I love how the black stripes run down the back of Chip's neck.
How Could A Sweetheart Like This Get Into Legal Trouble?!
10 minutes ago
A blog by a "sucker" and a "loser" who served her country in the Navy.
If you're one of the Covidiots who believe that COVID-19 is "just the flu",
that the 2020 election was stolen, or
especially if you supported the 1/6/21 insurrection,
leave now.
Slava Ukraini!
President* Trump on Tuesday apparently began deleting his tweets supporting Sen. Luther Strange (R-Ala.) in Alabama's Senate GOP primary runoff after Strange lost the race to former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore.It's probably illegal as all fuck for Trump to delete his tweets.
Subsection (b) of 18 U.S.C. § 2071 contains a similar prohibition specifically directed at custodians of public records. Any custodian of a public record who "willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys (any record) shall be fined not more than $2,000 or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States."
Two documentary filmmakers taken into custody on Sept. 17 in a mass arrest in downtown St. Louis have sued the city and three police officers whom they allege assaulted and arrested them because they were journalists.By the way, their allegations aren't the only ones out there. There were others, including the cops beating one of their own.
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The lawsuit said when the kettle closed on Drew Burbridge, he asked an officer if he and his wife could exit, explaining that they were part of the media. He was ignored.
Then police officers sprayed chemicals at the people trapped in the center, including the Burbridges. Two officers threw Drew Burbridge to the ground face-first, twisted his arms behind his back and repeatedly kicked him in the back while restraining his arms with zip ties. Even after he was restrained, the suit said, three officers struck him all over the body with batons. During the beating, one of the officers asked, “Do you want to take my picture now, (expletive)?”
Burbridge said he lost consciousness from the beating, but came to when an officer lifted his head by the hair and sprayed him in the face with a chemical.
It's a strange world when a NASCAR driver has a better handle on the Bill of Rights than does the President.Not all NASCAR people are siding with Trump -- with Dale Earnhardt Jr. throwing his support behind NFL protesters ... despite several NASCAR owners bashing them.Trump is trying to bully the NFL. A bunch of guys who spend their working day smashing into one another are not going to intimidated by the demented ravings of an old orange-haired loudmouthed racist.
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"All Americans R granted rights 2 peaceful protests," Dale Jr. tweeted.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
President* Donald Trump tweeted he was proud of NASCAR because no drivers, crew or other team members protested during the national anthem Sunday prior to a race at New Hampshire Motorspeedway.Riight. Like people involved in the Whitest Sport in America were going to protest the cops' killing black folk.
“So proud of NASCAR and its supporters and fans. They won’t put up with disrespecting our Country or our Flag - they said it loud and clear!” Trump tweeted Monday.
Several team owners and executives had said Sunday they wouldn’t want anyone in their organizations to protest. Richard Childress, who was Dale Earnhardt’s longtime team owner, said of protesting: “It’ll get you a ride on a Greyhound bus.”
In a sign of solidarity, the Pittsburgh Steelers stayed in the locker room during the national anthem before their 1 p.m. ET kickoff with the Chicago Bears.Football players are not going to be bullied by some old, overweight, short-fingered white guy.
Players for the Seattle Seahawks and Tennessee Titans did the same before their game.
An NFL official told ESPN NFL Insider Adam Schefter that no fines are being considered for those players who stayed in the locker room during the anthem.
A prominent left-wing Indian journalist critical of Hindu nationalist politics has been shot dead in the south-western Karnataka state, police say.I believe that Trump would cheer at the murders of reporters who had the temerity to write stories critical of him. If he had is own on-call death squads, like Philippine President Duarte, Trump would have hourly orgasms at being able to order hits on his critics.
Gauri Lankesh, 55, was found lying in a pool of blood outside her home in the city of Bangalore. The motive for the crime was not immediately clear.
She was shot in the head and chest by gunmen who arrived by motorcycle.
In a sharp departure from his predecessors, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price last week took private jets on five separate flights for official business, at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars more than commercial travel.One of those charter flights was from Dulles to Philadelphia, a route well-served by both the airlines and Amtrak. When you factor in time for security and travel time out to Dulles, Amtrak's probably even quicker.
The secretary’s five flights, which were scheduled between Sept. 13 and Sept. 15, took him to a resort in Maine where he participated in a Q&A discussion with a health care industry CEO, and to community health centers in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, according to internal HHS documents.
U.S. President* Donald Trump is using money donated to his re-election campaign and the Republican National Committee to pay for his lawyers in the probe of alleged Russian interference in the U.S. election, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters.Pretty nice that the RNC has a "Treason Defense Fund" that Trump can tap into.
Following Reuters exclusive report on Tuesday, CNN reported that the Republican National Committee paid in August more than $230,000 to cover some of Trump’s legal fees related to the probe. ... Trump would be the first U.S. president in the modern campaign finance era to use such funds to cover the costs of responding to a criminal probe, said election law experts.
United Airlines will say so long to its iconic Boeing 747 fleet with a final flight Nov. 7 from San Francisco to Honolulu.Real food in coach, like back in the day when it wasn't routinely awful?
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The final flight to Honolulu – Flight No. 747 – will recreate the first scheduled United Boeing 747 flight on July 23, 1970, from San Francisco to Honolulu.
The flight will feature a 1970s-inspired menu served by flight attendants in retro uniforms, while the in-flight entertainment will feature content from that era.
Trump administration officials, under pressure from the White House to provide a rationale for reducing the number of refugees allowed into the United States next year, rejected a study by the Department of Health and Human Services that found that refugees brought in $63 billion more in government revenues over the past decade than they cost.I am not surprised one whit. You can bet that whichever goon The Donald put in HHS will have massaged things so it comes out the way that Trump wants.
A magnitude 7.1 earthquake rocked central Mexico on Tuesday, killing at least 44 people as buildings collapsed in plumes of dust and thousands fled into the streets in panic.There won't be a single tweet of sympathy from Trump. His Duty Liar, Sara Whazerface, will not say a single kind word about Mexico from the Spicer Memorial Podium.
The quake came less than two weeks after another quake left 90 dead in the country's south, and it occurred as Mexicans commemorated the anniversary of a 1985 quake that killed thousands.
Despite international condemnation of Myanmar’s campaign of violence against the Rohingya people, there have been few calls for a return to the sort of sanctions that were long a feature of the country’s relationship with the West.Gee, it's unprecedented to herd the civilian population into camps or expel them! (The hell it is.)
After a Rohingya militant group attacked police outposts last month, Myanmar’s military, along with vigilante groups, launched a crackdown in the western state of Rakhine, triggering a refugee crisis that has sent more than 400,000 Rohingya fleeing to neighboring Bangladesh.
A U.S. Air Force chaplain who ministers to thousands of men and women at an Ohio base is asserting that Christians in the U.S. Armed Forces “serve Satan” and are “grossly in error” if they support service members' right to practice other faiths.It is a long-standing military tradition that military chaplains minister to all faiths, not just their own. That was shown in the 1949 movie Battleground:
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin defended his trip to view the solar eclipse from Fort Knox in Kentucky, for which he used a government plane, saying he did hot have any interest in the event because he is from New York.Really. He went to an event that was in the line of totality because he had no interest in the eclipse. And while he was there, he and Mitch "The Turtle" McConnell went to the roof of the Ft. Knox Gold Depository to watch it because he was only being polite to those ignorant Kentuckians who were interest in a fairly rare astronomical event?
“People in Kentucky took this stuff very seriously. Being a New Yorker, I don’t have any interest in watching the eclipse,” Muchin said on Thursday, according to The Washington Post.
The U.S. Office of Government Ethics has quietly reversed its own internal policy prohibiting anonymous donations from lobbyists to White House staffers who have legal defense funds.So anyone then can cough up to pay into the Trumpist Legal Defense Fund. Including Putin, the Saudi Royal Family, anyone at all.
The Mexican government will no longer offer aid to Texas and Louisiana to help with recovery efforts in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, Mexico’s foreign ministry announced Monday, instead redirecting that aid to portions of its own nation damaged by a powerful earthquake and Hurricane Katia.That's reason enough, they're probably strapped for resources. But this, a little later in the same article, was telling:
The 8.2 magnitude earthquake struck central Mexico last week near the city of Oaxaca, killing 95 people and injuring hundreds more, the Mexican foreign ministry said. Separately, Hurricane Katia’s landfall inflicted “significant damage” on the Mexican state of Veracruz, the foreign ministry said.
But while homeland security adviser Tom Bossert said President Donald Trump was “deeply touched” by a phone call from his Mexican counterpart offering aid and assistance, the federal government did not officially accept Mexico’s aid. The Mexican government noted in its statement that its offer had been accepted by the state of Texas, which said it could use the logistical support offered by Mexico.Really? An earthquake and a hurricane hit our neighbor and Trump can't be bothered to take notice? Is he that afraid that his sheet-wearing neo-nazi base is going to suffer butthurt if he says even one kind word about Mexico?
Trump, who has not publicly offered condolences to Mexico in the wake of its earthquake and hurricane landfall, has made getting tough with America’s southern neighbor a key part of his political agenda, pledging to either renegotiate or tear up NAFTA and to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border that Mexico will pay for.
Democratic leaders announced late Wednesday that they agreed with President* Trump to pursue a legislative deal that would protect hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants from deportation and enact border security measures that don’t include building a physical wall.Trump has two problems that are chafing his balls. First, he doesn't have a single major win under his belt. He's not signed any legislation of note. Second, he's getting lambasted in the press. Oh, he might decry "fake news", but even he knows that getting praise from sources like Fox News are just the words of sycophants.
Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), an immigration hard-liner and early Trump supporter, wrote that if reports of a potential immigration deal are accurate, the president’s “base is blown up, destroyed, irreparable, and disillusioned beyond repair. No promise is credible.”...don't expect Trump to care very much. He wants that win, and if he has to put Steve King into a coal mine or a whorehouse to do it, so be it.
Steven Mnuchin, the US treasury secretary, requested the use of a government jet for his European honeymoon, it was reported on Wednesday.Because Mnuchin thinks that he's entitled to have the government give him a military bizjet for his personal travel, because reasons.
The treasury department’s inspector general is investigating Mnuchin’s request for a US air force plane – with a reported operating cost of around $25,000 per hour – to transport him and his wife, Louise Linton, on their honeymoon to Scotland, France and Italy this summer, according to ABC News.
Brooklyn Federal Judge Kiyo Matsumoto revoked Shkreli's $5 million bail Wednesday evening, saying Shkreli's $5,000 bounty on Clinton's hair was the final straw.I was pretty sure that, with his smug attitude, that Shkreli was going to tweet or talk his way into a jail/prison cell (in his case The Tombs).
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His so-called satire wasn't protected First Amendment speech — it was an invitation for crime, the judge said.
"He is soliciting an assault on another person in exchange for $5,000," Matsumoto said.
I wrote a column for The Hill and said that Trump's mistake — and it was one — was that you can never under any circumstances equate Nazis with anyone else. It's a very simple thing, OK? So if you understand history — and I think Trump does to some extent, but not perhaps to the extent that is needed in this day and age — when you understand the evil that happened in the '30s and '40s in Germany, in Europe and even in Japan, really, truly understand it, you can't make comments about it in any other context other than, this is pure evil.I don't understand how anyone who was born in the 1940s and whom went to school in the `50s and `60s could have escaped the lesson that "Nazis are bad". Prime-time TV back then was about 35% westerns, 35% World War II and 30% sitcoms. It was kind of hard to miss that the Nazis were bad people.
US congressional investigators are examining whether Michael Flynn, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, secretly promoted a plan by private business interests to build US-Russian nuclear power plants in the Middle East while he was serving in the White House.I'm guessing that in the area of "the crime of failing to disclose", that this isn't exactly going to be a tough thing to prove.
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A letter released on Wednesday by top Democrats who are investigating Flynn, who was forced to resign from his post in February because of questions about his links to Russia, accused him of violating federal law when he failed to disclose a trip he took to the Middle East in June 2015 to promote the US-Russia project, as well as several contacts with foreigners that they allege ought to have been declared.
A Pizza Hut manager in Florida threatened to punish employees who missed shifts by evacuating too early for Hurricane Irma.You can read the memo here.
In a memo, the manager said workers at the Jacksonville restaurant have a “responsibility and commitment” to the community, and that employees who needed to evacuate would get only a 24-hour “grace period” before the storm.
“You cannot evacuate Friday for a Tuesday storm event!” the notice read. “Failure to show for these shifts, regardless of reason, will be considered a no call / no show and documentation will be issued.”
It also said that employees would be required to return to the city within 72 hours of an evacuation.
Lawyers representing Donald Trump’s current and former aides are giving their clients one simple piece of advice: Don’t lie to protect the president.Worse for them, it is possible that any pardons issued by Trump to block the probe might be challenged in court for being an illegal obstruction of justice. Which cold also mean that Trump would be committing a crime by issuing them, or even hinting at offering them.
As special counsel Robert Mueller and congressional investigators prepare to question high-ranking aides — including Hope Hicks, Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer — in the coming weeks, Trump’s long history of demanding his employees’ complete loyalty is being put to the test.
But Trump stalwarts know the president is closely following the media coverage of the Russia case — and the last thing they want is to be deemed a turncoat whose answers end up becoming further fuel for investigators.
In YearSixteen years on. The Middle East remains a chaotic mess due to the aftermath of the Iraq War, a completely unnecessary endeavor. As I wrote in some of the posts linked above, thanks to the ignoring of the situation in Afghanistan for seven years, any chance of securing that country was squandered.TenSixteen of the [Afghan] war, the best that the commanders can say at the Five O'Clock Follies is that "tangible progress" has been made. Many more American fighting men and women will be killed and maimed. At least another trillion dollars will be spent. There is no end in sight for this war.
the ATF basically ran a crooked cigarette business for the purpose of generating cash that the ATF could then use for other purposes, without having to put up with such things as Congressional oversight or submitting budgets.The operation, such was it was, went across the administrations for Bush II and Obama. The Department of Justice has been doing what it can to hust things up.
President* Donald Trump surprised the leaders of his own party in Congress on Wednesday when he backed a deal pushed by Democrats to attach hurricane relief money to a shorter-term bump in the debt ceiling as well as keeping the government open, cutting off his own Treasury secretary to strike a deal.Maybe Trump has finally figured out that he can't get shit done with only Republicans.
The decision was one of the most fascinating and mysterious moves he's made with Congress during eight months in office.
The remarkable turn of events left Republican congressional leaders, in control of both chambers of the legislative branch, "shell-shocked" and "visibly annoyed," and showcased how a President who also authored "The Art of the Deal" actually cuts one.
A Charlotte mayoral candidate wants people to know that she’s Republican, smart – and white.It's one thing to sound a dog-whistle to the neo-nazis, but Barnette was sounding a foghorn.
“VOTE FOR ME!” Kimberley Paige Barnette posted on Facebook. “REPUBLICAN & SMART, WHITE, TRADITIONAL.”
Barnette, who turned 53 on Friday, is a former Mecklenburg County magistrate making her first run for office.
Chairman Robin Hayes said Tuesday any suggestion a candidate is more or less qualified based on skin color alone "is offensive to North Carolina Republicans." Hayes added "this type of suggestion has no place in our public discourse."While that's nice of Mr. Hayes to say that, let's not forget for a second that North Carolina repeatedly elected Jesse Helms to the U.S. Senate. Helms was so racist that even Smirky Sessions probably shook his head and said "I can't believe this guy."
Paul Ryan says 'Dreamers' should 'rest easy' over expiring Daca policy.Right. Ryan is telling the Dreamers that he can deliver something that he damn well knows that he cannot. If Ryan was honest about helping the Dreamers, he'd deliver a "clean" bill, one that only handles the issue. But he can't do that. His caucus will insist on adding in amendments and other poison-pill shit that the Democrats will never go for. They'll add in provisions for building habitats for poisonous snakes into The Great Wall of Trump, or provisions that people who are worth $4 billion and whose primary residence is in Manhattan not only pay no taxes, but they get free ponies.
Salt Lake City police Detective Jeff Payne has been fired from his part-time paramedic job as the fallout continues from his arrest of a University Hospital nurse in July. ... At one point, Payne remarks to another officer — apparently frustrated by Wubbels’ refusal to allow a blood draw — that he could retaliate against the hospital in his role as a Gold Cross paramedic. “I‘ll bring them all the transients and take good patients elsewhere,” Payne says in the footage.I'll bet that the ambulance company really winced at being dragged into this mess.
Microplastic contamination has been found in tap water in countries around the world, leading to calls from scientists for urgent research on the implications for health.As the article explains, as the fibers become smaller and smaller, they'll get to the point where they'll easily penetrate into cells. And nobody really seems to know what will happen next.
Scores of tap water samples from more than a dozen nations were analysed by scientists for an investigation by Orb Media, who shared the findings with the Guardian. Overall, 83% of the samples were contaminated with plastic fibres.
The US had the highest contamination rate, at 94%, with plastic fibres found in tap water sampled at sites including Congress buildings, the US Environmental Protection Agency’s headquarters, and Trump Tower in New York. Lebanon and India had the next highest rates.
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The scale of global microplastic contamination is only starting to become clear, with studies in Germany finding fibres and fragments in all of the 24 beer brands they tested, as well as in honey and sugar. In Paris in 2015, researchers discovered microplastic falling from the air, which they estimated deposits three to 10 tonnes of fibres on the city each year, and that it was also present in the air in people’s homes.
A Yorkshire [England] school girl has made the unexpected discovery of a four-foot sword in the lake that King Arthur's Excalibur was apocryphally hurled into.Of course you're going to watch the Monty Python clip, aren't you.
Matilda Jones, aged seven, from Doncaster, found the sword when she was paddling in Dozmary Pool, in Cornwall with her father, Paul.
President* Donald Trump's administration will "wind down" a program protecting hundreds of thousands of young immigrants who were brought into the country illegally as children, Attorney General Jeff Sessions declared Tuesday, calling the Obama administration's program "an unconstitutional exercise of authority."The question, now, is whether or not there are enough Republicans in Congress who are willing to try and save DACA. If there are, then Trump could claim that all he did was force Congress to do the right thing. Which would then put the Democrats in a bind and, in essence, force them to help the GOP save themselves from Trump.
*The Attorney General will not be taking questions following the briefing.* #DACA pic.twitter.com/n995gVUrxx— Michael A. Scarcella (@MikeScarcella) September 5, 2017
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