But they didn’t TELL him he shouldn’t lie

Dec 12th, 2018 11:18 am | By

Yesterday’s late news was weird – Michael Flynn is complaining that the FBI agents who interviewed him didn’t tell him he shouldn’t lie to them.

Wut?

Did he think the FBI would be cool with it if he lied to them? Did he think they were interviewing him just for practice?

Lawyers for Michael T. Flynn, President Trump’s first national security adviser, asked a federal judge late Tuesday to spare him prison time for misleading investigators, and they suggested that the F.B.I. agents who interviewed him last year at the White House had tricked him into lying.

…

But the lawyers offered no explanation for why Mr. Flynn lied to agents about conversations he had during the presidential

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A veritable smorgasbord of crimes

Dec 12th, 2018 11:00 am | By

So anyway – Cohen was sentenced today; three years.

Judge William H. Pauley III said Mr. Cohen had committed a “veritable smorgasbord” of crimes involving deception and “motivated by personal greed and ambition,” each of which “standing alone warrant serious punishment.”

But he added that Mr. Cohen’s crimes — breaking campaign finance rules, tax evasion and lying to Congress — “implicated a far more insidious harm to our democratic institutions.”

“As a lawyer, Mr. Cohen should have known better,” the judge said.

Before he was sentenced, a solemn Mr. Cohen, standing at a lectern, sounded emotional but resolved as he told the judge he had been tormented by the anguish and embarrassment he had caused his family.

“I blame

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Critical legal theory

Dec 12th, 2018 10:50 am | By

Fox News headline right now:

Trump did NOT violate campaign finance law, despite what prosecutors say

You have to laugh. “Who ya gonna believe, some prosecutors or Fox News??!”… Read the rest

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At some point you have to be willing to walk away from a lousy deal

Dec 11th, 2018 4:48 pm | By

Via Screechy at the Miscellany Room: frat boy gets stern “tsk tsk” for four counts of sexual assault.

Even though Jacob Walter Anderson was indicted on four counts of sexual assault, the ex-fraternity president won’t spend a single day in prison.

Instead, a plea agreement allowed the former Baylor University student to plead no contest to a lesser charge of unlawful restraint.

That means if the 24-year-old successfully completes three years of deferred probation and pays a $400 fine, his criminal record will be wiped clean of the charge, CNN affiliate KWKT said.

Wow, a whole four hundred dollar fine. That should keep the prosecutors in paper towels for a good three months.

The plea agreement between Anderson’s defense

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Did you order the code wall?

Dec 11th, 2018 3:57 pm | By

Pelosi dissed him.

Moments after returning to Capitol Hill after an Oval Office standoffwith President Trump, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi questioned Trump’s manhood and said the border wall was a matter of masculine pride.

“It’s like a manhood thing for him. As if manhood could ever be associated with him. This wall thing,” said the California congresswoman.

Wall! Yooge wall! Yooge throbbing wall!

She told colleagues that she was “trying to be the mom” in the room while Trump and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) bickered about the coming funding showdown.

But she described Trump’s admission during the 17-minute on-camera tete-a-tete that he would be “proud” to shut the government as a political triumph.

“The

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More bangs

Dec 11th, 2018 3:41 pm | By

Not this again.

At least two people have been killed and 12 others wounded in a shooting in the eastern French city of Strasbourg.

The gunman, known to security services, is on the run and is being hunted by police. He had been injured in an exchange of gunfire with a soldier, police said.

The shooting happened close to a Christmas market near one of the central squares, Place Kléber.

France’s counter terrorism prosecutor has opened an investigation.

Go to a place where people are having a nice time – a festive winter market, a dance hall, a tourist site, a bicycle path – and open fire. The world will be a better place.

Local journalist Bruno Poussard wrote

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Trumpride

Dec 11th, 2018 11:14 am | By

And then there’s Trump’s self-declared pride at shutting down the government.

“I am proud to shut down the government,” he announces in his dopy shouty petulant scratchy voice.

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Uh oh, she’s saying words again

Dec 11th, 2018 10:38 am | By

This is maddening to watch, along many axes – but the most maddening to me is the way Trump shouts Pelosi down seconds after she starts talking, every time, along with slapping his hand at her in the “shut up I want to do all the talking” signal*…while he sits sullenly still and quiet while Schumer talks. His feels of dominance toward her and submission toward Shumer are painfully, infuriatingly obvious.

*Updating: found a picture of the shut up gesture at Pelosi.

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Let them drink Roundup

Dec 11th, 2018 9:41 am | By

Meanwhile Trump wants us to have dirtier water – dirtier in the sense of more toxic, not muddier – and he’s putting his want into action. Thanks, Don!

The Trump administration is expected on Tuesday to unveil a plan that would weaken federal clean water rules designed to protect millions of acres of wetlands and thousands of miles of streams nationwide from pesticide runoff and other pollutants.

Because why shouldn’t we have to drink pesticide?! We can always buy Perrier by the case. If we can’t do that it’s our own damn fault for being so lazy and shiftless and not corrupt, so we deserve the pesticide in our water.

Environmentalists say the proposal represents a historic assault on wetlands

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Trump’s got the loomies

Dec 10th, 2018 5:12 pm | By

Interesting. Republicans are said to be chatting about dropping Donnie Two-scoops. Impressive that it only took them three years.

Donald Trump is facing “looming problem” as Republicans contemplate abandoning the president as more evidence of wrongdoing comes to light, Los Angeles Times White House reporter Eli Stokols explained on MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House” on Monday.

Host Nicolle Wallace played a clip of Trump supporter and former U.S. Attorney Chris Christie wondering what additional evidence special counsel Robert Mueller and federal prosecutors in Manhattan have obtained.

Oh don’t worry about it, just let this criminal sack of shit go on destroying the country and the world for another couple of years. What could go wrong?

“Republican lawmakers who are —

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Just make shit up why don’t you

Dec 10th, 2018 4:44 pm | By

Good people on both sides. On both sides.

After the Republican-dominated legislature in Wisconsin passed a package of bills to strip power from the incoming Democratic governor for nakedly partisan purposes, NBC’s Meet the Press host Chuck Todd spuriously claimed that such maneuvers were not unprecedented because Democrats had done the same thing to Republican governors in the past.

There is no evidence of that — and Todd offered none.

On December 9’s Meet The Press, after detailing some of the changes that Republicans are making — in both Wisconsin and Michigan — and describing them as “a couple of end runs around the November election results,” Todd said: “Now, this has happened before in many a legislature.

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The march of identificationism toward the sea

Dec 10th, 2018 11:41 am | By

Daniel A. Kaufman at the Electric Agora thinks we may be witnessing the beginning of the end of civil rights, as traditionally understood.

The fight for civil rights was born with the original women’s movement of the late 19th century and may very well may die with the contemporary gender-identity movement that has engulfed both feminist and gay and lesbian activism.  If allowed to continue and become even more generalized (and I don’t see why it wouldn’t, given its current trajectory), this “identificationism” will absorb the black, Latino, and other racial and ethnic justice movements as well.  What a bitter irony it is that after surviving more than a century under the relentless assault of the forces of reaction,

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Noted

Dec 10th, 2018 10:51 am | By

Meanwhile…

The United States joined a controversial proposal by Saudi Arabia and Russia this weekend to weaken a reference to a key report on the severity of global warming, sharpening battle lines at the global climate summit in Poland aimed at gaining consensus over how to combat rising temperatures.

The US, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. That’s who we are now: Team Evil.

Arguments erupted Saturday night before a United Nations working group focused on science and technology, where the United States teamed with Russia, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to challenge language that would have welcomed the findings of the landmark report, which said that the world has barely 10 years to cut carbon emissions by nearly half to avoid

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Not as simple as all that

Dec 10th, 2018 10:16 am | By

Philip Bump at the Post:

President Trump’s day began Monday, as many of his days do, with watching Fox News. A guest on “Fox and Friends First” — the version of the show that airs in the pre-dawn hours — argued that former FBI director James B. Comey’s Friday testimony left Democrats without a smoking gun on the question of coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign in 2016. (It wasn’t intended to; it had been demanded by congressional Republicans.) Trump seized on the comment in a pair of typo-marred tweets.

“Democrats can’t find a Smocking Gun tying the Trump campaign to Russia after James B. Comey’s testimony,” he wrote on Twitter. “…So now the Dems go to a

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Not once but twice

Dec 10th, 2018 9:53 am | By

… Read the rest

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A simple private transaction

Dec 10th, 2018 9:26 am | By

Theme for today: beware the smocking gun.

Also, of course, the “simple private transaction” was spending money to buy the silence of two women he had sex with so that the voters wouldn’t know he’d had sex with two women outside his marriage. How dare we invade his privacy like that.

Also, it’s not “the Dems,” it’s federal prosecutors.… Read the rest

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The woman targeted

Dec 9th, 2018 4:57 pm | By

Lesbians not welcome on Baltimore’s LGBTQ Commission’s Law and Policy Committee:

The Baltimore LGBTQ Commission’s Law and Policy Committee recently held an emergency meeting aimed at eliminating lesbian representation on the Commission. Several women who are longtime residents of the region attended on the evening of December 4, 2018, to support the woman targeted by the meeting, twenty-five year-old Julia Beck. Julia has stated that her reasons for seeking this advisory role are unequivocally and unapologetically woman-centered: “I joined Baltimore’s LGBTQ Commission to represent lesbians in local government,” and to “defend the rights of lesbians as homosexual women.” Julia is the only lesbian on the Law and Policy Committee, and possibly the only woman on the entire Commission willing

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UP you go

Dec 9th, 2018 4:06 pm | By

Oh dear, this is hilarious.

https://twitter.com/BadFoxGraphics/status/1071500275872083968… Read the rest

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A perversion of a democratic election

Dec 9th, 2018 12:36 pm | By

The narrative is becoming clearer.

In the narrative that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and New York prosecutors are building, Mr. Trump continued to secretly seek to do business in Russia deep into his presidential campaign even as Russian agents made more efforts to influence him. At the same time, in this account he ordered hush payments to two women to suppress stories of impropriety in violation of campaign finance law.

The prosecutors made clear in a sentencing memo filed on Friday that they viewed efforts by Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, to squelch the stories as nothing less than a perversion of a democratic election — and by extension they effectively accused the

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An appallingly treacherous term

Dec 9th, 2018 12:14 pm | By

Lobster guy has a funny one today.

Ok not really funny, exactly; more like sinister. Of course it’s not “appallingly sinister” to talk of climate change denial and to call particular people deniers. There is such a thing as denial, and there are deniers; the words are not confined to the Holocaust.

Look at Trump for one example. He doesn’t bother to read anything or learn anything or ask anyone, he just … Read the rest

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