When digital cameras started to become commonplace, like 10 or 12 years ago, I thought: “say, now, this is cool – we’re finally going to get a really conclusive, clear shot of Bigfoot, or a UFO, maybe even the Loch Ness Monster. Instead, the only mystery we’ve solved is why all these black people keep winding up dead.
Even for White House as toxic and vile as George W. Bush’s sixth year in office, the revelation on April 12, 2007 seemed shocking. Responding to congressional demands for emails in connection with its investigation into the partisan firing of eight U.S. attorneys, the White House announced that as many as five million emails, covering a two-year span, had been “lost”, (OR: “deleted”, a violation of the Presidential Records Act).
Not long after George W. Bush assumed the presidency in 2001, potato head Karl Rove, his top political aide, set up a private email server for use in the White House. The stated purpose of the system — the primary domain name on which was gwb43.com — was that it would be used exclusively for the sort of political correspondence that Bush and Rove were not permitted to do on the taxpayer’s dime. Congressional investigators knew that this private server was being used for government business, including to discuss the firing of one of the U.S. attorneys. The RNC accounts were used by 22 White House staffers, including then-Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, who reportedly used his RNC email for 95 percent of his communications.
Seven years later, Bush and Rove were embroiled in two competing scandals — the Valerie Plame scandal, in which operatives for Dick Cheney, including Rove and Scooter Libby, were accused of unmasking Valerie Plame, a CIA specialist in the black market for weapons of mass destruction, for purely partisan reasons, (TREASON), and the U.S. Attorney purge, in which Rove operatives ordered Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to purge eight U.S. attorneys who were qualified prosecutors and replace them with political hacks with little or no prosecutorial experience.
Rove skated in the Libby case, but Scooter was convicted (Bush quickly commuted the sentence), on March 6, 2007, at the same time Bush and Rove were under fire for purging the U.S. attorneys. During the investigation, it came to light that Rove’s server had been used to send official, non-political emails — correspondence that was required by law to be preserved under the Presidential Records Act. Rove’s operation admitted that it had deleted at least 5 million emails from the server.
ASIDE: GOP IT “Guru” Mike Connell was blamed/credited for being behind the Secret Rove Email Scam, as well as the mishigosh surrounding the 2004 election tally in Ohio. Then Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell had a contract with Connell for IT work on the infamous Election Night 2004, giving Connell “remote monitoring capabilities” to the computer counting Ohio’s presidential vote, allowing Connell’s private, partisan external third party company and a subcontractor to have unfettered secret access to Ohio’s vote tally. On the night of the 2004 election, bizarre discrepancies between exit polls, which showed John Kerry winning handily, and the tabulated results, flipped. Without the machine hacking, Buckeye State’s 20 electoral votes would have given Kerry the presidency.
In 2008, election protection attorneys and others appeared to be closing in on critical irregularities and illegalities. Connell was now on the McCain/Palin payroll. He was deposed one day before the 2008 election about his actions during the 2004 vote count and his access to Karl Rove’s email files and how they went missing and was set to testify in the election tampering case. He was killed in a freak small plane crash in December of 2008, a few months after Karl Rove threatened him, telling him that if Connell didn’t “take the fall” Rove would go after his wife for “lobbying processes”. Velvet Revolution, a non-profit investigating Connell’s activities, revealed that Connell had said he was afraid George Bush and Dick Cheney would “throw [him] under the bus.” Attorney Cliff Arnebeck had also previously alerted Attorney General Michael Mukasey to alleged threats from Karl Rove to Connell if he refused to “take the fall.” The cause of the crash is unknown, and it remains under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board. Life is weird! (Death, too.)
Twitter rarely surprises or confuses me anymore. Nothing perplexed me more than @Southern_Mayers Twitter account, into whose deep black hole I fell through last night. This is the most effectively hilarious parodic account I’ve ever read.
In the 1961 book The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne C Booth coined a term that’s become common critical parlance, the “unreliable narrator”. The personage is familiar to anyone semi literate (Swift’s Gulliver, Humbert Humbert in Lolita, Patrick Bateman in American Psycho), whose account is so partial that the reader must see beyond it. @Southern_Mayers is such an unreliable narrator, a cross between a Phil Hendrie character and Patrick Bateman, the damned creature of a satirist’s place of perdition from American Psycho.
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WARNING: @Southern_Mayers comes on strong. She loves Jesus, and subsequently hates black people.
@Southern_Mayers thinks black are basically animals. Lazy, violent food stamp kings and queens and slavery was a good idea (like Jesus said):
Remember how we all mocked Mitt’s refusal to turn over his tax returns because we knew they were going to say he didn’t pay any taxes?
Every presidential candidate is legally required to submit a personal finance disclosure to the FEC. These were due in April, but Bernie Sanders requested a 45 day extension, which would mean that he would have to make his filing until all of the voting was finished. That deadline was yesterday. Still no taxes. Apparently he took another 45 day extension, which now means that he won’t have to file until after the Democratic National Convention. Dude, it’s almost Fourth of July, wheres your damn taxes?
The reason offered back in April was that Jane Sanders does the couples taxes and she’s been very busy. No explanation as of yet as to why the extension was needed this time. This report was due weeks ago. It is a legal requirement as long as Bernie still fancies himself a presidential candidate, as he seems to, waiting at the stage door for some Hillary bad news.
The irony of this post-convention delay is that, if it really is required to disclose this to be the nominee, it means he won’t be if something did happen to Hillary…Biden probably would be. They won’t nominate Sanders with these mysterious tax returns still hanging out there. Jane doesn’t need to do them. If Bernie Sanders really can’t afford the few hundred dollars it costs to have someone prepare his financials for him on his $174,000 annual, there is a thing called TurboTax which actually works really well.
Honestly. With respect: the man is behaving like a hypocrite. If we don’t call out our own when they conduct themselves poorly, we have no standing to complain when the Republicans do the same. If Bernie Sanders can be utterly cavalier about informing the public about his personal finances, then so can Mitt Romney, and so can Donald Trump.
Throughout the primary, we were repeatedly told that the rules of politics didn’t apply to Bernie Sanders. Specifically, that Bernie was so honest, authentic, the real deal, not really a politician at all, a wholesome and wizened sage, simply because a guy who’d been in Washington for 28 years said so. Look at how the campaign imagery reinforced this image. Many of us found that frightening; that people on The Left would believe something untrue because a politician said so. This isn’t about Bernie being a bad person. This is about Bernie’s image being false. No one is perfect and everyone has something to hide. This is a very troubling aspect of Sanders candidacy that should be addressed at some point.
There abound that both Scotland and Northern Ireland are trying to skedaddle out of the UK and reapply for membership in the EU as sovereign states. In Ireland the Unionists–the racist Paisleyites- are jacked up on the sheer frisson of this odious outcome, but the Republicans, like the Scots, know what it is to have your destiny in the hands of the feckin’ English, and they don’t seem inclined to tolerate this insane and grotesque turn of events, or to sit back and allow themselves to be governed by a confederacy of football hooligans and reactionary demagogues.
Scotland voted for staying, yet naturally when American Trump arrived in Scotland today he brayed how their votes to leave were a great thing, Yooooge! At which point the Scots all waggled their Sporrans at him, waved their Mexican Flags and laughed at his stupidity. I am worried that the good people of Scotland voted to leave the UK, they wouldn’t be able to join the EU any more because their economy tanked when oil took a nosedive. They’re now running a deficit which could kill their chances of applying for membership. Although, to be fair having a poor economic result didn’t stop the fucking idiots in the UK from voting to leave the EU, that’s the irony of the situation. But then they had their own referendum and they blew it.
Anyhow, the British pound (the colorful funny money those wacky Brits use instead of Euros or Ameros) took a nose dive over night, depreciating faster than the value of my boyfriend’s Land Rover, precision land and sea vehicle. He would have been better off setting currency on fire.
As an American, I find it ironic that the UK has voted to declare independence from the EU due to ‘unelected bureaucrats in Brussels’. Will they now begin storming ships to dump French cheeses and German cars into the Channel while screaming about ‘taxation without representation’? The BRIE Party (British Racists In Ecstasy) “Leave the car, take the camembert”. The British (not for long) parliament is meeting in emergency session to authorize the bricks necessary to fill in the chunnel holes. Trump’s in the UK in his signature ball cap to meet with the leaders to advise on the building of a wall across the width of the channel to further keep out the low lives who would pollute the blue blood of This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.
Poor, duped Britain People. It was all based on lies. The main slogan for leaving the EU was: We send the EU 350 million (pounds) a week, Let’s Fund our NHS Instead, Vote Leave, It was on the side of the bus that Boris and the gang rode around GB pushing the get out of the EU vote. Now the leader of the Get Out of the EU gang Nigel Farage “has admitted that it was a “mistake” to promise that £350million a week would be spent on the NHS if the UK backed a Brexit vote.”
But, it must be a good thing, as I’ve lost about 5 percent of my net worth today. So fa. rLooks like I picked the wrong week to start thinking I could retire in the next 200 years.
To Be Fair,™ these politicians know that a lot of right-wing nut jobs (who vote Republican), are probably on the terrorist watch list (Sovereign Citizens, etc.), and while they may not want to publicly acknowledge that many of their supporters are violent psychopaths, nevertheless they still wish to court their votes.
The Senate’s inaction is easily understood when you remember that white extremists are also on watch lists, and the proposed laws would make it illegal to sell guns to them, too. Laws that mean gun dealers have to say no to KKK and other White Supremists cannot be allowed to go forward, and MUST be blocked by the GOPee. The GOP strongly supports homegrown White Terrorism.
