DL Open Thread Wednesday, Jan. 3, 2024

Gold Bar Bob Menendez used his position as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to run quite a racket, according to his new federal indictment. It doesn’t add any new charges, but the details of how Menendez did favors for his wheeler-dealer campaign contributors and foreign governments, including Qatar as well as Egypt, illustrate how influence is peddled in Washington. Menendez is merely sloppier and more obvious than most of his peers and, as the cops say, they don’t catch all the criminals, just the dumb ones.

No matter how loopy you think Republicans are, they’re loopier than that. Consider this fever dream – calling it a conspiracy theory would be giving it too much credit. According to some of the keenest minds in the MAGA movement, there’s a scheme afoot to overthrow President Joe Biden at the Democratic National Convention convention. The last-minute maneuver is being plotted by an alliance that will use former First Lady Michelle Obama “as the figurehead”, with her husband pulling the strings on a de-facto third term. So in case you doubt the subconscious motivation of the MAGAts, note that they’re still using the black guy as the boogeyman.

The guy Trump hired to find voting fraud in the 2020 election wrote about his experience for USA Today. See if this headline rings true: “Trump paid me to find voter fraud. Then he lied after I found the 2020 election wasn’t stolen.” Will this change the discourse? Not on your life.

In a feat that will forever live in gaming history, a 13-year-old boy has become the first human to defeat the video game Tetris on the original NES console. Willis Gibson, a prodigy on the competitive Tetris circuit – I confess I did not know there was competitive Tetris circuit – took 38 minutes to reach a point where the game was going so fast it crashed. Gamers knew the feat was possible because a computer had reached the “kill screen,” but no human had managed it before. Gibson, who plays as Blue Scuti, recorded the whole game; you can see the video at the link. See how long you last before that 8-bit Russian folk music drives you to the mute button.

The floor’s yours.