(Everlasting Musical accompaniment to the last post of the week on the blog’s favorite living Canadian)
Not long ago, people were politician Blowing the whistle on a grade deal between ex-White House prevarication Kellyanne Conway and BH Funds, a dark money operation controlled by Leonard Leo, the mastermind behind the Supreme Court’s crafted conservative majority, And conservative infiltration of the federal judiciary in general.
On the day the 2017 sale of Conway’s voting business to Creative Response Concepts Inc., a lawyer filed similar liens with Virginia regulators from the CRC and BH Fund, financial experts said it showed dark money syndicates played a role in the financing. Action trade, POLITICO reported in late December. Conway valued the deal in her federal filings at between $1 million and $5 million, raising potential ethical questions because Conway was simultaneously running alongside Trump for some of Leo’s favored judicial candidates people defend.
so politician Sniff around and you’ll never believe what happens next. Well, actually, you will, because you realize that fraud and deceit is what drives the wingnut welfare machine.immediately politician Start asking questions about the Conway deal — poof! – BH Fund no longer exists.
But just three days after POLITICO made inquiries, the BH fund closed, according to documents filed with the Virginia Corporations Commission. Adam Kennedy, a spokesman for the company, now called CRC Advisors, said the BH fund had been dormant since late 2021. The firm, which did extensive consulting work for Leo in 2017, is now led by him. October “because other organizations made it obsolete.”
Of course, Leo didn’t end his destruction of democratic institutions. Thanks to a new benefactor, Leo is cashing in and working hard to create entities through which he can continue to practice his dark magic.
Leo now controls a conservative endowment fund of more than $1.6 billion, and he is building a new dark money organizational structure to manage it. Critics have long argued that understanding how Leo distributes his anonymous funds is crucial to understanding how the conservative legal movement secured its majority on the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2019, when asked about making a BH Fund documentary for The Washington Post, Leo said, “Well, BH Fund is a charity. Political stories, because I care about ideas.”
I am the Tsar of all Russians.
When I first went to college, I quickly understood the need for naps. I schedule my classes accordingly. I would go back to my room on the 11th floor of the dorm, draw the curtains, and doze off.My daily music soundtrack is the first side of David Crosby’s first solo album “If I Can Remember My Name”” The music is weird, full of spells, and a flawless map to the nap zone. The music didn’t put me to sleep; instead, it reassured me, allowing relaxation in this strange new environment.
David Crosby.
One day, as I watched the brewery’s grain silo burn at sunset and the music blared, I didn’t sleep at all that afternoon, but I was completely rested. That was my best experience with David Crosby’s music, and one of my fondest memories from college.
There is no question that Crosby used Molotov cocktails to blow up nearly every bridge he built for others in his lifetime. (In Bill Graham’s oral autobiography, both Graham and the Fillmores crew listed C, S, N, and Y as the most unlikely behaviors they had to deal with.) But Crosby later in life as musician and public Showing up, especially on Twitter, he offered valuable critiques of his compatriot’s relative skills in rolling joints. But one thing I can tell you: he wrote the best music ever written as he watched a grain elevator burn in towers of orange flames against the fading orange of the sunset horizon. That is a gift.
Weekly WWOZ Select Clicks: “Cafe du Monde” (Tank and Bangas): Yes, I still love New Orleans.
Weekly visit to the EMI Archives: Here’s a car jumping over a house in the 1920s. As you can see, the car didn’t land exactly (I wonder if they found the right front wheel).
Anyway, that’s what they did back then. I blame the ban, myself.history is so cool
Well, that’s not good news. From the Associated Press:
Micah Coomer, Joshua Abate and Dodge Dale Hellonen were arrested this week on misdemeanor charges after their Navy The Marines helped investigators identify them in video of the Jan. 6, 2021, pro-Trump mob. Dozens of people charged in the unrest have military backgrounds, but the three are among a handful of active duty personnel.A Marine Corps officer was charged in 2021 with scuffling police and helping other thugs force their way into the Capitol[…]Cuomo posted photos on Instagram that appear to have been taken inside the Capitol with the caption, “Gladly parted from history,” according to court documents. A few days after the 2020 election, he and another person discussed via Instagram messages how he believed the election was rigged. “Everything is corrupt in this country,” he told another in a message in late January 2021. “Honestly, we need to start over. I’m waiting for boogaloo,” Cuomo detailed in court documents wrote in the message. When the person asked what a “boogaloo” was, Coomer replied it was “Civil war 2,” authorities said.
My guess is that these guys weren’t the only active duty military in the mob that day. The country’s military has a longstanding problem with extreme right-wing politics within its ranks.
But don’t worry, once Matt Gates makes sure all trace elements of Frappuccino, empathy, and “woke” politics are removed from the Armed Forces, he’ll get to it.
Ohio Republicans are at it again. They’ve managed to get their election entangled in an impossible tangle of voter ID laws and voting rules, to the point that voting in such a stupid state is like buying something at IKEA after losing the instruction booklet.from Washington post:
In total, an Ohio county office distributed approximately 5,000 veterans ID cards, inadvertently realizing that it was no longer an acceptable form of identification for registering to vote. The League of Women Voters paused updating its election education materials while it analyzed the new law. Local election officials are awaiting word from the Ohio secretary of state on which IDs they will now accept, how long they can count ballots and who can vote outside polling places.
In other words, things are going the way Ohio Republicans want them to.
The legislation is now one of the strictest voter ID laws in the country, and Republican-led legislatures are increasingly trying to revamp their votes after former President Donald Trump made baseless complaints of fraud following his 2020 defeat. mechanism. Republican state leaders who support the law say it is necessary to speed up the ballot count and reduce fraud, even as Ohio’s secretary of state assesses the state’s 2020 election to be legal.
he signed the bill January 6? classic.
Discovery Corner: In Norwegian Stone, the dark past speaks.From Smithsonian Institution:
In the autumn of 2021, archaeologists excavating a tomb in eastern Norway discovered a red sandstone inscribed with spider-like runes, an ancient writing system used by the Germanic peoples of northern Europe. This in itself is not uncommon. Thousands of stones bearing runic inscriptions have been found in Scandinavia alone, dating back to the Viking period. But carvings on this particular stone date back 2,000 years to inscriptions, making it “the world’s oldest dataable runestone,” according to the findings, announced in a statement this week by the Museum of Cultural History at the University of Oslo. The museum said the artifact was found in a cremation pit near Lake Tyrifjorden, an area known for “monumental” archaeological finds such as the famous Gjermundbu Viking helmet.
I think the last sentence is partly based on runic inscriptions that don’t respect vowels, but hey, look what we found!
Hey, Smithsonian Institution, Is today a good day for dinosaur news? Today is always a good day for dinosaur news!
A century ago, experts believed that these remarkable dinosaur features were developed for cross-species attack and defense. The skull of a Triceratops served as a set of spears and shields to fend off a ravenous Tyrannosaurus Rex, while the plate armor and spikes of a Stegosaurus made Allosaurus think twice. But since them, the story has changed. We now know that many of the strange anatomical quirks that dinosaurs evolved were used to fight members of their own species.
For example…
The 75-million-year-old ankylosaurus was covered in spikes, like the classic ankylosaurus itself, and its strong tail ended with a heavy club. While such structures could have been used to fend off creatures like the dinosaurs, the famous T. rex’s carnivorous relatives, a new study in Biology Letters finds that the Zur must have fought each other. While only one Zuul fossil specimen has been found so far, the armor on the dinosaur’s hip shows damage from a blunt instrument being swung sideways—another Zuul’s tail would be a perfect choice.
Ancient battle robots! or…
Teenage Tyrannosaurus “Jane” has four partially healed bite marks on his skull. The piercings matched the shape of the teeth of another T. rex of similar age. The fossil shows that not only did T. rex fight by biting each other’s noses, as some crocodile species do today, but that the behavior began very early in the tyrant lizard’s life. Other, older T. rex specimens have also been found with bite marks, reinforcing the notion that these iconic dinosaurs were truly up against.
Eat face! oops! or…
Different teams of paleontologists have found evidence that some pachycephalosaur skulls had healed damage caused by some kind of blunt force trauma.This injury, along with biomechanical studies of how many inches of pachycephalosaurus skulls endured, suggests that these dinosaurs used their heads as weapons[…]The necks of these dinosaurs were ill-suited to handle the forces of a head impact, and the dinosaurs lacked the ventilated sinuses of head-impact mammals, which absorb the impact and prevent bone breakage. Instead, pachycephalosaurs may have bumped each other with their heads along the flanks or hips as part of combat.
Head ass! Jurassic World Wrestling! They fought then to make us happy now.
I’ll be back on Monday for the crazy scrolling. Be good and have fun, you bastards. Stay on top of the snake line, put on the goddamn mask, do the goddamn shooting – especially the goddamn booster – and make a little time for the Ukrainian people. I met a woman from Ukraine who was driving for a carpool service; her kids and parents are still in Kvov. My moments this week are very specific.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently idiot americaA working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
