An Austin man apparently committed a crime so he could access healthcare in prison, according to court documents. The Austin Statesman reports:

A caller told dispatch that a man carrying a cane had come into the bank and passed a note and that he was waiting outside for police, the document said.

A police investigation determined that Edward Austin Averill III, 58, had walked into the bank and passed a note to a teller that said, “This is a robbery, hand over all your 50’s and 100’s, thanks,” then told the teller, “you can call the cops now, I will be waiting outside,” the affidavit said.
----------------
Averill’s bail is currently set at $7500, according to the Travis County Sheriff’s Office; it’s not known what condition led him to believe that a felony prison sentence was the best was to secure consistent healthcare.

“Our president, it is like he is in a war,” Bakker said in an video flagged by Right Wing Watch.

“He is not running the country like he should because he is trying to defend himself,” he continued.

“Don’t kid yourself, he is in warfare. God spoke to me today on this broadcast; what you are experiencing in this nation through the television and through all the networking and through Hollywood and through everything now—everything—you are feeling a spirit which is the spirit of Antichrist. There is a war in the world against God.”

Bakker addressed Christians who doubt Trump’s divine appointment based on his history of womanizing, infidelities, and divorces, saying that they need to remember that King David was also a “womanizer.”

Earlier this week, white nationalist Congressional candidate Paul Nehlen revealed Vaughn’s real name, Douglass Mackey, in retaliation for what HuffPo’s Luke O’Brien describes as a spat between two factions of the fascist right, those who want public shows of power (Nehlen) and those who want to focus on propaganda (Mackey).

Nehlen, who was banned from Twitter earlier this year, was then promptly banned from the alt-right Twitter alternative Gab for doxxing another user. People on Gab are very mad about this.

----------------------------

It’s easy to dismiss Mackey—whose second Twitter account @RapinBill was suspended today, as a random Twitter troll. That would be a mistake. As O’Brien wrote:

There was no mistaking Ricky Vaughn’s influence. He had tens of thousands of followers, and his talent for blending far-right propaganda with conservative messages on Twitter made him a key disseminator of extremist views to Republican voters and a central figure in the “alt-right” white supremacist movement that attached itself to Trump’s coattails. The MIT Media Lab named him to its list of top 150 influencers on the election, based on news appearances and social media impact. He finished ahead of NBC News, Drudge Report and Stephen Colbert. Mainstream conservatives didn’t know they were retweeting an avowed racist and anti-Semite, but they liked what Ricky Vaughn had to say.

“Trade wars”, though, are probably the least of our concerns right now. Trump and his war cabinet of Pompeo, Bolton, Mattis and Haspel are gearing up for military action on two fronts: against the Iranians and the North Koreans (don’t be surprised either if Bolton succeeds in nixing the president’s proposed meeting with Kim Jong-un). Despite claims of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, nuclear tensions with Moscow could also escalate. Once again, it seems, the US is going rogue.

Is it any wonder that approval ratings for Trump and the United States are in freefall across the globe? Just 22 per cent of those interviewed by the Pew Research Centre in 37 countries expressed confidence in Trump to do the right thing in international affairs, compared with 64 per cent who had similar confidence in Barack Obama in his final years in office. “The share of the public with a positive view of the US,” noted Pew, “has plummeted in a diverse set of countries from Latin America, North America, Europe, Asia and Africa.”

America first; the world last.

“The scourge of our planet today is a small group of rogue regimes that violate every principle on which the United Nations is based,” declaimed the president in his speech to the UN General Assembly in September. Yet Trump, Bolton and Co seem hell-bent on having the United States join this “small group of rogue regimes”.

Trump won't like this new study one bit.

The study from researchers at Ohio State University finds that fake news probably played a significant role in depressing Hillary Clinton's support on Election Day. The study, which has not been peer-reviewed but which may be the first look at how fake news affected voter choices, suggests that about 4 percent of President Barack Obama's 2012 supporters were dissuaded from voting for Clinton in 2016 by belief in fake news stories.
------------------
Here are the false stories, along with the percentages of Obama supporters who believed they were at least “probably” true (in parenthesis):

Clinton was in “very poor health due to a serious illness” (12 percent)
Pope Francis endorsed Trump (8 percent)
Clinton approved weapons sales to Islamic jihadists, “including ISIS” (20 percent)
Overall about one-quarter of 2012 Obama voters believed at least one of these stories, and of that group 45 percent voted for Clinton. Of those who believed none of the fake news stories, 89 percent voted for Clinton.