange for work they did for Russia’s Channel One since June 2022. The network was sanctioned by the U.S. in 2022 over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Simes, 76, and his wife, Anastasia Simes, have a home in Virginia and are believed to be in Russia.

“These defendants allegedly violated sanctions that were put in place in response to Russia’s illegal aggression in Ukraine,” U.S. Attorney Matthew M. Graves said in a statement announcing the indictments. “Such violations harm our national security interests — a fact that Dimitri Simes, with the deep experience he gained in national affairs after fleeing the Soviet Union and becoming a U.S. citizen, should have uniquely appreciated.”

The indictments come at a time of renewed concern about Russian efforts to meddle with the upcoming U.S. election using online disinformation and propaganda. On Wednesday federal authorities charged two employees of the Russian media organization RT with covertly funding a Tennessee company that produced pro-Russian content.

Simes, who led a Washington think tank called the Center for the National Interest, figured prominently in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and potential ties to the Trump campaign.

A federal indictment unsealed on Wednesday alleges that a Tennessee-based media company which played home to several prominent right-leaning online commentators was secretly a Russian government-backed influence operation. The company is accused of receiving nearly $10 million from employees of Russia Today (RT), a Russian state-backed media company, as part of “a scheme to create and distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging,” according to Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Tenet Media worked with American conservative or heterodox media figures, including Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, and Lauren Southern, who variously present themselves as independent journalists, documentarians, and political commentators. Not all of them immediately commented on having been publicly linked to a foreign propaganda site, but Johnson soon tweeted that he and other influencers had been “victims in this alleged scheme.” In his own tweet, Pool echoed that line, writing, in part, “Should these allegations prove true, I as well as the other personalities and commentators were deceived and are victims.” Rubin, too, described himself as a victim, adding, “I knew absolutely nothing about any of this fraudulent activity. Period.”

The indictment, filed in the Southern District of New York, alleges that RT and two specific employees, Kostiantyn “Kostya” Kalashnikov and Elena “Lena” Afanasyeva, worked to funnel money to Tenet Media as part of a series of “covert projects” to shape the opinions of Western audiences. RT has faced cancellations and sanctions in the United States, Europe, Canada, and the UK after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; federal authorities allege those travails led the company to instead create more covert means of influencing public perception.

While Tenet is only referred to in the indictment as “U.S. Company 1,” details made it readily identifiable. The indictment alleges that Tenet’s coverage “contain[ed] commentary on events and issues in the United States, such as immigration, inflation, and other topics…consistent with the Government of Russia’s interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions.”

The indictment also alleges that not everyone affiliated with Tenet was unaware of the scheme, stating that “Founders 1 and 2” of the company knew the source of their funding. The founders of Tenet Media are Lauren Chen and her husband; Chen is a conservative influencer and YouTuber who’s hosted a show on Blaze TV and who’s affiliated with Turning Point USA. Her husband, Liam Donovan, identifies himself on Twitter as the president

Despite strong evidence that the average voter in the presidential election doesn’t care a hoot about international trade policy, Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance have been promising to step up Trump’s tariff war with China.

As usual, they’re backing their promise with lies and other humbug.

“A tariff is a tax on a foreign country,” Trump asserted at an Aug. 19 rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., for example. “That’s the way it is, whether you like it or not. A lot of people like to say it’s a tax on us. No, no, no. It’s a tax on a foreign country.”

Questioned during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Aug. 25 about the effect of Trump’s tariffs on ordinary households — and economists’ conclusion that consumers pay the price — Vance asserted that “economists really disagree about the effects of tariffs.”

They’re wrong on both counts.

In truth, there’s no detectable disagreement among economists. In two polls conducted by the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, panels of economists unanimously agreed that American households would pay the price for Trump’s tariffs.

Those opinions held in a March 2018 poll and a May 2019 poll of panels of 43 leading academic economists. (The panels weren’t identical but did overlap; three respondents in the first poll didn’t provide answers and 11 didn’t answer or were “uncertain” in the second.)

The Harris campaign is more forthright about the cost of tariffs to the average consumer, although its specific estimates about the magnitude of the cost of tariffs Trump has proposed for the future — almost $4,000 a year on middle class households — can be questioned.