Secaucus Fats Sees the Light

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said Wednesday that he’s ending his Republican presidential bid just days before Iowa’s leadoff caucuses in a last-ditch effort to deny Donald Trump a glidepath to the nomination.

“My goal has never been to be just a voice against the hate and division and the selfishness of what our party has become under Donald Trump,” Christie said at a town hall in New Hampshire.

“I’ve always said that if there came a point in time in this race where I couldn’t see a path to accomplishing that goal, that I would get out,” he said. “And it’s clear to me tonight that there isn’t a path for me to win the nomination, which is why I’m suspending my campaign tonight for president of the United States.”

It took nearly four years of the TOFF presidency before he realized that the TOFF was a fascist piece of shit.

Russia's Potemkin Army?

StrategyPage posits that Russian troop numbers have been inflated, to both cover up corruption and to please Putin. They're also stating that naval officers and sailors have been sent to the front with no significant training (where they die like flies).

I'd be happy with a little indications as to sources.

Anyway, it's not like sending sailors and naval officers into a ground war hasn't been done, here.

Trump's Lawyers Say That Joe Biden Can Have Trump Shot

Former President Donald Trump's attorney on Tuesday argued that a president could order the assassination of his political rival and couldn't be prosecuted for it — unless Congress impeached and convicted that commander in chief first.

So, should the Democrats in the Senate decide to protect Biden by not convicting him in an impeachment trial, he can have Trump shot and get away with it.

If the appellate court or the Suprmes buy that argument, I'm down with Biden testing that premise. For the good of the country, you understand.

A Courtroom Isn't a Campaign Event

And the judge in the TOFF's fraud trial isn't going to let him do that.

Donald Trump won’t make his own closing argument in his New York civil business fraud trial after his lawyers objected to the judge’s insistence that the former president would stick to “relevant” matters.

My guess is that the TOFF knows that he's going to lose, so he was willing to run the risk of pissing off the judge in exchange for having Yet Another Platform For Spewing Bullshit. But the judge likely would rather yank out his eyeballs than be subjected to that.

Nice Move

Letting the Russians almost complete building a new bridge and then blowing it up.

Google seems to think that the Kerch Bridhe is also closed, but I'm not finding a reason for that.

Magnets!

The TOFF is dumber about things than Col. O'Neill in SG-1. One has to wonder if he has ever touched a magnet in his life.

Vixen Strangely digs into it.

He is crazier than a shithouse rate. But that will not change the mind of a single one of the TOFF's Cultists.

Dodging These Down, Here

Jeez, Boeing

Federal investigators say a door panel slid up before flying off an Alaska Airlines jetliner last week, and they are looking at whether four bolts that were supposed to help hold the panel in place might have been missing when the plane took off.

The comments Monday from the National Transportation Safety Board came shortly after Alaska and United Airlines reported separately that they found loose parts in the panels — or door plugs — of some other Boeing 737 Max 9 jets.

The door was part of the fuselage made by Spirit Aerosystems in Wichita, KS, which was Boeing's Wichita division until it was split off about twenty years ago in some of the usual corporate shenanigans after the MBAs and beancounters took control in the late nineties. The Wichita plant was the lead factory for B-29s.

Still, if there is a critical gizmo that needs bolts to hold it in place, shouldn't somebody be checking it? Hell, does somebody bother to check to see if the fucking wing attachment bolts are properly installed?

My suspicion is that this is the sort of shit that happens when the damned beancounters decide tha tthey don't need a lot of quality control, that they can give the workers a form to fill out with a checkbox for "check the bolts". After awhile, the box gets checked without thinking about it, because nobody is checking on the work.

Pretty fucking shoddy.

Hippo Birdie, P226

This is the 40th birthday year for the P226.

Well, truth be told, since I live in a hi-cap mag ban state, a 9mm P226 doesn't do much for me and they're pretty pricey, to boot. But the ones I've coonfingered and shot seem to be nice guns.

The Uber-Rich Hate It When the Spotlight Is Turned Back on Them

So Bill Ackerman, a really rich fuckwad, pressured Harvard University to fire its president for, among other things, plaigarism. Harvard obliged him, because keeping rich doners is Job One for a university.

His wife is a tenured professor at MIT and, guess what some reporter at Business Insider found out that she did: Yep, you guessed it. She allegedly repeatedly lifted stuff from Wikipedia.

So what does said rich fuckwad do? He contacts one of his asshole buddies who owns Business Insider and weeps foul to the owner. Who promises to look into it.

My guess is that people are going to lose their jobs because they upset the wife of some rich tool.