DL Open Thread Wednesday, May 8, 2024
If you want to dominate the headlines, it helps to be the defendant in four legal proceedings simultaneously. Luckily for Trump, the one serious crime he’s accused of, stealing top-secret documents, is the one that was paused indefinitely by MAGA judge Aileen Cannon. Meanwhile, the judge in his New York falsifying-business-records case – that’s what he’s accused of, the hush money payment is established fact – warned Trump’s lawyer to make his client stop “cursing audibly.” I’m so old I remember how people were scandalized hearing Nixon’s salty language on the Watergate tapes, and he never even had a porn star spank him with a rolled-up magazine.
House Speaker Mike Johnson is getting along well with Trump – why does every Republican politician meet with a guy who holds no office and no official place in their party? – and now we know what the price was. Johnson demanded the end of all Trump prosecutions and vowed to impede them – even the state-level ones – “in every possible way.” No word on whether he stamped his widdle footsies when he said it.
Remember, kidz, if you want to be successful in our dog-eat-dog entrepreneurial paradise, the key is private profits, public costs. Good example: Assisted living facilities increasingly won’t pick up residents who’ve fallen and can’t get up. They call 911 instead so they can’t get sued for injuries caused by undertrained minimum-wage workers.
Looking for an investment opportunity but want something less sketchy than cryptocurrency? Consider olive oil futures. As experts predicted, climate change has slashed the olive harvest again, so the price of olive oil is expected to soar. Given that counterfeiting olive oil was already a problem, you might want to stockpile a couple of gallons.
The floor’s yours.
Judge Cannon is a timely reminder that the law will not save America from Trump. Only voters in PA, Michigan, Nevada, Georgia Arizona and Wisconsin can save us.
And even though it is nice to see Nikki Haley continuing to do well (getting 21.6% of the GOP primary vote in Indiana), even she is not going to save us from Trump.
The DelState shooting that killed an innocent bystander made the national news feed.
https://people.com/prospective-student-visiting-college-campus-killed-by-gunfire-as-bystander-8644645
Too much tequila?:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/08/us/rfk-jr-brain-health-memory-loss.html
Doctors find dead worm in RFK Jr.’s brain.
This, of course, raises all sorts of questions:
1. Did the worm eat the part of his brain that steeled him against conspiracy theories?
2. Was the worm somehow secreted there by the Russians to impart such conspiracy theories?
Well, TWO questions anyway.
ALSO, mercury poisoning.
Al, I’ll do the honors this time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ODb8vaAjeo
https://whyy.org/articles/delaware-state-employee-embezzlement-unemployment-trust-fund/
Don’t remember seeing this in the locals.
Convicted felon gets promoted to supervisor while out on parole for stealing and having his state wages garnished to pay off last fraud. Then strikes again and steals another $180K (that we know of) from the Unemployment Trust Fund.
One of the reasons why we need an independent Office of Inspector General. Support SS1 for SB21. Released from Senate Exec Committee needs to get signed out of Senate Finance Committee. Call Senator Paradee and have him circulate it for release.
Former Rep. John Kowalko
Wow! What a bleeping cover-up.
No wonder the UI office was ‘unauditable’.
If this doesn’t fall on our sad-sack governor, will anything?
I will point out the obvious by saying that once again this disaster of an administration tried to keep this under wraps.