It is a relatively minor part of the overall story. But one lingering question is just how the police got to the home of Speaker Nancy Pelosi as quickly as they did. Was it a call to 911 or a triggered house alarm? According to this article from The San Francisco Chronicle, Paul Pelosi called 911 and then left the call open, allowing the dispatcher to hear at least part of what was transpiring in the home after David DePape had broken in.

There’s more with the Rubio canvasser attack story.

Sunday night two men assaulted Rubio canvasser Christopher Monzon. Rubio went on Twitter the next day claiming it was a politically motivated attack. But Monzon did not say anything like that in the police report of the incident and only began making the claim after Rubio did. Attention has also focused on the fact that Monzon has a long history with racist and antisemitic extremist groups, including being one of the alt-righters at the Charlottesville “Jews will not replace us” rally in 2017.

Today Rubio angrily attacked the press for “smearing” Monzon’s past, claiming that Monzon had “rejected” his past extremism. But today he was the guest of honor at a Proud Boys rally organized to support him.

“I’m going to clear my name,” Monzon told The Miami Herald in a brief impromptu interview at the rally.

As we go into the weekend, a few updates on the overnight attack at the Pelosi home in San Francisco.

Just to bring us all up to speed, rapidly emerging details appear to show that the overnight attack on Speaker Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, was politically motivated and targeted Speaker Pelosi herself, who was not at home at the time of the attack. According to reporters briefed on the investigation, the hammer-wielding intruder shouted “Where is Nancy? Where is Nancy?”

We will take this story one step at a time and update you as we learn more. But the general outlines of what did happen and could have happened look more and more clear.

Faced with calls to share the oil industry’s 2022 windfall with the American people, Exxon CEO Darren Woods says he’s doing just that — in the form of a big dividend payout to shareholders. No really. I’m not kidding. “There has been discussion in the U.S. about our industry returning some of our profits directly to the American people,” says Exxon Chief Executive Officer Darren Woods. “That’s exactly what we’re doing in the form of our quarterly dividend.”

The Russo-Ukraine war has spurred a vast and sustained increase in energy prices and threatens possibly severe shortages of heating fuel this winter in Europe. The United States, while committed as a matter of policy to a clean energy transition, is nevertheless pressing various global producers to ramp up production of oil and gas. But the newly released annual World Energy Outlook report from the International Energy Agency suggests these present crises mask a more profound and lasting impact.

In short, the Ukraine war looks likely to become an inflection point accelerating the global energy transition. As the energy sector publication Energy Intelligence summarizes the report, the 2022 crisis is driving three main effects: “an accelerated energy transition, the end of Russia as the world’s pre-eminent fossil fuel power costing Moscow some $1 trillion in revenues to 2030, and an end to what has been a golden age for gas.”

You can read the executive summary of the report here.

We’re racing to the conclusion of the 2022 midterm. Just before the big day, on November 3rd, TPM is going to host an online event where we’ll discuss what the Dems got right (and wrong) in this mid-term cycle.

Why didn’t Senate Democrats seize on a Roe and Reform pledge early? What internal dynamics of the Democratic caucus and the filibuster produced that result? What about the role of Social Security and Medicare, crime and gas prices.? Joining me to discuss these and other questions are two of the most knowledgable people around on just these topics. My old friend Steve Clemons, former TPM blogger and probably the most wired guy who in DC, who recently helped launch Semafor will join me. So will Adam Jentleson, editorial director of the Battle Born Collective and the country’s most important filibuster reformer. Adam was also Chief of Staff to the late Harry Reid.

I hope you can join us.

Join us virtually on November 3, 2022 at 6:00 p.m. ET for our live discussion and a Q&A session.
To attend please RSVP and consider a $10 donation to the TPM journalism fund. Readers like you make TPM possible.

I want to return to this issue of the Ukraine letter that the Congressional Progressive Caucus released and then hastily disavowed. This can seem like an insider story with a mix of staff-member disagreements, endangered leadership ambitions and just some old-fashioned whodunnit. We’re not at all above covering those stories. But there are some really important issues at play beneath the superficial controversies.

One close to dominant view of this is that the letter itself wasn’t very controversial. It was just ill-timed (right before the election, after on-going Ukrainian battlefield successes), poorly managed and the Washington Post article that broke the story portrayed it as a break with administration policy when it really wasn’t. (Here’s one good overview of the whole controversy.)

There’s a bit of truth to this. But I think it’s basically wrong. The overview I linked to above says it’s an example of how constricted the current policy debate about Ukraine is. Again, I think that’s wrong. We’ll come back to that in a moment.

We are now cast into that antic final period before an election where a raft of strange and outlandish stories suddenly spring up and mostly drop like a stone amidst the ongoing carnival of news. One of those stories popped up earlier this week in Florida when Marco Rubio announced on Twitter that a canvasser for his campaign was viciously beaten by anti-Republican street toughs who told him that Republicans weren’t welcome in their neighborhood. “Last night one of our canvassers wearing my T-shirt and a Desantis hat,” tweeted Rubio, “was brutally attacked by 4 animals who told him Republicans weren’t allowed in their neighborhood in #Hialeah #Florida.”

It sounded pretty bad — a canvasser for Rubio’s campaign was beaten badly enough that he had to be taken to a local hospital. But the story has played out a bit differently than might have been expected.

Another woman has come forward alleging that Herschel Walker pressured her to have an abortion after she became pregnant during a longterm extramarital affair with the former football star. This alleged incident occurred in Texas in the 1990s. The woman, who did not show her face during a virtual press conference today, appeared with her lawyer Gloria Allred.