DL Open Thread: Thursday, June 9, 2022

Will Serial Sexual Predator Be Cleveland’s Starting QB This Year?  Cleveland traded for this guy while completely aware of his alleged proclivities.  His former team enabled his behavior, including requiring NDA’s from victims:

The accusations have been frequent and startling: more than two dozen women have said the football star Deshaun Watson harassed or assaulted them during massage appointments that Watson and his lawyers insist were innocuous.

Two grand juries in Texas this year declined to charge him criminally and, while the N.F.L. considers whether to discipline him, he has gotten another job, signing a five-year, $230 million fully guaranteed contract to play quarterback for the Cleveland Browns this coming season.

A New York Times examination of records, including depositions and evidence for the civil lawsuits as well as interviews of some of the women, showed that Watson engaged in more questionable behavior than previously known.

The Times’s review also showed that Watson’s conduct was enabled, knowingly or not, by the team he played for at the time, the Houston Texans, which provided the venue Watson used for some of the appointments. A team representative also furnished him with a nondisclosure agreement after a woman who is now suing him threatened online to expose his behavior.

Watson has said publicly that he hired about 40 different therapists across his five seasons in Houston, but The Times’s reporting found that he booked appointments with at least 66 different women in just the 17 months from fall 2019 through spring 2021. A few of these additional women, speaking publicly for the first time, described experiences that undercut Watson’s insistence that he was only seeking professional massage therapy.

Golf’s Top Villains Take Saudi Blood Money.  Yes, one of the tourneys will take place at a Trump Golf Club:

Unlike the vanity purchase of a European soccer team or the hosting of a major global sporting event, Saudi Arabia’s foray into golf is no mere branding exercise, not just another effort by a country to use its wealth to redefine its global image in the reputation-cleansing process widely derided as sportswashing.

Instead, Saudi Arabia is seeking to seize control of golf by winning, or in a cynics’ view buying, the loyalty of some of the world’s best players. Its strategy has been bold — nine-figure offers, huge guaranteed paydays at each event — but it has taken direct aim at the structures and organizations that have governed golf for nearly a century.

While the Saudi plan’s potential for success is far from clear — the series does not yet have a television rights deal or the array of corporate sponsorships necessary to blunt its extravagant start-up costs — its direct appeal to players and its seemingly bottomless financial resources could eventually have repercussions for the 93-year-old PGA Tour as well as the corporate sponsors and television broadcasters who have built professional golf into a multibillion-dollar business.

I’m not gonna cry crocodile tears at problems the PGA might encounter.  However, enabling the Saudi government to try to clean up its image (but not its act) is a black mark on all who participate.

Supreme Court Gives Border Agents Carte Blanche To Storm Houses Along The Border And To Kill The Occupants:

In a 6-to-3 vote, the Supreme Court ruled that border agents may unconstitutionally enter a person’s home without a warrant and assault him and … federal courts are powerless to do anything about it.

More previously-unfathomable decisions due soon.

Where Did $$’s Donated To Phony-Baloney Voter Fraud Group Go?  I really don’t care, but they didn’t go to ‘True The Vote’.  Looks like it was pocketed by its founder and her lover.  Fraudulent ‘founder’ steals money dedicated to fraudulent ‘the election was stolen’ investigations that never happened:

A former PTA mom-turned-Tea Party activist, True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht has played a pivotal role in helping drive the voter fraud movement from the political fringes to a central pillar in the Republican Party’s ideology. Casting herself as a God-fearing, small-town Texan, she’s spread the voter-fraud gospel by commanding airtime on cable television, space on the pages of Breitbart News, and even theater seats, as a new feature film dramatizing her organization’s exploits, “2000 Mules,” plays in cinemas across the country.

Along the way, she’s gained key allies across the conservative movement. Former President Donald Trump, who shouts her out by name during rallies and held a private screening for the film at his Mar-a-Lago resort, exploited the group’s declarations to proclaim that he won the popular vote in 2016. Provocateur Dinesh D’Souza partnered with Engelbrecht on the film. And she’s represented by the legal heavyweight James Bopp Jr., who helped dismantle abortion rights, crafted many of the arguments in the Citizens United case that revolutionized campaign finance law, and was part of the legal team that prevailed in Bush v. Gore.

A review of thousands of pages of documents from state filings, tax returns, and court records, however, paints the picture of an organization that enriches Engelbrecht and partner Gregg Phillips rather than actually rooting out any fraud. According to the documents, True the Vote has given questionable loans to Engelbrecht and has a history of awarding contracts to companies run by Engelbrecht and Phillips. Within days of receiving $2.5 million from a donor to stop the certification of the 2020 election, True the Vote distributed much of the money to a company owned by Phillips, Bopp’s law firm, and Engelbrecht directly for a campaign that quickly fizzled out.

What do you want to talk about?