While premiums and benefits have improved for beneficiaries, the financial mechanisms behind these plans raise concerns. Medicare Advantage companies, funded by the federal government, are incentivized to manage policyholders’ risks, potentially leading to overspending and profit-driven practices.

The potential legal claim against Media Matters by X could include Tortious interference, a common law tort that allows for damages when a defendant wrongfully interferes with the plaintiff’s contractual or business relationships. 

Top generals warn that allies — Canada included — are running dangerously low on artillery shells.

 A pair of women who recently completed the first all-female spacewalk, considered "historic," made a boo-boo when they accidentally released a bag of equipment into orbit.

 For the first time since the October 7 incident, Russia is making its position known without any doubt, siding with Gaza and the Palestinians rather than Israel, their aggressor.

The Mohave County Board of Supervisors in Arizona is scheduled to vote today on an agenda item to, “approve and direct the Mohave County Elections Department to carry out hand tabulation of ballots for the 2024 elections.” 

The agenda item packet includes a letter from Kari Lake attorney Bryan Blehm vowing to defend the decision and cover all legal expenses, a letter from Arizona State Senator Sonny Borrelli, and a notification that the County has received “written commitment” covering the volunteers required to carry this out.

However, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, who stole her election by 280 votes, sent a letter to the Board yesterday, threatening prosecution, “for conducting an illegal hand count” and labeling people advising this hand count as, “bad-faith actors.” 

The Lumma information-stealing malware is now using an interesting tactic to evade detection by security software - the measuring of mouse movements using trigonometry to determine if the malware is running on a real machine or an antivirus sandbox.

Lumma (or LummaC2) is a malware-as-a-service information stealer rented to cybercriminals for a subscription between $250 and $1,000. The malware allows the attacks to steal data from web browsers and applications running on Windows 7-11, including passwords, cookies, credit cards, and information from cryptocurrency wallets.

The Kinsing malware operator is actively exploiting the CVE-2023-46604 critical vulnerability in the Apache ActiveMQ open-source message broker to compromise Linux systems.

The flaw allows remote code execution and was fixed in late October. Apache’s disclosure explains that the issue allows running arbitrary shell commands leveraging serialized class types in the OpenWire protocol.

Researchers found that thousands of servers remained exposed to attacks after the release of the patch and ransomware gangs like HelloKitty and TellYouThePass started to take advantage of the opportunity.

...

To mitigate the threat, system administrators are recommended to upgrade Apache Active MQ to versions 5.15.16, 5.16.7, 5.17.6, or 5.18.3, which address the security issue.

Facepalm: While Western Digital is facing a class action lawsuit over failing SanDisk SSDs, a new report coming from a data recovery company has seemingly discovered the real issue within the defective drives. According to Attingo, the entire hardware design is flawed and no firmware update will solve this kind of problem alone.

Joe Biden’s poll numbers are so bad that NBC’s hosts were stunned as they reported on a new left-leaning NBC poll that shows Biden’s approval rating is just 40% – the lowest Biden “has ever measured in our poll.”

A homeowner who was forced to pay the local government a $23,000 fee for the “traffic” impact of his new, modular retirement home is going to the U.S. Supreme Court challenging its constitutionality.

City officials who just a week ago had outlined exactly what they would allow for Christmas decorations – “non-religious” snowflakes, greenery and northern lights – abruptly now are claiming that was not intended to be a ban on religious items.

 This weekend Donna Brazile, the DNC Chair who famously leaked debate questions to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and was later fired, went on with Bill Maher on HBO.

In 1988, in an elevator at a film festival in Havana, the director Oliver Stone was handed a copy of On the Trail of the Assassins, a newly published account of the murder of President John F. Kennedy. Stone admired Kennedy with an almost spiritual intensity and viewed his death on November 22, 1963 — 60 years ago this month — as a hard line in American history: the “before” hopeful and good; the “after” catastrophic. Yet he had never given much thought to the particulars of the assassination. “I believed that Lee Oswald shot the president,” he said. “I had no problem with that.” On the Trail of the Assassins, written by the Louisiana appellate judge Jim Garrison, proposed something darker. In 1963, Garrison had been district attorney of New Orleans, Oswald’s home in the months before the killing. He began an investigation and had soon traced the contours of a vast government conspiracy orchestrated by the CIA; Oswald was the “patsy” he famously claimed to be. Stone read Garrison’s book three times, bought the film rights, and took them to Warner Bros. “I was hot at the time,” Stone told me. “I could write my own ticket, within reason.” The studio gave him $40 million to make a movie.

The resulting film, JFK, was a scandal well before it came anywhere near a theater. “Some insults to intelligence and decency rise (sink?) far enough to warrant objection,” the Chicago Tribune columnist Jon Margolis wrote just as shooting began. “Such an insult now looms. It is JFK.” Newsweek called the film “a work of propaganda,” as did Jack Valenti, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America, who specifically likened Stone to the Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. “It could spoil a generation of American politics,” Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in the Washington Post.

MSNBC’s Al Sharpton pushed the panic button on Monday over black voters ditching Democrats, warning the Biden Administration to take it more seriously.

The massive lack of enthusiasm among black voters, specifically young minority voters for the Biden Administration has become more apparent in the wake of indictments against Donald Trump.

“How do you see it, and what do you see can be the remedy?” MSNBC’s Jonathan Lemire asked Al Sharpton.

“I think that the fact that there is a lack of enthusiasm among young voters, particularly young black voters, the Biden campaign needs to take seriously because you need to really build a ground game movement from the bottom-up, rather than just poo-poo it and be in denial,” Sharpton said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that deliveries of artillery shells from the US have "decreased" since Israel unleashed its relentless bombing campaign in Gaza following the October 7 Hamas attack.

The US has provided Ukraine with a huge amount of artillery ammunition since Russia launched its invasion last year, including over 2 million 155mm shells. But supplies are strained as Ukraine is using ammunition at a much faster rate than can be produced by the entire NATO alliance.

Republicans will control every statewide elected office in Louisiana starting in January after the GOP swept three runoff elections over the weekend for attorney general, treasurer and secretary of state. 

Republican candidates for the three statewide offices all beat their Democratic opponents with at least 65% of the vote during Saturday's runoff election, according to the unofficial election results from the Secretary of State's Office. 

Nancy Landry will become the first female elected as secretary of state while Liz Murrill will become the state's first female attorney general, according to The Associated Press. John Fleming was elected treasurer. 

The current governor of Louisiana is Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards, who was unable to run for reelection because of term limits. Edwards, the only Democratic governor in the region, had been in office for eight years. 

Webmaster addition: A portent for next year's elections?

Webmaster addition: This is a terrible miscarriage of justice. Maybe the Supreme Court is afraid of triggering massive Antifa and BLM riots if they overturn the conviction, or maybe we have reached the point where the government dares not ever admit it made a mistake.

Israel’s attacks on Gaza’s healthcare system have only intensified as the death toll mounts and tens of thousands of wounded people require medical care as Israel’s bombardment continues across the besieged enclave.

Following the Israeli military destruction of Al Shifa Hospital, rendering it entirely out of service, Israeli forces are now surrounding the only remaining hospital providing basic medical care in the north of the Gaza Strip, targeting it with artillery shelling.

On Monday morning, the Indonesian Hospital was put under siege by the Israeli military. At least 12 people have been killed in the attacks so far according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health who describe the siege as a “circle of death.”

Al Jazeera reported that almost 6,000 people are seeking shelter in the complex, including 100 medical workers and about 700 patients. 

The controversy started when Musk responded to the following post on X:

Okay. Jewish communties have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them. I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest s**t now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much. You want truth said to your face, there it is.

“You have said the actual truth,” Musk responded.

Tapper claimed that Musk later went on to say he was “talking about the ADL and other Jewish groups are pushing replacements of whites.”

Representative Jim Banks accuses Nancy Pelosi of blocking him and Jim Jordan from investigating January 6th, alleging that the committee is part of a cover-up and a partisan agenda.