Halfway Home [DOT 27/7/22]

27/7/22 MegMegMcGee 27

Happy Wednesday everyone! I hope you are having a great week. I made it through the first half with all my client meetings. Still have a few this week, but the bulk of it is over.

Ew, no. Go away.

He’s back: Trump returns to Washington for first time since leaving office
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/26/trump-washington-president-capitol-attack-january-6

Meanwhile in Maryland we are waiting forever for election results

Opinion: A governor’s misguided veto is behind Maryland’s glacial vote count
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/25/larry-hogan-veto-maryland-july-primaries/

US officials say ‘biggest fear’ has come true as Russia cuts gas supplies to Europe
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/26/politics/us-russia-europe-gas/index.html

Nothing to see here.

Sprots!

In the modern NFL, $2.2bn won’t stop the Chicago Bears’ flight to the suburbs
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/jul/26/chicago-bears-solider-field-renovations-plans-dome-arlington-heights-nfl

WWJD?

Brooklyn pastor says he and his wife were robbed of more than $1 million in jewelry while preaching
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/25/us/brooklyn-pastor-robbery/index.html

Following up here:

A man who was being strangled by his 15-foot pet snake before police shot it in the head has died
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/24/us/pennsylvania-pet-snake-attack-police-trnd/

I would like to write a strongly worded letter to whomever thought this was a good idea.

Have a great, though Choco Taco-less, Wednesday!

avataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravatar

27 Comments

  1. Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t understand why anyone would keep a python as a “pet”.

    And, any church that has a pastor who can buy a million dollars worth of jewelry should be taxed to kingdom come.

  2. Yes, about that Brooklyn “faith leader” who’s so cozy with our current Mayor (warning: comments enabled):

    https://nypost.com/2022/07/25/flashy-brooklyn-bishop-defends-lifestyle-after-1m-jewelry-heist/

    A favorite con among holy rolling grifters here in fair Gotham is to self-create ecclesiastical titles and self-affiliate with the Episcopal church, despite them having about as many ties to the established Episcopal/Anglican Communion as Chuck Schumer or Jerry Seinfeld. I was once at a very strange party and a woman who was somehow sort of cohosting asked me to open a couple of bottles of wine because she didn’t drink and, she claimed, had never used a corkscrew. I obliged, and asked her what she did for a living. She informed me that she was an Episcopal archbishop. That’s funny, I thought. I had met the Episcopal bishop of New York and I had thought that’s as high as it got. Turns out she was another one of these storefront cult-of-personality “faith leaders” whose prosperity gospel allows them to grift off their mostly elderly, mostly female, mostly Black, mostly poor, small congregations.

    This isn’t the best photo but here you can see the back of the head, at least, of the real Episcopal bishop of New York. He’s awfully camera-shy for someone in what is a fairly exalted position. He nominally has control over St. John the Divine but that institution long ago non-denominated itself in all but name and no longer really has any pastoral function. The only thing they do well now is the annual Blessing of the Animals but even that is now tinged with strong hints of pagan zoolatry. He’s also the leader of St. Thomas Episcopal, one of my favorite churches, just three blocks north of St. Patrick’s on Fifth Avenue. Three blocks south of St. Patrick’s is St. Bartholomew (aka St. Bart’s, and every bit as glam as the Caribbean getaway.) He’s also got Trinity Episcopal way downtown, miraculously unaffected during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and whose small churchyard has one of the oldest (maybe the oldest) cemeteries in Manhattan.

    The faux-archbishop I met looked more like Grace Jones.

    https://www.marinelog.com/inland-coastal/seamens-church-institute-hosts-44th-annual-silver-bell-awards/

    • Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” -Matthew 19:21-24

      Guess he is going to hell, too..but he will not be allowed entry into the DeadSplinter parties.

      • I wish I could find the video, but the transcript will have to do….

         

        https://www.google.com/amp/s/snltranscripts.jt.org/96/96cheyward.phtml%3famp

         

        Here is a slice…..

        “John W. Heyward: Hello. I’m a very wealthy man. I’m worth billions, and always have been. But I haven’t always been a man with a conscience. Time was, I thought my money was all I needed to be happy. But all that changed one day when I came across.. [ holds up Bible ] ..this book. The Bible. And I saw where it said.. [ reads passage ] ..”It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” That passage changed my life. It moved me to start putting my riches towards a worthy cause. And that’s why I established the Heyward Foundation. The Heyward Foundation, For The Development Of A Way To Make It Easy For A Camel To Pass Through a Needle’s Eyes. I’m not going to Hell if my billions have anything to say about it! And I think they do. Let me show you..

         

        [ enters a laboratory filled with scientists and camels

        We’re doing God’s work here at the Heyward Foundation. First, scores of desperate Third World children brought me all these camels. And then I found all these cancer researchers, made them stop whatever it was they were doing, and devote their energies to trying to force these camels through needles, just like it says in the Bible. I know it sounds impossible, but we have made a lot of progress. We started small. We tried to cram a horse through a drinking straw. The result was pretty ugly and completely unsuccessful. But we learned a lot! [ stands in front of a big glass full of a strange-colored liquid ] Next, we tried pureeing a camel into a thin liquid, then pouring the camel through the eye of a needle. Sure enough, the liquid camel will pass through the needle. But.. we think that might be cheating. We’ve got our lawyers looking into it. But a liquid camel’s only part of it. I’ve also invested millions of dollars from my tobacco and pornography enterprises to build very large needles and very small camels. [ stands in front of a large needle and a miniature camel ] Unless I’ve completely missed the message of the Bible, somewhere in here is my ticket to Heaven.”

    • Oh wow, I saw that earlier but didn’t know he was a staffer.

      Yeah, Lyft and Uber exist to drive your drunk ass home. Their behavior must have been egregious. Though it sounds like the Lyft driver left the scene so who knows.

      I’ve always been terrified of being stuck on the side of the road after a college acquaintance was killed changing a tire on the side of the road in Pittsburgh.

       

      • The real scandal is that the group was being driven between Dewey and Bethany. C’mon, man, as The Big Guy would say, Rehoboth’s where you want to be, and that’s where he and Dr. Jill have their beachy escape.

  5. Hmmm, wonder why Matty would vote against this?

    https://www.newsweek.com/matt-gaetz-among-20-republicans-who-voted-against-human-trafficking-bill-1728206

    Sounds like a lovely fellow…

    https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/marine-murder-rape-plot-rapekrieg-1388238/

    This could be good?

    https://www.skynews.com.au/world-news/two-teams-of-doctors-rush-to-russian-president-vladimir-putins-bedside-after-health-scare/news-story/289c9b0faf00675f8436568dbe84fc66

    • Rapekrieg?????

      What kind of psycho thinks that’s a good idea?

      And the GOPers wonder why Neo Nazis should get kicked out of the military?

      Thanks W Admin for loosening the rules on recruitment and allowing such nuts in to help prosecute your stupid illegal war.

  8. Interesting summary of some of the moves on Trump. DOJ has been building a case for a while. The article notes that this well preceded the January 6 hearings..

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/26/trump-justice-investigation-january-6/

    I bash the NY Times, so I wanted to note that one Times reporter, Alan Feuer, pointed out all the way back in January that there was evidence DOJ was investigating his direct involvement.

    The Post article hedges by putting it that the “degree of prosecutors’ interest in Trump’s actions has not been previously reported” which I read to be a bit self congratulatory. But it really should be read as an admission of failure.

    For months the running narrative in the Post, NY Times, CNN and elsewhere is that DOJ has been sitting on its hands and a desperate January 6 Committee was goading them to act.

    But there has been a lot of public evidence in court filings and other actions that DOJ was a lot further along than the press narrative would have you believe.

    The reason is that there has been an orchestrated PR campaign on the right to minimize the threat of prosecutions, while prosecutors are playing their cards very close to their vests.

    Better reporters would have used the limited public evidence to expose the PR campaign, but most political reporters only know PR.

    As always, none of this means Trump will be brought to court. These cases are hard to prove under the best circumstances, and there is the looming threat of radical right wingers on the Supreme Court inventing out of thin air reasons why Trump is innocent.

    But a different narrative is finally starting to emerge, and may be seeing the press starting to retcon hard.

    • …there are a lot of overlapping problems both with the knowledge of the law, the judicial institutions (& how they overlap &/or interact) as well as the way the pace at which that stuff happens being a poor fit for the demands of a reporter’s schedule but there are places who’ve been keeping a pretty keen eye on the details in court filings since way back

      …I’ve got a little out of the habit but there’s a podcast (which comes with a twitter feed & probably facebook & I think some conversation via the patreon platform, since that’s how they pay the bills) which was called “mueller she wrote” but goes by “the daily beans” now & the lady who hosts that has been pretty good about that stuff…to the point that they have a “fantasy indictment league” where they bet not-money on who might get served in the upcoming week…though it’s not the sort of content that lends itself easily to inclusion in a DOT so I’ve only occasionally mentioned it

      …but it’s well worth checking out emptywheel…she’s also pretty great at parsing that stuff…though not all the posts on that site are by her personally

      …allegedly there’s a lot that can be gleaned from lawyers on twitter, too…but I resist the idea of signing up to twitter so I’ve not really got a good list of those

      …it’s pretty dry trying to actually sift the wheat from the chaff going through the filings themselves so I think it helps to have a proxy of some sort…but without getting too far into reading-tea-leaves territory there’s been some pretty significant information slowly dripping from that tap…& from time to time some arguably strong (if somewhat legalistically obfuscated) indications of places various investigations look to be headed

      …I think bryanl is/was right that they’ll roll up the also-rans like collude-y-rudy & steve “flop sweat” bannon before they do anything massive like charge a member of the family…so that kind of thing is still likely more than a year away…but short of taking a wrecking ball to the federal judiciary (as opposed to the current jackhammers wielded by the GOP & the supreme court majority at either end) it’s been looking like that sort of thing is a natural end-point for a number of ongoing investigations in several jurisdictions up to & including the federal for…kind of a while depending on the perspective you look at it from?

Leave a Reply