…and besides, Liz Cheney can afford her own snacks.
(Hat tip: Scissorhead @NamelessCynic on the tweeter)
…and besides, Liz Cheney can afford her own snacks.
(Hat tip: Scissorhead @NamelessCynic on the tweeter)
We’re eff’ed in the dark:
The kitty revolution has begun! Or will, after kitty takes a nap.
But what’s this? A fellow hoomin has betrayed us!
Well, I for one welcome our new feline overlords. After I take a nap, of course.
(Hat tip: Scissorhead Rich Webb.)
Headlines by Committee
Dan Gilmore wrote a great piece on Medium that everyone should read:
An open letter to my friends and colleagues in journalism:
Please, just stop.
Please stop giving live airtime to liars. Stop publishing their lies.
Please examine what you’re doing. You are letting liars use your traditional norms — which made sense in different times and situations — to turn you into amplifiers of deceit. You know you are doing this, and sometimes you even defend it.
Please stop.
…
Your job is not to uncritically “report” — that is, do stenography and call it journalism — when the people you’re covering are deceiving the public. Your job is, in part, to help the public be informed about what powerful people and institutions are doing with our money and in our names.
…and it goes on from there. He not only admonishes for putting Kellyanne Conway on the air (and other known liars), he gives a pretty good class in how to report the truth in an age of blatant liars.
Full disclosure: I met Dan a couple of time when he was working for the San Jose Mercury News. I wouldn’t say we were friends or even acquaintances, but I’ve admired his journalism for years.
Touched By An Angel, or at least a Fed.
Let’s now turn our attention to Comrade Trump’s stupidest lawyer (sorry Rudy), Michael (or is it Mikhail?) Cohen, the fixer in need of a fixer.
Federal prosecutors in New York revealed on Friday that they had pieced back together shredded documents found during search-warrant raids in April targeting Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s longtime personal attorney.
They taped together shredded documents, like a common Prznintial Archivist? It seems to be a theme in the Fourth Reich. [Reminder to self: Invest in 3M, Scotch Tape futures are gonna be YUGE!]
Comrade Trump must feel very lucky that a smart cookie like Cohen at least used burner phones and destroyed those before the Feds arrived…
Lawyers from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan also said they’d managed to download the contents of one old BlackBerry found in the raids, as well as messages from encrypted apps, including WhatsApp and Signal, found on newer phones.
He kept the phones? He kept all the phones? [Note to Rudy: this is why Cohen’s the stupidest lawyer. I guess you learned to get rid of the phones while you were philandering on wives one, two, and now three.] So what did the Feds find?
“Approximately 731 pages of messages, including call logs,” were found on those apps and were turned over to Cohen’s lawyers on Friday to be reviewed for potentially privileged materials like attorney-client communications, as well as “highly personal” information, prosecutors said.
They have not told us what they found, but if it was evidence… well, that’s gonna hurt. Destruction of Evidence and Obstruction in one fell swoop, and that’s pretty much a gimme.
Anyway, Cohen is the target of TWO federal investigations, one is on bank fraud, campaign finance violations and illegal lobbying, and the other is in Mr. Mueller’s office related to The Little Kremlin-on-the-Potomac.
And then there’s this: Cohen’s attorney tried to get a gag order to shut up Michael Avenatti, who is representing Stormy Daniels in the Pornygate scandal. The Federal Judge rejected Cohen’s request, and so Avenatti can say anything he wants to. One wonders if the shy and reclusive Avenatti will continue to be ever-present on the talkies? Heh.
Watching Putin’s Pal Robert Manafort hauled off to the pokey can’t have been good for Cohen’s infamous loyalty to Comrade Trump. So Cohen squealed for help by dropping his defense team and seeking a new one, and good luck with that. What law firm wants to have a client with Russian mob connections? Bill collecting comes with a steaming mug of ricin.
But not to worry, Mikhail, Wrong-Again Rudy heard your squeal and watched Manafort frog marched into jail and smoke-signaled his own future Obstruction of Justice charges (only guessing, but still probably?):
“When the whole thing is over, things might get cleaned up with some presidential pardons.”
Say, maybe Rudy is Comrade Trump’s stupidest lawyer after all!
Tucker wants in on the Panda-Eff’ing. Only guessing, of course.
Let’s see how Fox is positioning the news that Manafort is going to Jail because he was witness tampering.
Thank god 69-year-old Paul Manafort is finally behind bars. Unchain the door, let the kids play outside. We’re safe. Downside: now that unregistered lobbying for foreign governments is an enforceable felony, most of Washington is going to have to report to jail.
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 15, 2018
Um, Tucker, stick to Panda eff’ing. Unregistered lobbying is a felony and has been for quite a while. Keep up with the rest of the class.
They say that the camera shows your soul.
“When the whole thing is over, things might get cleaned up with some presidential pardons”
…and that’s some mighty fine Obstruction smoke signaling right there.
“I hear Curaçao is nice.”
CNBC:
A federal judge on Friday revoked the $10 million bail of ex-Trump campaign chief Paul Manafortand ordered him to jail because of witness tampering charges lodged by special counsel Robert Mueller.
Here’s as concise a summary of the issues as I could find:
The latest crime Manafort is charged with, and now in jail for, involves a conspiracy with a Russian citizen alleged to be a longtime and active member of Russian military intelligence. Whom Manafort contacted repeatedly during the 2016 campaign. https://t.co/xfUlBGM4Ow
— zeddy (@Zeddary) June 15, 2018
My guess is that Comrade Stupid’s prep work for his Korean Summit consisted of watching a M.A.S.H. marathon, and you know, most of those actors are still alive…
Trump claims, preposterously, that parents of Korean War veterans came up to him during the 2016 campaign and said, “when you can, we’d love our son to be brought back home — you know, the remains.”
The Korean War ended in 1953. pic.twitter.com/f4HEHZ22YM
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 13, 2018
“We have thousands of people who have asked for that — thousands and thousands of people,” Trump said. “So many people asked when I was on the campaign. I would say, ‘Wait a minute, I don’t have any relationship.’ But they said, ‘When you can, president, we’d love our son to be brought back home — you know, the remains.”
This tweet flickered past the other night, and I thought it was funny because (duh) it couldn’t have happened. But Comrade Stupid (and there’s yet ANOTHER example of how he earns that title) lied and so now the LATimes is fact checking it:
Wrote, The Week, “Let’s do the math. Say an American solider was 18 when he was sent to North Korea in the war’s final year, 1953 — he would have been 80 in 2015; if his parents had given birth to him when they were 18, they would have been 98 in 2015. More realistically, the parents would have been well over 100.”
So, you know, the chance that this happened multiple times is exactly zero.