And we’re back! Happy Monday everyone. I hope you had a great weekend. It was nice here in the DMV, a little rainy on Saturday but lovely on Sunday. Fired up the Big Green Egg and made some food you can definitely eat.
Let’s see what else is going on, shall we?
Ah yes, let’s get the sentient potato to testify.
Bannon initiates talks with January 6 panel on testifying over Capitol attack
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/10/steve-bannon-discussions-january-6-committee-capitol-attack
Elon Musk may have to complete $44bn Twitter takeover, legal experts say
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jul/10/elon-musk-may-have-to-complete-44bn-twitter-takeover-legal-experts-say
It’s right there in the Constitution they go on about so much!!
Sprots!
Novak Djokovic wins Wimbledon, defeating volatile Nick Kyrgios
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/10/wimbledon-mens-final/
Dame Judi!
Can’t forget some turtle content:
This is not the light-hearted Ben Stiller movie I was expecting it to be.
Okay, we have no money for rent or housing, but by God we can buy five guns, a Taser, and ammunition for all of that, plus other paraphernalia.
I just can’t with these gun freaks any more.
You’re misinterpreting it, Bryan. They had the money to spend on guns BECAUSE they had no rent to pay…
This day in history:
“Not much more than a hundred years ago, my own great-grandfather owned a farm in Harlem, right across there … But I am quite sure, Bob Moses, that he never dreamed of the bridge.” — President Franklin D. Roosevelt, speaking at the dedication of the Triborough Bridge, now the RFK, held on July 11, 1936, 86 years ago today.
It is a little difficult to imagine a Roosevelt working a small plot of land, raising root vegetable and perhaps tending a few apple trees, even two centuries ago. I tracked down this great-grandfather out of curiosity.
Uh-huh, go on…
That headline is pretty bad — the subhed is what’s right. Musk faces a choice between paying $1 billion to drop the bid or else come up with tens of billions to go through.
What he’s almost certainly doing is stringing this out so that Twitter’s board settles for a piece of that $1 billion. Twitter’s just not remotely worth the tens of billions he bid, if he even has all of that cash, which isn’t clear at all.
Do they want to go to court and get the full $1 billion years from now and deal with him until then? Or do they settle for less sooner? They’re probably trying to get intel on how badly he’s been hurt by stock and crypto slides to game out how much he’s bluffing, not whether he is.
I’m not sure Twitter has the money for an extended litigation process. My guess is they want Musk to write a check and make this go away. I’m still not clear on Twitter’s business model. I assume they rely on advertising dollars? But yes, as you point out, the whole thing is worth WAY less that Musk offered. The Twitter board clearly thought Christmas came early this year and they were going to be able to unload this used car with sawdust in the transmission on an unsuspecting rube.
Musk’s “genius” reputation is gonna take a blow from this.
I may have told this story before, but in college I worked as a janitor at my Baptist church. Once I was vacuuming the sanctuary and glanced at the baptistry (basically a giant bathtub in a raised alcove behind the pulpit where they had … baptisms, duh) and thought I saw a shadow moving behind the curtain. I was weirded out but dismissed it and kept working.
Turns out there was a homeless dude living back there. That area didn’t get used much — there were male and female dressing rooms to get ready to be baptized. That only happened once a month or even less. Dude had built himself a bed out of seat cushions and choir robes, and made himself at home. I’m not sure what he was eating, but I guess he’d slip out (the doors only locked from the outside) and I guess prop the door open? Maybe jam the lock with paper? Or he’d wait until services started and sneak back in and hide in the bathroom or whatever until everybody left.
I honestly had not thought about how little those buildings were used on a daily basis until then.
So what happened when the guy was discovered, @bryanlsplinter? Did the church do the Christian thing and use some of its tax-free funds to help get the guy shelter and rehabilitation? Or was it, “Lock him up and throw away the key.”?
Sorry, I meant to thread this under Cousin Matthew’s comment about the children’s museum. Oh, well.
I don’t actually know his fate, other than I know he wasn’t arrested. I don’t know if they tried to help him or not. He may have just bolted when discovered and they just found his “lair.” They may have just shown him the door. I know we had to start doing “sweeps” of the building when locking up.
Like most churches, they had a “benevolence fund” that was used to help people who came in. They could get money for groceries or some rent or power money. It was limited — you could only do it so often and the grocery money could only be used for food, not alcohol or cigarettes. They had an account set up with a local grocery store that could verify those expenditures. Rent and/or power went directly to the landlord or power company. It didn’t go through the individual. A lot of grifters would say “forget it” at that point and weed themselves out. They did make sure the money went to the right place.
That’s not to say I approve of them, mind you. The church pastor lived in a mansion and his three kids all had cars and they vacationed in Europe. I was keenly aware of that. It’s just that they did think that charity stuff through. Interestingly enough, there was a local ministerial association that the church leaders (Protestant, I think, though I may be wrong) belonged to and they all kind of adopted these standardized practices to be able to help without getting fleeced. A lot of people would hit the churches in sequence because you could only get help like once every three months or something like that.
Bannon’s offer to testify to the 1/6 Committee is BS, by the way. That Guardian article eventually gets down to the reality that this is just dumb maneuvering, in contradiction of what they say at the top about how this “gives the select committee a prime opportunity to gain insight” into the inner workings of Trump and his people.
He’s just blowing smoke, and either he or one of his people most likely gave The Guardian this email in the first place. It’s fine for them to take the document, but there is zero reason for them to trade first rights to the document in exchange for printing his framing on the issue. He’s a horrible source, and they ought to treat him that way.
I read one analysis that theorized that Trump “released” Bannon (actually, Bannon never had executive privilege) to slow down the hearings. That writer thought they were trying to delay things until the November elections, when Republicans will ostensibly take over again and can make all this go away. I don’t see that working, to be honest. It’s an interesting theory, but this stuff has way too much momentum for that hump Bannon to derail it.
That letter he wrote to/for Bannon….just….wow.
i keep forgetting about this guy…till he randomly pops into my feed again for whatever reason
dude gets angry so i dont have to….and thats nice
I would consider that an “essential service”.