And don’t let Matt Whitaker try to tell you he thought the company was on the up and up.

(And even if he really did think that, it would be no excuse, because he should have done due diligence.)

He knew damn well it wasn’t.

Months after joining the advisory board of a Miami-based patent company in 2014, Matthew G. Whitaker began fielding angry complaints from customers that they were being defrauded, including from a client who showed up at his Iowa office to appeal to him personally for help, records show.

Yet Whitaker, now the acting attorney general, remained an active champion of World Patent Marketing for three years — even expressing willingness to star in national television

There’s been a major earthquake near Anchorage, Alaska. I learned of it early because I follow Blair Braverman (Iditarod winner) on Twitter and she’s there* (without the dogs, who are far away and safe). She’s currently tweeting from a car (passenger seat) attempting to get away from a possible tsunami.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the 7 magnitude tremor struck about 10 miles north of Anchorage at 8:29 a.m. local time (12:29 p.m. EST) Friday morning. Social media images and videos showed cracked and collapsed roads, as well as cracks in the walls of buildings. It wasn’t immediately clear if there were any injuries.

“At Anchorage Daily News in Midtown, it sent cracks up walls, damaged ceiling panels and

Awww iddn that sweet.

Russian President Putin and Saudi Crown Prince bin Salman embrace and laugh at the G20 in Argentina. pic.twitter.com/DtyNK6RwhI

— NBC News (@NBCNews) November 30, 2018

… Read the rest

Oh, that’s how dirty the cops are in St Louis.

When a judge acquitted a white St. Louis police officer in September 2017 for fatally shooting a young black man, the city’s police braced for massive protests. But St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department Officer Dustin Boone wasn’t just prepared for the unrest — he was pumped.

“It’s gonna get IGNORANT tonight!!” he texted on Sept. 15, 2017, the day of the verdict. “It’s gonna be a lot of fun beating the hell out of these s—heads once the sun goes down and nobody can tell us apart!!!!”

Two days later, prosecutors say, that’s exactly what Boone did to one black protester. Boone, 35, and two other officers, Randy Hays,

Comey is seeking to quash the subpoena, on account of how he doesn’t want to talk to Congress behind closed doors because the Republicans cheat.

Former FBI Director James Comey has filed a motion in federal court in Washington to quash a congressional subpoena issued just before Thanksgiving soliciting his testimony on the FBI’s actions leading up to the 2016 election.

Comey has said previously that he would be willing to testify publicly, but did not want to do it behind closed doors.

In Thursday’s filing, his lawyers argue that the House Judiciary and Oversight committees “have conducted an investigation in a manner that exceeds a proper legislative purpose insofar as members of the committees have established a practice

Meanwhile, uptown, a psychology professor at Columbia Teachers College and some students head to her office.

As they entered her workspace, they passed a mezuza, a small box containing Hebrew religious texts, affixed to her doorpost.

But the sight that met them next made the professor and her students stop in their tracks.

Anti-Semitic graffiti had been spray-painted on the office walls of Elizabeth Midlarsky, a clinical psychologist and Holocaust scholar at Columbia’s Teachers College on the Upper West Side of New York. The vandalism included swastikas and an anti-Semitic slur, “Yid,” painted in bright red on the white walls of her office foyer. The outer door had been closed but not locked, one student said.

“I was shocked.

This crap again. A conference called PantheaCon, meaning I assume AllthegoddessesCon, explains why after inviting the well-known scholar Max Dashu to speak it then told her to stay away. It explains, of course, by pouring abuse on Max and licking the bums of people it claims would be terrified by her presence.

To the trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming members of the PantheaCon community:

It was a mistake to include Max Dashu in the program and I want to personally apologize to each of you. I have communicated with many of you directly and have read every letter sent personally. I want to apologize for my part in causing the fear, pain, and sense of exclusion that many of you

Via Screechy Monkey in the Miscellany Room, the Miami Herald on the plea agreement that spared Jeffrey Epstein a long prison sentence:

On a muggy October morning in 2007, Miami’s top federal prosecutor, Alexander Acosta, had a breakfast appointment with a former colleague, Washington, D.C., attorney Jay Lefkowitz.

…

[Lefkowitz’s] client, Palm Beach multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein, 54, was accused of assembling a large, cult-like network of underage girls — with the help of young female recruiters — to coerce into having sex acts behind the walls of his opulent waterfront mansion as often as three times a day, the Town of Palm Beach police found.

He was also suspected of trafficking young girls for “parties” with his friends.

Facing a

Grotesque.

A lawyer for Paul Manafort, the president’s onetime campaign chairman, repeatedly briefed President Trump’s lawyers on his client’s discussions with federal investigators after Mr. Manafort agreed to cooperate with the special counsel, according to one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers and two other people familiar with the conversations.

Boom.

The arrangement was highly unusual and inflamed tensions with the special counsel’s office when prosecutors discovered it after Mr. Manafort began cooperating two months ago, the people said. Some legal experts speculated that it was a bid by Mr. Manafort for a presidential pardon even as he worked with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, in hopes of a lighter sentence.

Whatever it was a bid for, it’s dirty … Read the rest