Lafayette Park is a city park, across the street from the White house. It’s a place for picnics and midday walks, and it’s also a natural place for protesters to congregate. Locking it ends the picnics, ends the walks, and on protest days it pushes the crowd onto the sidewalk, spilling into the streets whether they choose to or don’t, and thus much easier for police to corral and pepper-spray and arrest.

Cornell University refused to refund Jane Doe’s tuition when she couldn’t continue attending classes with the men who raped her. That’s everything I need to know about Cornell.

A Jamaican was charged under a federal law against non-citizen voting, and the judge found the law unconstitutional cuz only the states can regulate voting. That’s a big deal, if the Constitution and laws still matter, but that’s a big ‘if’.

Excerpt: Reps. Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican, and Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat, are seeking written pledges from their colleagues to accept the midterm election results.

Me again: “Written pledges” won’t mean much, when all Republicans and most Dems are daily breaking their oath of office. But do it, please — collect those written pledges. Srsly. Shrug. It can’t hurt.

Read the transcript and wince, or vomit. If it’s too much to read all of it, pick any question and answer at random. My mother is more coherent, and at 93 she’s only half there.

And to think, it was only a few years ago when a president speaking mental mush was newsworthy. Calling Jake Tapper!

Only, they don’t, there’s no race, and there will be no nukes on the moon while anyone reading this is alive. It’s the New York Times hallucinating, but there’s sanity at the article’s 20th paragraph:

Excerpt: Target dates have repeatedly slipped, and few experts expect the countries to meet their deadlines. Nobody has a proven lander that can lower heavy, potentially radioactive material onto bumpy lunar terrain. Nobody has ever installed a reactor in low gravity…

Excerpt: The federal government paid $496 million to buy the private prison on the outskirts of town — more than anyone has ever paid to buy any property anywhere in the state.

The most valuable transaction in Minnesota before that was for the Normandale Lakes Office Park in Bloomington, which has 1.7 million square feet of offices across several towers. A place where thousands of people work, and several companies are headquartered, sold for $366 million in 2022.

Prairie Correctional Facility, a 36-year-old empty prison that can hold 1,600 people, sold for more than that because Trump thinks immigration is so out of control in this country that the government needs to spend more money on the work of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) than it does on the Marines.

Me again: If America survives this era (big ‘if’), the roving kidnap crews of ICE will be remembered like the anti-Commie hysteria of the ’50s and the Satanic Panic of the ’90s.

This was the bank’s (forced) response to decades of redlining, which denied loans to blacks. Another example of Trump finding a law meant to protect people and instead using it to hurt them.

Excerpt: Kimberly Guilfoyle was preparing for her congressional hearing to become U.S. ambassador to Greece when she reached out to a Trump donor with an urgent request: She needed $100,000 that she said she owed American Express—in a way that wouldn’t leave a paper trail.

Excerpt: On Sept. 22, a judge agreed Alejandro was unlawfully arrested and his detention wasn’t justified. The judge ordered he be released “immediately.”

On the morning of Sept. 25, Alejandro was brought to the Whipple building, given his belongings and told he was being released.

Alejandro got a few steps farther than Ivan would. He made it outside the building’s front doors.

That’s where plain clothes immigration agents were waiting to handcuff him.

“One of the agents translated for me, saying just like they could release me, they could arrest me again,” Alejandro said in Spanish.

Excerpt: One of the biggest myths is that men rape by mistake. Like, “Oh, they need consent training.” But research is very clear: Sexual violence is not a mistake. It is an intentionally made decision by people who know they don’t have consent. They just don’t prioritize consent over things like status, power, domination, and sexual gratification.

… One of the reasons I call them perpetrators in my work is because every single person I interviewed confessed in that context. The first question I would ask them was, “When you received that email from Title IX that you were under investigation, did you know what it was about?” Every perpetrator I interviewed said “yes.” If sexual assault were a miscommunication, you would be wondering, What have I possibly done wrong? That is not the way that any of them reacted because they knew.

Very worth noting, the Republican Party endorsed the child rapist after he was charged.

Have a tall glass of Vichy water, Rahm.

It’s rude to mention any victims except Israeli victims, and genocide shouldn’t prevent good manners!

Excerpt: Those challenges will pose a major test for Mr. Ellison, 43, who until last year had never run a public media company. He and his team must convince Wall Street that the new company can manage those challenges while it pays down $82 billion in debt, a staggering sum for a traditional media company.

Excerpt: “Democracy has been hailed as, like, the holy grail for the last couple hundred years, but democracies are inefficient,” he said as we approached the palace. “If you get a benevolent dictator, it’s actually extremely efficient. There’s very little debate going on. You don’t waste time on a lot of frivolous stuff.”

Ebola flies from Congo to Kenya

Excerpt: The sudden pullout of the bombers came a week after the British police arrested five men who had been traveling last Sunday morning in white vans near the base, which has been used by American bombers in the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. The men were released on bail a day later after the authorities did not discover explosives in the vans.

Belgian student protests against education costs echo France

You go first — put a data center across the street from your main mansion, Altman.