Fri: Did Biden Snaek This One Past the QOP?

Guess Who's Helping Clean Up After the Hurricane?  

As Florida residents emerged from Hurricane Idalia on Thursday, some have started to assess the trail of destruction the storm left behind — and this included a group of Latinos who started cleaning up the severely damaged hotel where they work.

Alberto, Maggie and Jorge Vidal were among dozens of construction and agricultural workers who sheltered inside a 30-room hotel in the city of Perry. The Vidals had relocated to Florida from Mexico a year ago to work in construction, and Idalia was the first hurricane they've ever endured.

"In Mexico, we had never experienced a catastrophe like this," Jorge Vidal told Noticias Telemundo in Spanish. He recalled hearing the windows of the hotel crack. The wind gusts that seeped in blew everything away, including parts of the hotel's ceiling, and the rain flooded some of the rooms.

Shortly after the storm passed, the Vidals, who also work in the hotel where they sheltered, started cleaning up the debris and assessing the damage even before the hotel's manager was able to return to the building, Noticias Telemundo reported.

That's when it became clear to Maggie Vidal that immigrant construction workers like herself will be key to rebuilding what Idalia destroyed.

"This is where all the immigrants that the governor wants to push out are needed," Maggie Vidal told Noticias Telemundo in Spanish. "Who is going to do all of this work? There is a lot, a lot of work here."

I Wonder How Many Donut Shops They Have in Coffee City.

The tiny Texas town of Coffee City is taking the concept of "over-policing" to a whole new level.

Local news station CBS 19 reports that Coffee City, with a population of just under 250 people, employs 50 full-time and reserve officers – that's one police officer for every five residents.

And these officers appear to be very busy as well, as CBS 19 has found that they issued a whopping 5,100 citations last year that generated more than $1 million in revenue for the town budget.

This has left many residents questioning why such a small town needs an overwhelming number of police officers.

"They’re everywhere, literally everywhere,” complained one woman to CBS 19 who asked not to be publicly identified.

And that's not all.

Local news station KHOU 11 Investigates found that a surprisingly large percentage of police employed by the town had been fired from previous law enforcement jobs.

In particular, KHOU 11's investigation found that "more than half of the department’s 50 officers had been suspended, demoted, terminated or dishonorably discharged from their previous law enforcement jobs" for actions including "excessive force, public drunkenness, untruthfulness and association with known criminals."

Greg Fremin, a retired Houston Police Department captain who is now a lecturer at the Sam Houston State University College of Criminal Justice, tells CBS 19 that he's "astounded" by the tiny town's massive collection of rogue cops.

“I’ve never seen anything like that in my professional career, and I’ve seen a lot," he said.

The Best Things in Life Are Free. But Not the Best (Or Worst) Lawyers.

Former President Donald Trump's Save America PAC is critically low on funds — at the exact moment it stares down the prospect of paying millions more for legal fees for associates of the former president in the Georgia election racketeering case, reported USA Today Thursday.

The PAC "has spent nearly all of the more than $150 million it raised and is sitting on less than $4 million" — and Trump "has already dug into his fund for 2024 ads and borrowed money to post bail in Georgia," as some of his co-defendants beg for donations and claim he is not helping them as they assumed he would.

Four of Trump's co-defendants — attorneys John Eastman and Jenna Ellis, DOJ official Jeff Clark, and fake elector Cathleen Latham — have been reduced to using the right-wing Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo for money. Ellis in particular has allegedly been left in the cold by Trump and his associates because of her work with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the former president's most significant rival for the 2024 nomination.

These trials could end up being massively expensive, according to experts. Defense attorney Danya Perry estimates that if they run for two or three weeks, they could easily top $10 million. And some of Trump's associates are already facing financial ruin – Rudy Giuliani is reportedly nearly broke, and already has a default judgment looming over him in an election worker defamation case, as well as debts from other legal cases.

At a bare minimum, said former federal prosecutor and defense attorney Bruce Udolf, “I can’t see most top-level white collar lawyers doing it for less than $2 or $3 million.”

As all of this is going on, Trump also needs to ramp up campaign spending to mount an effective rematch against President Joe Biden, who as of last month had raised $72 million since formally launching his re-election campaign.

Vivek Rama-Slimey = Neville Chamberlain

Presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy is vowing to allow Russia to keep every inch of Ukrainian territory it has occupied if Vladimir Putin promises to cut ties with China.

The outspoken Republican candidate told Fox News that he would also cave to Russian demands to keep Ukraine out of NATO in exchange for the hypothetical pledge to break off economic and military alliances with Beijing.

“I would freeze the current lines of control,” Ramaswamy said Wednesday night. “I would further make a hard commitment that NATO will not admit Ukraine to NATO. That’s enough to get Putin to do the deal.”

If he were elected president, Ramaswamy said he would get Russia to abandon its burgeoning alliance with China, which he calls a more serious threat to the U.S. than the invasion of Ukraine.

Hitler Never Honored Any of His Promises

PT Barnum:  "There's a Sucker Born Every Minute." QOP: "There's An Old Sucker Dying Every Minute".

What’s important about Ramaswamy is not his ideology—he has no coherent one—but how susceptible our political and media ecosystem is to a charismatic phony. He’s become a recurring character on cable news, recently claiming on CNN that he was misquoted in The Atlantic when raising questions about the 9/11 attacks. But The Atlantic’s John Hendrickson had the tape, which of course included Ramaswamy asking, “How many police, how many federal agents were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers?” Denying something that is actually on tape, how very Trumpy.

Perhaps we shouldn’t find this surprising, as Fantasyland author Kurt Andersen put it in an email, “Americans historically have a special weakness for charismatic charlatans especially in religion—from Joseph Smith two centuries ago to the past half century of televangelists. Now that we have a political party dominated by quasi-religious and actually religious charlatanism, voilà.”

In Vivekmentum we see that Trumpism (or the con that is Trumpism) can in fact scale. Stuart Stevens, a former GOP operative who is firmly in the Never Trump camp, told me on the phone, “The party has become less educated and with that comes a higher susceptibility to conspiracy, fraud, and snake oil salesman.”

Did Biden Snaek This One Past the QOP?  Maybe While Mitch Was Light-Header.

A new proposed rule by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives would increase what is required to obtain a federal firearms license (FFL) for gun sellers across the country -- an attempt to end what gun control advocates term "the gun show loophole."

Justice Department officials told reporters that prior to the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which was signed into law last June, those "engaged in the business" of a firearms dealer were defined broadly. The definition that ATF is proposing is more specific in an effort to better regulate the market in accordance with the new federal law.

"The prior definition before that, [before] the BSCA was implemented and signed by the president, focused on when a person earns their livelihood from dealing in firearms," a senior DOJ official said on the call with reporters. "The revised, new definition covers anyone devotes time, attention and labor to dealing with firearms as a regular course of trade or business to predominantly earn a profit. So, the rulemaking is focused on that new terminology to predominantly earn a profit."

"The proposed rule would amend the ATF regulations to clarify that firearm dealing that requires a license and conduct conducting a background check does not solely occur in brick-and-mortar stores," a senior DOJ official said. "It also encompasses dealing at gun shows flea markets mail order and over the internet. The proposed rule reinforces and makes clear that there is no gun show loophole, there is no internet loophole recognized under federal law. Instead, a gun dealer must obtain a license and run background checks, no matter what menu that person engages in this."

Dog Adopts People

In most rescue animal adoptions, the adopter picks their pet. In this case, the canine in question chose a new home all on his own.

Scout was staying at the Antrim County Animal Shelter in Bellaire, Mich., when he started sneaking out to Meadow Brook Medical Care Facility — a nursing home across the street — in the middle of the night.

“He climbed the chain-linked kennel,” said Heather Belknap, the shelter director, explaining that Scout — who weighs about 65 pounds — was indoors, and scaled a fence to get outside. “There’s a six-foot solid vinyl fence around the dog kennels. He jumped over that fence.”

Staff at the shelter could tell that Scout — a stray mutt they rescued and named — was abused, as his jaw had pellets in it, possibly from a BB gun wound, and he displayed other traits of a mistreated animal. He was easily excitable and had a fear of strangers.



“Somebody obviously abused him,” said Belknap. “When he ended up in the shelter, he ended up in the right place.”

Scout’s first nursing home break-in was back in 2017. He leapt over two fences and crossed a highway, then sauntered into the nursing home lobby through an automatic revolving door and parked himself on a brown-colored couch.

He made himself comfortable, sleeping on the sofa until a stunned nurse spotted him and called the county sheriff in a panic.

The dog, who was brought back to the shelter, repeated the same sequence of events on three separate nights in the span of only a few days — slipping out of the shelter and hopping onto the brown couch in the nursing home lobby.

“He was pretty relentless in his pursuit to be here,” said Stephanie Elsey, a clinical care coordinator at Meadow Brook Medical Care Facility. “He found his home.”

Following the third uninvited visit, a staff member took Scout home with her, but he wasn’t a good fit with her other dogs. So, not wanting to send him back to the shelter, the nursing home staff talked, and they collectively decided to adopt him.

“He’s ours. He chose us in the beginning,” said Rhonda Tomzack, an administrative assistant at the facility.

To this day, no one knows why Scout was so drawn to the nursing home.

“We just knew that he belonged here,” said Elsey, adding that staff checked with residents for allergies, and ensured everyone was comfortable with having him around.

Staff at Meadow Brook agreed to share the responsibility for taking care of Scout — whose age is not known, though his vet suspects he is somewhere between 10 and 12 years old. The care facility is divided into several separate units, and each has about 20 residents, most of whom are seniors with health issues. Since 2017, Scout has been living full-time as a resident pet in Glacier Hill.

While Scout has the run of the place and regularly visits other parts of the building, “he definitely knows that this unit is home. It’s where he feels most comfortable,” said Jenny Martinek, the facility’s household coordinator.

Dog kept escaping shelter to sleep in nursing home. Staff adopted him.