DL Open Thread: Saturday, April 27, 2024

Election Integrity–Rethuglican-Style.  They no longer even pretend that they’re not gonna try to steal the election:

When conservative lawyer and media personality Christina Bobbbecame one of the latest members of Donald Trump’s inner circle to be chargedin connection withthe effort to reverse the 2020 presidential election results, it became immediately clear she would not have to give up her day job: senior counsel to the Republican National Committee’s election integrity team.

Bobb’s indictment solidifies her identity as a dedicated Trump loyalist who fiercely fought to reverse his loss in the politically competitive state and potentially elevates her role within the RNC to help him (cheat to) win in November.

This is the new normal.

Do the Russian People Hate Higher Taxes?  They’re gonna pay ’em–for the war machine:

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia appears on track to institute a rare tax increase on corporations and high earners, a move that reflects both the burgeoning costs of his war in Ukraine and the firm control he has over the Russian elite as he embarks on a fifth term in office.

Financial technocrats in Mr. Putin’s government are searching for new ways to fund not just the war but also a broader confrontation with the West that is likely to remain costly for years. Russia is allocating nearly a third of its overall 2024 budget to national defense spending this year, a huge increase, adding to a deficit that the Kremlin has taken pains to keep in check.

The proposed tax increase underscores Mr. Putin’s rising confidence about his political control over the Russian elite and his country’s economic resilience at home, showing that he is willing to risk alienating parts of society to fund the war. It would represent the first major tax overhaul in over a decade.

Hey, at least he’s taxing corporations and the wealthy.  Ya think all the Putin sympathizers in the Rethuglican Party will follow suit?

From Dog-Killer To Veep?  I hear that Trump hates dogs:

By taking Cricket on a pheasant hunt with older dogs, (South Dakota Governor Kristi) Noem says, she hoped to calm the young dog down and begin to teach her how to behave. Unfortunately, Cricket ruined the hunt, going “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life”.

Noem describes calling Cricket, then using an electronic collar to attempt to bring her under control. Nothing worked. Then, on the way home after the hunt, as Noem stopped to talk to a local family, Cricket escaped Noem’s truck and attacked the family’s chickens, “grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another”.

Cricket the untrainable dog, Noem writes, behaved like “a trained assassin”.

When Noem finally grabbed Cricket, she says, the dog “whipped around to bite me”. Then, as the chickens’ owner wept, Noem repeatedly apologised, wrote the shocked family a check “for the price they asked, and helped them dispose of the carcasses littering the scene of the crime”.

Through it all, Noem says, Cricket was “the picture of pure joy”.

“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, adding that Cricket had proved herself “untrainable”, “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog”.

“At that moment,” Noem says, “I realised I had to put her down.”

Noem, who also represented her state in Congress for eight years, got her gun, then led Cricket to a gravel pit.

Hey, what’s wrong with having two sociopaths on the R ticket?

Birthday Greetings To Melania:

“I want to start by wishing my wife Melania a very happy birthday,” Donald Trump told reporters on Friday. “It would be nice to be with her but I’m at a courthouse for a rigged trial.”

Since spending quality time with Stormy Daniels appears to be out of the question.

Anyone Heard Of Delaware’s The New School?  Rolling Stone has. (Confession: I haven’t subscribed to Rolling Stone since the ’70’s.) Sounds like it has a bit of a, um, ‘cult following’:

Rolling Stone published an investigation Tuesday that delved into the history of a small private school in New Castle County: The New School. One student’s “hyper-focused” fascination with religion, and his protection by his school, meets overall concerns with alleged sexual behavior, aggression, shaming and a culture of silence detailed within the reporting.

Housed for most of its existence in an old Victorian with acres of farm to match, some 4 miles from University of Delaware, the institution kept a small student body — under 50 kids at any given time, from 5 to 19 years old, according to reporting from senior writer Ej Dickson.

The outfit’s name could sound familiar to local coverage just before pandemic shutdown. It was the school of choice for Samuel Gulick before he threw a Molotov cocktail inside Newark’s Planned Parenthood facility in January 2020, spent more than two years in federal lockup, then saw a sentence of probation and mental health treatment.

Well, that’s ‘guilt by association’, supposedly verboten for reporters.  However:

Gulick’s lawyer at the time said his client’s developmental issues were treated up until his time at The New School, as previously reported, when at age 15, he chose to discontinue that treatment and focus his attention on a “conservative form” of Roman Catholicism practiced by leadership at the school. That leadership offered no comment at the time.

The school either is, or isn’t, still operational.  Nobody from the school is talking.  Wonder if the Department of Education is aware that this school exists and/or is doing anything about it.  We have some education experts who read and comment here.  Anybody have more info?

What do you want to talk about?