• September jobs numbers: A delayed September jobs report shows that significantly more jobs were added than expected. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 119,000 jobs were added in September, far more than the 50,000 the Dow Jones consensus had estimated. Meanwhile, the headline unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 4.4%, the highest since October 2021. Average hourly earnings increased 0.2% in September, up 3.8% from a year ago. The BLS report was delayed due to the record 43-day government shutdown. Glassdoor chief economist Daniel Zhao observed, “September’s jobs report shows the labor market still had resilience before the shutdown, beating payroll expectations, but the picture remains muddy with August jobs revised to a job loss and the unemployment rate increasing.” He added, “These numbers are a snapshot from two months ago, and they don’t reflect where we stand now in November.”

• Trump signs Epstein legislation: President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social Wednesday evening that he had signed legislation directing the Justice Department to release the remaining files related to Jeffrey Epstein. Much of the unreleased information has been sealed from public view by a court order, so it’s unclear what the new releases will include. Revelations of unknown criminal history are unlikely, though the likelihood of embarrassing information about public figures is high. If Rep. Thomas Massie measures the success of the legislation by the number of billionaires led away in handcuffs, he is likely to be disappointed.

• Crockett’s faux pas: Texas Democrat Rep. Jasmine Crockett embarrassed herself on the floor of the House yesterday when she revealed a number of Republicans who had received money from “somebody named Jeffrey Epstein.” Crockett’s list included Mitt Romney, Lee Zeldin, and George Bush. “I just want to be clear,” she stated, “if this is the standard that we gonna make just know we gonna expose it all and just know that the FEC filings they are available for everybody to review.” Crockett’s “big reveal” has just one major problem: the “Jeffrey Epstein” associated with these prominent Republicans is not the same one as the convicted pedophile financier. Apparently, it never occurred to Crockett that there might be other people who share the same name but have absolutely no other connection.

• Dem congresswoman’s FEMA scheme: Florida Democrat Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick was indicted by a grand jury on Wednesday, as she was charged with stealing upwards of $5 million in FEMA disaster relief funds and funneling it to her 2021 congressional campaign. Her brother was also charged. Cherfilus-McCormick, who served as CEO of her family-owned healthcare company, allegedly submitted 17 fraudulent invoices to the Florida Department of Emergency Management to acquire millions in COVID-related relief funds. “Using disaster relief funds for self-enrichment is a particularly selfish, cynical crime,” Attorney General Pam Bondi stated. “No one is above the law, least of all powerful people who rob taxpayers for personal gain. We will follow the facts in this case and deliver justice.” If found guilty, Cherfilus-McCormick faces up to 53 years in prison.

• More Comey fallout: Lindsey Halligan, the interim U.S. attorney bringing the case against former FBI Director James Comey, has made a “shocking admission,” as the headlines would have it. On Wednesday, Halligan confirmed that the full grand jury never saw the final version of the charges against Comey. The grand jury foreman saw the final version, which differed only by removing the unapproved first count from the list of charges, and signed off on it. The DOJ argues that adjusting the indictment to include only the approved charges was “neither unusual nor improper.” Legal experts will need to weigh in, but the fact that the changes to the document neither altered nor broadened the offenses seems to contradict the “shocking” nature of Halligan’s admission.

• Arctic Frost provision update: In a clear rebuke of Senate Republicans including a provision within the continuing resolution that allows GOP senators to sue the U.S. government over former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s targeting of their phone records, the House yesterday voted unanimously to repeal the measure. As House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole explained, the provision “had been added in the Senate without our knowledge. It was a real trust factor. … I mean, all of a sudden, this pops up in the bill, and we’re confronted with either: leave this in here, or we pull it out, we have to go to conference, and the government doesn’t get reopened.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune included the provision in the CR at the request of Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz.

• Ukraine “peace” plan: The new 28-point “peace” plan for Ukraine, the result of U.S.-Russia talks, doesn’t resemble the Gaza peace plan recently adopted by the UN Security Council, despite headlines comparing the two. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, special envoy Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner built the proposal in meetings with Putin cutout Kirill Dmitriev, who reported that “the Russian position is really being heard." Indeed, the Russian position seems to be the only one that was heard. The proposal calls for Ukraine to surrender even unconquered parts of the Donbas and downsize its military; orders European partners to withdraw any military aircraft from the nation; and rejects the idea of placing a European peacekeeping force in the remaining Ukrainian territory. The Russian concession, if it can be called that, would apparently be limited to ending the war without the complete annexation of Ukraine.

• Woke woman to lead Christianity Today: The onetime premier magazine of mainstream Protestant evangelical culture, Christianity Today, continues to slide further and further from its conservative Christian foundation. CT’s board of directors recently announced that they unanimously elected a woke "Christian” as the new president and CEO of the magazine. Dr. Nicole Martin may tout an academically impressive résumé, but she also espouses a clearly leftist worldview. For example, following Donald Trump’s election, she wrote an article titled “God Is Faithful in Triumph and Despair” in which she talked of voting for who she believed to be the “best-qualified president of the United States, Vice President Kamala Harris.” In her book Nailing It, she espouses the false woke claim of systemic racism against blacks by police in modern America. At this rate, one wonders if CT should drop “Christianity” and rebrand itself as “Woke Today.”

• 30K trafficked children rescued: The Biden administration allowed 450,000 children to be illegally smuggled into the country and then lost track of 300,000 of them. Border Czar Tom Homan, talking to Fox News’s Jesse Watters this week, announced that the Trump administration has already found nearly 30,000 of the missing children. Homan hammered the violent anti-ICE protesters in North Carolina and other states for pretending to be full of compassion for illegal aliens and yet actively trying to interfere with the federal officers who are saving kids and bringing traffickers to justice. Unsurprisingly, the party that supports the killing of preborn babies is the same party that couldn’t care less that hundreds of thousands of children were smuggled into the country, and many of them are still held hostage by their abusers. The activists have no compassion for the lives of federal officers, American citizens, or trafficked victims. Thankfully, Homan has promised, “We’re going to keep working until we find every one of these kids.”

• Congressional Republicans finally fight against bogus 2020 census: Rep. Chip Roy led the charge on Wednesday in finally addressing the egregious issues with the 2020 census. Roy called it the “sanctuary census” since it counted illegal aliens, which shifted 10-12 House seats toward the Democrats. The lack of a citizenship question on the census, despite doing so for more than 150 years until the mid-20th century, is hardly the only issue. The Census Bureau admitted in an after-action report that six states, mostly Republican, were undercounted, and eight states, mostly Democrat, were overcounted. Yet another issue was the use of the “differential privacy” data tool that witnesses say distorted every number below the state level. In 2010 in Virginia, this same tool inflated one town’s population by 87% and deflated another’s by 43%!

Headlines

• Larry Summers goes on leave at Harvard as university investigates ties to Epstein (The Hill)

• House Republicans save Cory Mills from censure threat (Daily Caller)

• Judge moves ahead with contempt investigation into Trump administration (Daily Signal)

• BLS says full October jobs data won’t be released, available figures to be included in next report (CNBC)

• Toyota CEO goes full MAGA at NASCAR event (NY Post)

• Lesbian pleads guilty to lying about her ex committing “first crime in space” (Not the Bee)

• The Kessler twins die together by assisted suicide (CBS News)

• Humor: Scholars now believe number of the Beast is actually 67 (Babylon Bee)

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