Not all enemies of the constitution wear Gravy Seals cosplay costumes. Some wear nice suits and expensive ties.

(CNN)Federal prosecutors are reviewing fake Electoral College certifications that declared former President Donald Trump the winner of states that he lost, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco told CNN on Tuesday.

“We’ve received those referrals. Our prosecutors are looking at those and I can’t say anything more on ongoing investigations,” Monaco said in an exclusive interview.
The fake certificates falsely declaring Trump’s victory were sent to the National Archives by Trump’s allies in mid-December 2020. They have attracted public scrutiny amid the House’s January 6 investigation into the pressure campaign that sought to reverse Trump’s electoral defeat.

Dumb. He should have made it contingent on a replacement being confirmed by the Senate.

Justice Stephen Breyer to retire from Supreme Court, paving way for Biden appointment

New Jersey Celebrity Chef Mehmet Oz and Connecticut hedge fund executive David McDickhead must both have very deep pockets.  If you own a TV you know that the US Senate wannabes and their proxies have been throwing mountains of cash at TV ads in the Philly area.

The primary is scheduled for May 17.  At this rate, by then the dueling conservative whack jobs will have either metaphorically killed each other, or built a strong base going into the general on November 8, 2022.

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When you think this is all wrapped up, the consummate attention whores go out whoring for more attention.  In this episode Jerry and Becki streisand effect themselves in an interview with Vanity Fair. I will probably not read that interview, but get a load of this nugget:

“Because of my last name, people think I’m a religious person. But I’m not,” Falwell Jr., 59, told Vanity Fair in the interview,.

AH, YES! It was the name. It wasn’t going around for 30 or so years pretending to be a religious person that gave people that erroneous impression.

In a series of exclusive interviews with Vanity Fair, the spouses — who say they’ve been able to move forward from the drama together — are shedding new light on the events leading up to the affair as well as its aftermath.

Their lives first took a drastic turn following the 2007 death of Jerry’s father, pastor and Liberty founder Jerry Falwell Sr.

Although Falwell Jr. had helped his father save Liberty from financial ruin in the past, he claimed, becoming president of the evangelical school presented a unique challenge.

Previously on the Jerry Falwell Jr. Cuckold Fetish Rumors Watch:

It was only a matter of time until that perv perved himself out of a job.
USA Today Headline:

Liberty University’s Jerry Falwell Jr. taking leave of absence after photo with pants unzipped

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Per TPM:

“Jerry Falwell Jr has settled the lawsuit tied to the “pool boy”/Miami dive hostel story. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the terms of the settlement are not being disclosed. To remind everyone, the suit was brought by yet another guy, Gordon Bello, a high friend of Giancarlo Granda, the pool boy. He claimed that he’d been promised 25% of the hostel business.

One additional complexity: Bello originally sued under the name Jesus Fernandez, Jr., which was his name. He and his father changed their names to Gordon and Jett Bello during the litigation allegedly because of threats against them tied to the lawsuit.

If this lawsuit had made it to open court it would have spelled the end of “Jerry Falwell Jr.s Cuckold Fetish Rumors Watch” as a recurring series.

Bello apparently also claimed or at least suggested a relationship with Rebecca (Becki) Falwell as part of his lawsuit.  As you may recall, pictures of Becki Falwell wearing a sexy French maid costume have been shared between Jerry Falwell Jr and his trainer.

“Bello said in court papers that he first met Rebecca Falwell through Granda, and formed a “personal relationship” with her before he met Jerry Falwell in the lobby of the Loews Miami Beach for the alleged pitch meeting in 2012.”

>>Previously on Jerry Falwell Jr.s Cuckold Fetish Rumors Watch…..< <<<<<<<

Liberty University Students Protest:

The revealing item in this story is the meme Jerry Falwell Jr used to reply to protesting students.

Falwell is just overflowing the with fruits of the spirit. (Galatians 5:22-23)

Liberty University students are demanding an “open and clean investigation” into school president Jerry Falwell Jr. after explosive news reports detailing alleged self-dealing and the denigration of students and officials during his tenure at the Christian university.

“We should hold the university president at the same standard that me and my friends at Liberty are held to,” Ian Parish, a senior at Liberty University, told CNBC in an interview.

>>>><<

Jerry Falwell Jr asking the FBI to investigate the Cuckold Fetish rumors swirling around him might be opening a can of worms.

Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. told Hill.TV on Tuesday that he has begun sharing information with the FBI in what he alleged was a criminal conspiracy against him by former board members at the school.

Falwell said in an exclusive interview that in the coming days the FBI will review university documents at the Lynchburg, Va., campus. He accused former colleagues of stealing school property in the form of emails and then sharing them with reporters in an effort to damage his reputation.

The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

The known facts point to Jerry Falwell Jr having sexual tastes that would be frowned on by his evangelical followers. Did the Putin/Trump campaign leverage that information to gain the Falwell endorsement? Again, the evidence points to yes.

• In 2012, Jerry Falwell Jr. and his wife Becki visited the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. While there, they befriended a 21-year-old pool attendant named Giancarlo Granda. Granda soon began traveling with the Falwells, both to their home of Virginia and to the Cheeca Lodge in the Florida Keys.
• The Falwells offered to help Granda, who had practically no business experience, open a hostel in Miami. Falwell ponied up $1.8 million for the venture.
• Later in 2012 Trump was invited to speak at Liberty University. Michael Cohen accompanied him, and the Apprentice star and his fixer developed a relationship with Fallwell. (Granda was in attendance, as well; the Times published a photo of him holding a copy of The Art of the Deal on a private jet.)
• In 2015, as the potential release of compromising photos (purportedly of Giancarlo Granda and Becki Falwell) was becoming a problem for Falwell, he enlisted the help of Cohen, a revelation reported by Reuters. Cohen reportedly then flew to Florida to meet with the attorney of the mystery figure who possessed the photos. The issue was resolved, and the attorney told Cohen that the photos were destroyed.  Falwell has only ever commented on the photos to say that he was not in them. 
• Jerry Falwell Jr’s January 2016 endorsement of Trump shocked religious leaders while essentially giving evangelicals wrestling with Trump’s not-so-Christian behavior permission to vote for him. (The endorsement was surprising not only because Trump embodied everything evangelicals detest, but because Falwell allegedly had already agreed to endorse Ted Cruz)
• Cohen’s involvement was initially revealed through a March 2019 phone conversation he had with comedian Tom Arnold, who secretly recorded it. (Click here to read Rolling Stone‘s story on Arnold’s quest to take down Trump and his relationship with Cohen.) “There’s a bunch of photographs, personal photographs, that somehow the guy ended up getting — whether it was off of Jerry’s phone or somehow maybe it got AirDropped or whatever the hell the whole thing was,” Cohen said on the recorded call. He described the photos as “personal” and “between husband and wife,” and said that he had one of them. “It’s terrible,” Cohen said.

Pictures of Becki Falwell wearing a sexy French maid costume have been shared between Jerry Falwell Jr and his trainer. This is not one of them.

Ukraine continues to dominate the little bit of news I consume.

There’s lots of reason to believe that Russia quite seriously intends to use a mechanized offensive along several lines of attack to cut off parts of Ukraine and install a new government in Kiev. – VIA LGM

I hear something like that and think, “Shit. If that happens it will really suck for all the soon to be displaced, disabled and dead Ukrainians.” But then I realize that I’m a poor excuse for a liberal because the real liberal stance is… “Big Whoop. If it happens it is typical capitalist warmongers mongering. Also, the CIA does bad shit all over the world every day. So who the fuck are we to frown on what some other equally fucked-up and morally bankrupt country does?”

Two cases of the new omicron subvariant BA.2 detected in Santa Clara County are believed to be the first such cases in the Bay Area.

In California, there have been at least 11 confirmed BA.2 cases.

UCSF infectious disease specialist Dr. Peter Chin-Hong said while BA.2 may be harder to detect than the original omicron variant, there’s no indication it’s more of a threat.

“sub-variant …no big threat” I think I we know by now how these stories end up unfolding.

The Supreme Court is getting ready to overturn decades worth of precedent allowing universities to use race as one of many factors in admissions decisions. Court watchers have suggested that the majority opinion may include the legal reasoning “LOL, Fuck you!”

Chris Coons was “gravely concerned” on “This Week” 

SEN. CHRIS COONS, (D-DE) FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE: I’m gravely concerned, Martha. We’re seeing laws like SB1 in Texas passed in a dozen states across the country that are clearly designed to accomplish voter suppression.

(two minute later)

COONS: I think our work in the Senate and President Biden’s work to strengthen deterrence is what is hopefully going to succeed. But I’m gravely concerned that Putin will show once again aggression in Europe and cross the boundary into Ukraine in the coming days or weeks.

On inflation, the lazy dishonest media is dishonest and lazy:

On the inflation issue specifically, I see people who should know better thinking it’s real. A few months of high measured inflation data, especially relative to pandemic depths, is not really hitting people where it hurts.

All the coverage is driven by the data release and the inflation-is-killing-us PR industry, not by the actual lived experience of people at the 35th percentile of the income distribution, because nobody in elite political journalism gives a shit about these people or even pretends to most of the time. – Via Eschaton

If you think that Putin isn’t deploying 100,000 troops, short-range ballistic missiles, and elite spetsnaz operators on the Ukranian border for nothing, this explanation of what Putin actually wants makes sense.

We continue not to know what Vladimir Putin intends nor wants with his massive military buildup around Ukraine, accompanied by diplomatic demands, primarily on the United States, that will not be satisfied.

Michael Kofman is one of the best military analysts around, and well able to extrapolate from the military to Putin’s objectives. His latest summary suggests that Putin will take major military action against Ukraine, perhaps to install a Russia-friendly regime in Kiev.

Given the stakes, and likely costs, any Russian military operation would have to attain political gains that give Moscow the ability to enforce implementation. In short, just hurting Ukraine is not enough to achieve anything that Russia wants. While some believe that Russia intends to compel Ukraine into a new Minsk-like agreement, the reality is that nobody in Moscow thinks that a Ukrainian government can be made to implement any document they sign. Such a settlement would be political suicide for the Zelensky administration, or any other. Russia has no way to enforce compliance with its preferences once the operation is over. This is, at least, the lesson that Moscow seems to have taken from Minsk I and Minsk II. Why would Minsk III prove any different? Russia has not struggled in getting Ukraine to sign deals at gunpoint, but all of these have resulted in Ukraine’s continued westward march and a decline of Russian influence in the country. It’s not clear how Moscow achieves its goals without conducting regime change, or a partitioning of the state, and committing to some form of occupation to retain leverage.

I listened to football this Sunday.  A good radio play by play announcer is an artist.  These games didn’t need a good play by play announcer to be interesting.  Bills/Chiefs was probably the best football game I have ever listened to.  But a playoff game shouldn’t be decided by a coin flip.  Allow both teams to have a possession, FFS.

Our health care/health insurance system is a sick fucking joke.  

Fins and Big Oyster Brewery management and employees will host a fundraiser for Jamie Lauren Horn, their friend who recently found out she has metastatic breast cancer. 

At the time of her diagnosis, Horn was working full time to provide for her family. Her diagnosis rendered her unable to work. As a result, Fins and Big Oyster Brewery will donate 50 percent of their proceeds on Thursday, Jan. 27, to cover some of her medical expenses. 

Those who cannot make it to the fundraiser may support Horn via her Gofundme page at tinyurl.com/2p92wb83.

Oh shit, I noted that the forces of capital will soon have to mobilize Coonsie and Co. to prevent people from quitting their suck-ass jobs.

Well it seems they are already using the circuit courts to prevent people with good jobs from quitting them.    I’m sure you’ve seen this story from Appleton Wisconsin, wherein employees of a hospital were offered more money and better conditions at another hospital, but were prevented some quitting:  

Attorney David Muth, (arguing on behalf of the abused employees) noted that ThedaCare had weeks to come up with better offers to keep their employees or figure out alternate staffing solutions and instead chose to initiate court action days before the workers were set to start at Ascension, resulting in “a mess of ThedaCare’s own making.”

In the complaint, ThedaCare attorneys wrote that the organization found out Dec. 21 that four interventional radiology technicians had accepted offers with Ascension, and learned Dec. 29 that two nurses planned to make the same move. On Jan. 7, they learned one additional nurse planned to quit and work at Ascension.

Ascension had offered the employees a better benefits package that ThedaCare did not match, Muth said.

Speaking of Wisconsin – Aaron Rogers can eat me.  The nation cheered then that lying, entitled dick lost.

ADT hiker Briana DeSanctis, who set off from Cape Henlopen on Jan 1st is now in Little Orleans Maryland which is still 1 county (Garrett) east of Ohio. Cape Henlopen is 75.0946° W longitude and Little Orleans is 78.3864° W, so at our latitude, she has hiked 3.2918° or 161 miles to the west.

When I was in my 20’s the United States of America was still widely admired around the world. Sure the CIA got involved in some bad shit, but the country’s heart was always in the right place, and when it decided to do something (like defeat Nazi Germany, go to the moon, or eradicate polio) by God that shit got done. Now we suck. Can’t get anything done, AND our heart is in the wrong place.

…The endless cycles of one step forward, two steps back, on numerous issues takes its toll. Brief windows open up and then the powerful backlash forces step in.
Fanatical devotion to the status quo is, sadly, considered to be the height of seriousness in The Discourse. I’d even be more accepting of this if it was merely, “the status quo, but a bit more convenient,” but often it is impossible to stare down even the trivial forces that impose large burdens on the rest of us.

I mean, “we” can’t even fix spam calls. There are also the related cycles of, “YOUNG PEOPLE AND PEOPLE OF COLOR WILL SAVE US,” followed immediately by, “oh no, not like that.”

Workers pushing back against the abuses of late stage capitalism is officially a thing.   Which means it is only a matter of time until capital organizes its assholes and lackeys (like Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) for example) to introduce some sort of bipartisan bills making it illegal to quit your suck-ass job.

Brits are quitting their jobs at a rate not seen in over a decade, new data shows, highlighting the struggles companies are facing when it comes to staff.

Sanjay Raja, chief UK economist at Deutsche Bank, said analysis of official data suggests people are resigning at the highest rate since 2009 with “historically elevated levels of workers leaving the labour market entirely”.

The data shows that the so-called “Great Resignation” happening around the world in the wake of the pandemic is not just anecdotal. In the US, where the government produces official data on the so-called ‘quit rate’, a record 4.5 million people resigned in November.

Employers across the UK complain of struggling to both hang on to and recruit staff.  Redundancies in the UK are at their lowest level since the mid-1990s, while the level of open vacancies is the highest on record.

Rocket Penis

After losing to Joe Biden, all of Trump’s moves were designed to create enough discord and chaos to allow Pence to stall the electoral college certification.

Read the never-issued Trump order that would have seized voting machines

The Jan. 6 select panel has obtained the draft order and a document titled “Remarks on National Healing.” Both are reported here in detail for the first time.

Here is a pod for your ears brain and soul. I haven’t listened yet, but will return to the comments to give it a 1 to 5 rating. (1 being equal to a Pizza Hut Stuffed Crust Pizza and 5 being equal something so transcendently luminescent it is nigh on impossible to discuss with any heretofore devised human language.)

JAN 22, 2022 AT 8:00 AM

E159 – In Leadership (w/Tye Grier)

The Jerkyville Soviet is back in session as Tye Grier joins Rob in the virtual bunker to talk about the Darius Brown verdict and controversy, the role of leadership in dealing with ethics issues, and some upcoming collaboration between local groups.

Show Notes:

• Darius Brown trial verdict
• NAACP Press Conference
• Activist Office Hours
• Network Delaware
• Working Families Party
• State of the State

I don’t know anything about Gabriel Ríos other than what I just read in wikipedia [(born 1978 in San Juan, Puerto Rico) is a Puerto Rican-Belgian singer songwriter currently residing in Belgium and New York.] and the fact that he is responsible for this bop which I first heard as a track on a Putumayo world music collections ten or so years ago.