So to give you a sense of how this is going, Elon Musk started the day by replying to Hillary Clinton’s condemnation of the Pelosi attack with a link to an article containing an anti-LGBT conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi. I don’t want to get into the details. But let your imagination go wild and it’s that bad. Now he’s deleted the tweet and is getting attacked by his alt-right fans for giving into the left wing mob. Twitter has always been a marginal proposition in business terms. I suspect that the advertiser exodus had already started. Whatever its other shortcomings, Facebook in its day was a killer app when it came to ad targeting. Advertisers found it impossible not to be there. The post-2016 climate has taken a toll regardless. Its market cap has now collapsed. Twitter is a far more marginal buy for advertisers.

After yesterday’s Proud Boys rally in Hialeah, Rubio canvasser Christopher Monzon appeared at a GOP event in Miami Springs today during which he gave a fiery speech with numerous new details about the allegedly politically motivated attack he suffered a week ago. Remember that in the initial report to police he didn’t mention any political remarks at all. Now they said “F**k Marco Rubio,” along with threatening to kill Monzon for being a Republican.

The Herald also has more details about the father of one of the attackers who apparently tried to break up the fight. According to the Herald he also introduced a limp today that he didn’t have yesterday.

Basically every eyewitness or contemporaneous police report makes it fairly clear that this was a street fight of some sort that Monzon and Rubio are now making into a kind of GOP martyrdom story.

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.