DL Open Thread: Friday, October 4, 2024
Bad Day For Trump Evildoers:
DENVER (AP) — Former Colorado clerk Tina Peters, the first local election official to be charged with a security breach after the 2020 election as unfounded conspiracy theories swirled, was found guilty by a jury on most charges Monday.
Peters, a one-time hero to election deniers, was accused of using someone else’s security badge to give an expert affiliated with My Pillow chief executive Mike Lindell access to the Mesa County election system and deceiving other officials about that person’s identity.
Judge sentenced her to nine years in prison yesterday.
Former Las Vegas City Councilwoman Michele Fiore was convicted of federal fraud charges Thursday after she used donations intended for a fallen police officer’s memorial for her personal gain, marking a downfall for the firebrand conservative who nearly became Nevada’s treasurer two years ago.
The case centered on the construction of a statue honoring Alyn Beck, a Las Vegas police officer killed in the line of duty in 2014. Federal prosecutors accused Fiore — across six months in 2019 and 2020 while serving as a councilwoman — of soliciting donations to her PAC and nonprofit for the construction of the statue but using the money for personal use, including her rent, plastic surgery and another daughter’s wedding.
In 2022, she narrowly lost a bid for state treasurer — during which she appeared in a campaign ad shooting beer bottles with the labels “vaccine mandate” and “CRT” (critical race theory), and said she didn’t mind people bringing guns into courtrooms because “an armed society is a polite society.” Shortly after, she was appointed as a justice of the peace in rural Nye County, winning another term outright this year.
In 2015, she released a gun-themed calendar and was particularly outspoken in support of the Bundy ranching family, who were at the center of the infamous standoff regarding cattle grazing on federal land. Following her fraud indictment, Fiore accused prosecutors of engaging in the same type of misconduct as they did related to the Bundy family.
A Seattle doctor whose medical license was suspended after she participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol was shot and killed after pointing a gun at two people delivering paperwork at her West Seattle home on Tuesday.
Towers Parry, who was in the midst of eviction proceedings, came out of her house and pointed a shotgun at the two men before the 40-year-old, armed with a handgun, opened fire. In a phone call Wednesday, Pritchard said the men did not work in law enforcement and were not there to evict Towers, but he would not describe the paperwork they were delivering.
Tuesday’s shooting happened less than two weeks after Towers Parry’s home was foreclosed on and scheduled to be sold at a Sept. 20 auction, King County housing records show. Towers Parry had failed to make about $24,000 in mortgage payments and still owed more than $225,000 on the home, which she previously shared with her ex-husband, according to the records.
A photo taken of the house on Tuesday showed a large U.S. flag hanging from the home’s front window underneath the word “QAnon,” the name of a far-right conspiracy theory that gained traction online after the 2016 election of former President Donald Trump.
Brian Comer. The real menace to the geese of Springfield, Ohio:
NEW: I’ve received evidence of an arrest for illegal geese harvesting in Springfield, Ohio. But it wasn’t a Haitian immigrant who was arrested. It was a white man named Brian Comer, who shot two geese with a shotgun on a golf course.
According to the affidavit by an Ohio Division of Wildlife officer, the golfer approached Comer about the dead goose in the pond, and Comer said there would be several more dead geese in a few minutes. Comer reportedly then got on his lawnmower with a shotgun and fired twice, killing a second goose.
The golfer told police that Comer picked up the first goose and tossed it into the weeds and then broke the neck of the second bird, which had been wounded, according to the affidavit.
The Vanishing Rethug GOP GOTV Operation. Resistance to outsourcing this to Turning Point likely led to the ouster of Ronna McDaniel as R National Chair. She, um, might have had a point:
How much any of this means for the 2024 GOP ground operation I don’t know. But it at least seems clear to me, clearer than it was earlier, that the impetus for a lot of this stuff started with Turning Points USA, Charlie Kirk and the folks around him. They started pushing their role as the GOP’s GOTV oversee and McDaniel’s resistance to that led to his year long war against her which played some significant role in her eventual ouster. The biggest immediate effect of that changing of the guard, in which daugher-in-law Lara Trump and Michael Whatley took over, was shutting down the RNC’s GOTV and field operations and outsourcing it to outside groups the biggest of which was Turning Point USA and its affiliated groups.
When Turning Point first pitched its $108 million plan to do GOTV work it was for three states: Arizona (where they’re based), Wisconsin and Georgia. In some accounts it was Arizona, Wisconsin and Michigan, with more activists operating across all the swing states. The lack of specificity about Georgia or Michigan may suggest that the plan was flexible depending on who agreed to fund the plan. By late summer the list had been pared back to Arizona and Wisconsin because of limited funds, according to a Turning Points’ spokesperson. Just this evening Politico reported that Turning Points is pulling out of Wisconsin and handing its operation over to Elon Musk’s America PAC. The plan is presented as combining operations. But read the piece and that’s not quite it. As a Turning Points spokesperson Andrew Kolvet put it, “with America PAC taking over many of the organization’s expenses in Wisconsin, Turning Point Action will now redirect resources toward its existing field program in Arizona and a new initiative in which the organization pays for hotel rooms for volunteers to door-knock in Wisconsin and Arizona during early voting periods.” The decision is “not only good for Wisconsin,” but allows Turning Point Action “to double down in Arizona.”
In other words, Turning Points Action, which seems to have played a major role in shaping the 2024 GOP ground game plan and was billed as the muscle to take over the work from the RNC now seems to be down to field work in Arizona with an agreement to pay for hotel rooms in Wisconsin.
How US State Department Cleared The Way For Israel To Decimate Gaza:
In late January, as the death toll in Gaza climbed to 25,000 and droves of Palestinians fled their razed cities in search of safety, Israel’s military asked for 3,000 more bombs from the American government. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew, along with other top diplomats in the Jerusalem embassy, sent a cable to Washington urging State Department leaders to approve the sale, saying there was no potential the Israel Defense Forces would misuse the weapons.
The cable did not mention the Biden administration’s public concerns over the growing civilian casualties, nor did it address well-documented reports that Israel had dropped 2,000-pound bombs on crowded areas of Gaza weeks earlier, collapsing apartment buildings and killing hundreds of Palestinians, many of whom were children. Lew was aware of the issues. Officials say his own staff had repeatedly highlighted attacks where large numbers of civilians died. Homes of the embassy’s own Palestinian employees had been targeted by Israeli airstrikes.
Still, Lew and his senior leadership argued that Israel could be trusted with this new shipment of bombs, known as GBU-39s, which are smaller and more precise. Israel’s air force, they asserted, had a “decades-long proven track record” of avoiding killing civilians when using the American-made bomb and had “demonstrated an ability and willingness to employ it in [a] manner that minimizes collateral damage.”
While that request was pending, the Israelis proved those assertions wrong. In the months that followed, the Israeli military repeatedly dropped GBU-39s it already possessed on shelters and refugee camps that it said were being occupied by Hamas soldiers, killing scores of Palestinians. Then, in early August, the IDF bombed a school and mosque where civilians were sheltering. At least 93 died. Children’s bodies were so mutilated their parents had trouble identifying them.
Weapons analysts identified shrapnel from GBU-39 bombs among the rubble.
Siemens Underpaid Delaware Women At Glasgow Plant:
A Delaware manufacturing plant just outside Newark had been systematically underpaying its female system engineers and has agreed to give a handful of employees pay raises and backpay, according to federal officials.
The Glasgow manufacturing plant for German-owned Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics produces components for tests that help physicians diagnose, monitor and treat diseases.
In what Department of Labor officials called a “routine compliance review,” federal officials found that Siemens “paid females in system engineer roles less than male counterparts in similar positions.” Federal auditors arrived at this conclusion through statistical analysis of system engineers’ pay.
While notable, I included this article for the following excerpt:
In 2021, Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics received nearly $2 million from the Delaware Strategic Fund for a $32 million expansion of the facility, which the company said would add 500 jobs to the 1,300 employees already employed. Siemens acquired the manufacturing facility in 2007 as part of its purchase of lab diagnostics company Dade Behring.
Did the expansion take place? Did the company add the 500 jobs? What, if any, procedures does the (private, thanks, Carney!) Delaware Strategic Fund have in place to make sure that its generous handouts are not just another slush fund similar to Bethany Hall Long’s Opioid Slush Fund?
I want to see Matt Meyer make this disbursement of public funds to corporations a public function again, complete with oversight and protections against the misuse of this largesse. Undo one of Carney’s worst initiatives.
What do you want to talk about?
“It was a white man named Brian Comer, who shot two geese with a shotgun on a golf course.”
I love it when gun fondlers use hunting as an excuse for gun ownership.
C’mon, Al, my favorite part was that he shot them while tooling around on his riding mower.
Yet more proof that satire is dead.
My point is that when you have a hammer – even when it’s not all you have – you view everything as a nail.
I just got a kick out of Comer saying that he was within his rights to shoot the geese b/c they were a ‘nuisance’.
As opposed to riding his mower around a golf course firing off his shotgun.
Well he had to ride a mower. When even the police report calls you “heavyset,” you’re talking about a morbidly obese motherfucker.
Any guesses who he votes for?
Dockworkers’ union to suspend strike until Jan. 15 to allow time to negotiate new contract
– Good.
September jobs report significantly higher than expected, unemployment lower.
– I’d prefer this news over the opposite, but still it means probably no more interest rate cuts, which is bad for housing and cars which are already unaffordable.
They weren’t going to cut rates again so soon after cutting them aggressively last month, certainly not before the election.
If the jobs report had been bad they probably would have cut by a smaller amount. Now they have to leave rates unchanged to avoid inflation risk.
At any rate, anti-trust enforcement is a stronger remedy for inflation, though probably out of our reach for now.
Remember Devin Nunes, the California congressman who quit to run Trump’s Truth Social scam? ProPublica found he’s just as incompetent at that as he was at congressing.
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-media-truth-social-executives-ousted-devin-nunes