Month: March 2022

I think you probably got it, right?:

Before Senate confirmation hearings for US Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, Republican Senator Josh Hawley announced plans to question the US District Court judge over what he characterised as her lenient “treatment of sex offenders, especially those…

The senator, who has not served as a judge, was involved with prosecuting sex crime cases as Missouri’s attorney general from 2017 to 2019, including a case in which a county sheriff admitted to sexually abusing a woman.

His sentencing called for two years in prison. He was released on probation.

In 2018, Mr Hawley’s office was appointed to serve as special prosecutor in a sex abuse and domestic assault case involving the sheriff of Knox County.

According to a probable cause statement filed with the Knox County Circuit Clerk by a representative of then-Attorney General Hawley’s office, Robert Becker had a “violent” history with the victim, who alleged that Becker “choked” her with a shirt in December 2017.

In April 2018, the sheriff’s department searched the woman’s home. Becker accompanied the search.

While officers looked through the property, Becker stood in front of the woman while she was looking for items in a bathroom, then “removed his penis from his pants and put his penis” in the woman’s mouth without her consent, according to the complaint.

Becker resigned and was charged with a misdemeanor count of domestic assault and misdemeanor sexual abuse, crimes punishable up to one year in prison.

The case was not brought to trial. Under a plea agreement, Becker served no jail time and was placed on two years’ probation.

“There is no place for law enforcement officers who abuse their power,” Mr Hawley said in a statement at the time. “As a result of today’s plea, Mr Becker can no longer serve in any law enforcement capacity. The Knox County community is safer as a result of today’s action.”

Mr Hawley stepped down from office in January 2019 following his election to the US Senate.

His successor, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, tried to revoke Becker’s probation agreement and have him sentenced to jail for two years, after Becker was charged with illegally using a firearm to shoot quail on a highway just one week after his sentencing.

In November 2020, a judge ruled that Becker failed to complete mandatory sex offender counseling as required under his plea agreement, sentencing him to 20 days in jail.

As Missouri’s attorney general, Mr Hawley also established a Human Trafficking Task Force.

Last year, one member of the task force accused him of “putting his career before sex trafficking victims,” leveraging publicity with a focus on offenders rather than working to protect survivors, and using an “anti-trafficking platform and dedicated people as pawns to gain public recognition for himself.”

“Though we did not expect Hawley would lead every meeting, his involvement became negligible after the second time we gathered. Some of our initiatives were ignored or delayed by his absence,” Pam Hamilton wrote in a column for The Kansas City Star.

An attorney for survivors of people who claim to have been sexually abused by priests in Missouri also said Mr Hawley rejected her demands for an investigation.

“I stood outside your office with survivors of childhood sexual abuse to ask you to organize an investigation into abuses within the Catholic Church in Missouri,” attorney Nicole Gorovsky wrote in a letter to his office in August 2018.

“We asked for an investigation like the one that occurred in Pennsylvania which revealed over 300 perpetrators and likely over 1,000 victims,” she said. “You responded that you did not have the power to do such an investigation.”

But that month, Mr Hawley said he accepted an invitation from Archbishop Robert Carlson to open an investigation, saying that the church’s cooperation would allow a “thorough, fair, impartial and indeed vigorous investigation – that’s exactly what we intend to do.”

“Facts are powerful things,” he told reporters. “And what the public wants, above [all] else, is they want an accounting. They want an accounting of the facts.”

Ms Gorovsky wrote that his announcement was “exactly backward.”

“Allowing the accused wrongdoer to pick and choose what will be provided in an investigation of his wrongdoing is not an investigation at all,” she said. “It is certainly not what I was asking for as I stood outside your office … and I do not believe it is what survivors of clergy abuse want either.”

Perhaps Josh Hawley should shut his piehole?

Sarah Palin thinks she may have the right stuff to succeed Rep. Don Young, who passed away after serving as Alaska’s lone representative in Congress for 49 years.

Palin was interviewed about if she plans to run in the special election by Fox News Sean Hannity.

Hannity did not seem that familiar with the race, asking if Palin lived in Young’s district, even though Alaska only has only ever had a single, at-large seat in Congress.

Palin said she might run for the seat.

“There is a time and a season for everything,” she said. “And if this season is one where I need a more official platform to have, then yeah, I’m going to throw my hat in the ring because we need people that have cajones.”

In July of 2009, Palin “abruptly announced” she was “quitting at the end of the month,” The New York Times reported at the time.

“Ms. Palin’s announcement was another unusual marker in what has been a tumultuous year for this first-term governor since Mr. McCain turned her into a national figure overnight by surprising his own party and naming her his running mate. It also underscored the instability in the Republican Party as it tries to find a strategy and voice in the wake of losses in 2008,” The Times reported. “Quitting midterm, however, is highly unusual. It set off speculation about what led her to leave so abruptly. One interpretation among Republicans was that she had simply underscored how erratic she is as a politician.”

Marge and Lauren are going to have to move over. Palin is a much bigger national figure than they are. Could be trouble…

I guess it’s just reflexive negativity at this point but I think Biden has done a great job in dealing with this crisis in Ukraine so far. Truly much better than we could have expected.

In his big speech today he said that Putin cannot remain in power, which is a big change in rhetoric if not underlying policy. He’s going to take a lot of heat for saying it, whether it was spontaneous or not. It’s risky, for sure. I know he’s a gaffe machine but this was a very important formal speech and I kind of doubt it. They’ve been using intelligence to send messages throughout the crisis so I suspect this may have been done for a reason.

But who knows? Maybe he’s just started WWIII. I guess we’ll find out.

Anyway, here are some highlights in case you missed it. I thought it was a a very good speech.

Biden begins his speech in Warsaw by quoting Pope John Paul II

Biden on the battle between democracy and autocracy: "This battle will not be won in days or months … we need to steel ourselves for a long fight ahead."

"My message to the people of Ukraine … we stand with you. Period." — Biden

"Today, Russia has strangled democracy" — Biden

"A criminal wants to portray NATO enlargement as an imperial project aimed at destabilizing Russia. Nothing is further from the truth. NATO is a defensive alliance." — Biden

"It's Putin, it's Vladimir Putin who is to blame. Period." — Biden on the sanctions that are hurting the Russian economy

"Americans forces are not in Europe to engage in conflict with Russian forces. Americans forces are here to defend NATO allies" — Biden

Biden thanks @chefjoseandres

"Let there be no doubt that this war has already been a strategic failure for Russia. Having lost children myself, I know that's no solace to the people who have lost family" — Biden

"You, the Russian people, are not our enemy" — Biden addresses Russians

"Europe must end its dependence on Russian fossil fuels, and we the United States will help" — BIden

Biden winds down his speech by saying of Putin, "for God's sake, this man can not remain in power."

Originally tweeted by Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) on March 26, 2022.

My congressman Ted Lieu thinks it was a smart comment:

??????

I don’t know … I hope they have good reason to think so.

The following happened way back in 2019. And, as far as I remember, nobody really batted an eye. I’ve never understood why. Bill Clinton had to end his global charity when Hillary ran, and everyone said Chelsea would have to go back to school to become a kindergarten teacher or a seamstress or something, in order to avoid even the slightest whiff of conflict of interest. All associates of Clinton were required to retire completely from any kind of public life in order to assuage the critics.

Trump came in and kept his sons in charge of his global business, brought his daughter and son-in-law into the white house while they kept their hands in their family business and Trump himself spent the entire time promoting his resort properties and blatantly doing pay-to-play every weekend at his private golf clubs. Apparently there was nothing anyone could do about that.

And this? Crickets:

President Trump met last week with a delegation of hard-right activists led by Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, listening quietly as members of the group denounced transgender people and women serving in the military, according to three people with direct knowledge of the events.

For 60 minutes Mr. Trump sat, saying little but appearing taken aback, the three people said, as the group also accused White House aides of blocking Trump supporters from getting jobs in the administration.

It is unusual for the spouse of a sitting Supreme Court justice to have such a meeting with a president, and some close to Mr. Trump said it was inappropriate for Ms. Thomas to have asked to meet with the head of a different branch of government.

A vocal conservative, Ms. Thomas has long been close to what had been the Republican Party’s fringes, and extremely outspoken against Democrats. Her activism has raised concerns of conflicts of interest for her husband, who is perhaps the most conservative member of the Supreme Court.

A White House spokeswoman declined to comment on the meeting, and Ms. Thomas did not respond to an email seeking comment.

During the meeting last Thursday in the Roosevelt Room, which was attended by about a half-dozen White House aides, one woman argued that women should not serve in the military because they had less muscle mass and lung capacity than men did, according to those familiar with the events. At another point, someone said that gay marriage, which the Supreme Court determined in 2015 was the law of the land, was harming the fabric of the United States. And another attendee was dismissive that sexual assault is pervasive in the military.

The meeting was arranged after months of delay, according to the three people. It came about after the Thomases had dinner with the president and the first lady, Melania Trump, the people said.

Ms. Thomas was an ardent supporter of Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, during the 2016 presidential primaries. But she shifted her support to Mr. Trump when he became the nominee and has forcefully denounced his political critics.

Others at the meeting had also opposed Mr. Trump’s candidacy at one point.

One of them, Connie Hair, was identified by Ms. Thomas’s group as a conservative columnist when the meeting was being assembled, according to the people. In reality, she is the chief of staff to Representative Louie Gohmert, Republican of Texas. During the campaign, she had posted several comments on Twitter describing Mr. Trump as unfit for office, including calling him “certifiable” and saying he would “never be elected president.”

In the meeting, Ms. Hair described herself as a strong Trump supporter, according to those familiar with the events. Ms. Hair did not respond to an email seeking comment.

A central focus for Ms. Hair and Ms. Thomas was administration appointments that they wanted made and that they accused the president’s aides of blocking. People familiar with the situation indicated that the people Ms. Hair and Ms. Thomas wanted hired were rejected for a range of reasons, and in at least one case someone was offered a job and declined it because the position was not considered senior enough. Another complaint was that Ms. Thomas had not actually shared the full list of people to be hired, said those familiar with the meeting.

Others attending included Frank Gaffney, the founder of the Center for Security Policy who has advocated curtailing immigration and has repeatedly denounced Muslims, and Rosemary Jenks, who works for the anti-immigration group NumbersUSA, according to the people familiar with the events.

Ms. Thomas — whose group, Groundswell, was formed in 2013 to strategize against Democrats and the political left and meets weekly — joined others in prayer at the start of the meeting. Some members of the group prayed at different moments as the meeting continued. At one point, Mr. Trump pulled in his daughter Ivanka, a West Wing adviser, saying she would be beloved if she were serving a liberal president, instead of getting negative news coverage.

One attendee criticized Republican congressional leaders, saying they should be “tarred and feathered,” a person briefed on the meeting said. Mr. Trump defended the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy of California, saying that they had held strong for nearly five weeks of a shutdown, and that it was not clear what else the attendees thought they could be doing.

Ms. Thomas, who was said to have opened the meeting by informing the assembled White House staff members that she feared being open because she did not trust the people there, has long been more conservative than her husband, and has often provoked controversy.

In 2011 she formed a government affairs firm called Liberty Consulting, which drew criticism for boasting on its website that Ms. Thomas would use her “experience and connections” to help clients.

More recently, she hired as an assistant a woman fired by the conservative group Turning Point USA for texting a colleague a year earlier that “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE.” The woman, Crystal Clanton, was on the list of people Ms. Thomas’s group asked to have attend the meeting, the people familiar with the sit-down said.

She has also drawn criticism for sharing social media posts promoting conspiracy theories, including one suggesting that the billionaire philanthropist George Soros was working against Mr. Trump and that Democrats had committed voter fraud during last year’s midterm elections. Shortly before the elections, Ms. Thomas also shared a misleading post about the caravan of migrants traveling toward the United States.

Ginni Thomas is a right wingnut and so is her husband and he has a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land and very obviously puts his thumb on the scales of justice all the time.

Nov 20: Thomas spouse engages WH chief on legal strategy as Trump pursues Court hearing

Jan 21: Fmr Thomas clerk Eastman pushes memo on VP

Feb 21: Thomas dissents from Court’s rejection of Trump challenges

Jan 22: Thomas dissents on rejection of Trump’s request on records

November 2020-January 2021

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/24/virginia-thomas-mark-meadows-texts/

December 2020-January 2021

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/sullivan-eastman-memo/2021/09/29/68d93000-211f-11ec-9309-b743b79abc59_story.html

February 2021

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/clarence-thomas-voter-fraud-trump-pennsylvania.html

January 2022

NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/us/politics/trump-supreme-court-jan-6.html?ref=oembed

Originally tweeted by Robert Costa (@costareports) on March 26, 2022.

It’s outrageous, but what else is new?

Just read this thread by David Wallace Wells about what we are able to see now about the death toll of COVID 19. It will sober you up fast:

“Live long enough in a pandemic and you will see the entire narrative landscape shift, even flip, sometimes more than once.” Excess mortality data isn’t new, but the stories it tells about the global pandemic will probably surprise you. A thread.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/covid-excess-mortality.html

“The idea is simple: You look at the recent past to find an average for how many people die in a given country in a typical year, count the number of people who died during the pandemic years, and subtract one from the other.”

“The basic math yields some striking results. A remarkable excess-mortality database maintained by The Economist estimates global excess mortality at above 20 million—well more than three times the official estimate.”

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates

“As a measure of pandemic brutality, excess mortality has its limitations — but probably fewer than the conventional data we’ve used for the last two years.”

“That’s because it isn’t biased by testing levels — in places like the U.S. and the U.K., a much higher percentage of COVID deaths were identified as such than in places like Belarus or Djibouti, making our pandemics appear considerably worse by comparison.”

“By measuring against a baseline of expected death, excess mortality helps — though only somewhat — account for huge differences in the age structures of different countries, some of which may have many times more mortality risk than others because their populations are older.”

“And to the extent that the impact of the pandemic isn’t just about COVID-19 but also our responses to it — lockdowns and unemployment, suspended medical care and higher rates of alcoholism and automobile accidents — excess mortality accounts for all that, too.”

“In some places, like the U.S., excess-mortality figures are close to the official COVID data. In other places, the numbers are so different that accounting for them changes the picture of not just the experience of individual nations but the whole world…”

“…scrambling everything we think we know about who did best and who did worst, which countries were hit hardest and which managed to evade catastrophe.”

“If you had to pick a single metric by which to measure the ultimate impact of the pandemic, excess mortality is as good as we’re probably going to get.”

“So what does it say? A year ago, it seemed easy enough to divide pandemic outcomes into three groups — with Europe and the Americas performing far worse than East Asia and much of the Global South, especially sub-Saharan Africa.”

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/03/how-the-west-lost-covid-19.html

“Today, a crude count of official deaths, not excess mortality, suggests the same grouping: North America and Europe have almost identical death counts with official per capita totals eight times as high as Asia, as a whole, and 12 times as high as Africa.”

“South America’s death toll is higher still — ten times as high as Asia and 15 times as high as Africa.”

“The excess-mortality data tells a different story. There is still a clear continent-by-continent pattern, but the gaps are much smaller, making the experiences of different parts of the world seem less distinct and giving a more universal picture of pandemic suffering.”

“According to The Economist, Europe, Latin America, and North America have all registered excess deaths ranging from 270 to 370 per 100,000 inhabitants; excess mortality in Asia is estimated between 130 to 330; in Africa, the range is 79 to 220.”

“These numbers are not identical, but, all things considered, they are remarkably close together. The highest of the low-end estimates is barely three times the lowest; the highest of the high-end estimates is not even twice as high as the lowest.”

“If you adjust for age, as the Economist database does separately, the differences among continents grow more dramatic — suggesting a reversal of outcomes, rather than a convergence.”

“Outside of Oceania, Europe and North America were among the best in the world at preventing deaths among the old—several times better at protecting their elderly, of whom they had many more, than Africa and South Asia. East Asia performed better, but only slightly.”

“On per capita excess morality among the elderly, Canada is in line with China, Germany just marginally worse than South Korea, Iceland in the range of Japan.”

“By almost any metric, Oceania remains an outlier: The Economist gives the whole region an excess-mortality range of negative 31 to positive 37 per 100,000, meaning it’s possible fewer people died there than would’ve had we never even heard of SARS-CoV-2.”

(For those who may find this figure astonishing, keep in mind that for several weeks now the U.K. has been posting negative excess mortality data, as well.)

“In the country-by-country data, the divergences grow even bigger.”

Perhaps most striking is that the worst-hit large country in the world was not the U.S., which registered the most official deaths of any country but ranks 47th in per capita excess mortality, or Britain, which ranks 85th, or even India, which ranks 36th. It is Russia.”

The country that recently launched a needless war of nationalist aggression and expansion “has lost, during the pandemic, between 1.2 million and 1.3 million citizens over the course of the pandemic, a mortality rate more than twice as high as the American one.”

“Russia is not an outlier. While we have heard again and again in the U.S. about the experience of the pandemic in western Europe — sometimes in admiration, sometimes to mock — it has been eastern Europe that, of any region in the world, has the ugliest excess-mortality data.”

“This, then, is where the pandemic hit hardest — in the countries of the old Warsaw Pact and formerly of the Soviet bloc. In fact, of the ten worst-performing countries, only one is outside eastern Europe.”

“The world’s worst pandemic, according to the data, has been in Bulgaria, followed by Serbia, North Macedonia, and Russia, then Lithuania, Bosnia, Belarus, Georgia, Romania, and Sudan. (Have you read much about pandemic policy in any of these countries?)”

“Peru, which had what is often described as the most brutal pandemic in the world, ranks 11th — with the smallest gap, among those countries with the most devastating pandemics, between the official COVID data and the estimated excess mortality.”

“(You probably haven’t read much about Peru, either, but its lockdowns were severe — for months, only one member of each household was allowed out once a week.)”

“Because The Economist allows you to explore how excess mortality evolved over time, country by country, the data also clearly showcases the pandemic as a tale of two years — a mitigation year, 2020, and a vaccination year, 2021.”

“Early in the vaccine-distribution phase, with the U.K. and U.S. moving fastest, it was striking how so few of the countries that had done well in preventing spread in 2020 were doing well in providing vaccines quickly. Over the course of 2021, many of those gaps disappeared.”

“But the U.S. took the opposite course. In 2020, the U.S. had done a bit worse than average among its OECD peers. In 2021, when pandemic outcomes were often determined by the relative uptake of American-made vaccines, the U.S. did much, much worse than that.”

“In country after country in Europe, the pandemic killed a fraction as many last year as it had the year before. In the U.S., it killed more.”

“A year ago, you could defend the American record as merely below average. Today, it is cataclysmically bad, which is both outrageous and ironic, given that American vaccine innovation so helped changed the landscape for the rest of the world—the rich world, at least.”

“How did this happen? The answer is screamingly obvious, if also, in its way, confusing: The U.S. drove an unprecedented vaccine-innovation campaign in 2020, and then, in 2021, utterly failed to take advantage of its power itself.”

“But what is perhaps even more striking is that American vaccination coverage isn’t just bad, by the standards of its peers, but getting worse.”

“About two-thirds of Americans have received two shots of vaccine, a level that is in line with Israel and not far off from the U.K., though below many other wealthy countries. (And even in the U.K., vaccination was more effectively directed toward the old.)”

“But over the last six months, the country has had an opportunity to make up that gap with boosters and has simply not taken it.”

“Only 29 percent of Americans have had a booster shot of vaccine, which puts us behind Slovenia, Slovakia, and Poland and means that less than half of those people happy to be vaccinated a year ago have chosen to get a third shot through Delta and Omicron.”

“Booster campaigns seem like an obvious opportunity for easy public-health gains, yet remarkably few Americans seem to think it’s worth the trouble. Why? For everything we think we know about the pandemic and how people have responded, that one remains a maddening mystery.” (x/x)

Originally tweeted by David Wallace-Wells (@dwallacewells) on March 26, 2022.

If you have followed Marcy Wheeler‘s posts on the Jan. 6 investigations, you know she has been dismissive of complaints that Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice is doing nothing about throwing a net over Donald Trump and his White House courtiers for their part in the Jan. 6 insurrection. The DoJ is working, just slowly and methodically from the foot soldiers up to the kingpins.

Events, however, continue to erode confidence that the justice system is up to the task.

Case in point from this week (New York Times)

One of the senior Manhattan prosecutors who investigated Donald J. Trump believed that the former president was “guilty of numerous felony violations” and that it was “a grave failure of justice” not to hold him accountable, according to a copy of his resignation letter.

The prosecutor, Mark F. Pomerantz, submitted his resignation last month after the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, abruptly stopped pursuing an indictment of Mr. Trump.

There are still other investigations underway of Trump by New York Attorney General Tish James and Georgia’s Fulton County DA Fani Wallace. Even so.

News hit this week that Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife Ginni was involved (with Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows) in efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) revealed that Trump was still seeking ways to rescind the 2020 election and see himself reinstalled in the Oval Office as late as last September. Both reinforce the notion that, like Wall Street bankers, there exists a class of people in this country for whom following the law is optional. They appear the way Trump presents: untouchable.

Lack of official accountability for the untouchable class encourages numbskulls like this (below) to believe they are a law unto themselves.

After the Ginni Thomas revelations, I asked, “Why am I throwing up my hands and asking what is not broken about American justice? Is that question fair to the many dedicated public servants? No. Is it what I feel? Yes.”

David Rothkopf Friday morning expressed the same sinking feeling in a thread:

David Rothkopf

I don’t want to stir up the hornets nest of Merrick Garland defenders (yes, I know, seeing nothing is exactly what we should be seeing), but I’ve got to say, so far all we get daily is more proof of serious crimes from Trump & his bunch and so far… 

…not one single example of holding them accountable. This is true at the state and local level too. (The @ManhattanDA situation is a clear example of the wrong decision being made at the wrong time in the wrong way.) Yes, yes…don’t @Me…it all takes time. 

Yes, yes…the processes are all deeply secretive. Yes, yes…there are clues buried in the fourteenth paragraph of the twelfth page of the most recent DoJ filing that suggest that it is possible that Trump might be a person of interest in some unspecified investigation someday. 

Yes, yes…I know I’m not a lawyer and that all the lawyers and judges and former DoJ people I know and talk to regularly are wrong to be as nervous and upset as me and you, voices of the Twitterverse are right. So, let’s set all that aside. Let’s stipulate my ignorance. 

What is indisputable as of now, whatever may or may not being happening behind the scenes, is that Trump and Co. and the purveyors of the Big Lie are empowered by the current silence and inaction. 

At the same time, the people of the country, seeing the evidence and shocking stories pile up followed by months and months and months of silence and apparent inaction, are losing faith in our system of justice. 

Trump’s legacy so far is that he more than any individual in US history hast throughout his life demonstrated that the rich & powerful are, effectively, above the law, even if they are serial criminals as Trump is. Even if they have sought to undermine our entire system of gov’t. 

The inscrutability of due process aside, given the cynical politics of the GOP in our Senate and House, the political activism of the right on our courts (and then some), and the polarization and near-insanity of our state politics, people are losing faith in our system. 

The coming election is not likely to improve that situation. Victories by the GOP will elevate a party that has embraced as a leader a man who led a coup and sold out our foreign policy to the most dangerous, evil foreign leader on the planet. 

Their past behavior indicates that given more power that will further corrupt our system, gut our democracy, and place themselves above the law. Systemic corrosion will have precisely the same effect as the disinformation campaigns of Putin or Trump or the rest of the GOP. 

We will lose faith in the foundational principles and structures of our government. They will weaken and ultimately become unrecognizable. That’s the issue of the moment. We are facing a crisis of faith in our justice system of a scope that many Americans have seldom seen before. 

(Black Americans have never seen that system work. Nor have the poorest among us. This isn’t new for many.) So, leaving the reading of DoJ chicken entrails aside for the moment, let’s agree, Trump & Co. must be held accountable soon or the damage done may be irreparable. 

I’d say Amen, but it might be sacrilege.

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For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

They’d arrived in my wife’s truck and invited me to join them at a neighborhood Italian joint. We had just ordered food when our friend looked at her cell phone and exclaimed, “Uh-oh.”

“I’m panicking,” she said.

An Amazon driver just made a delivery at her house 7 min. away. Amazon’s alert arrived along with a digital photo. There sitting beside her glass storm door were two packages.

But through the storm door glass the front door appeared to be left open. She has cats. No one remembered leaving the door open, but there it was. The cats might get out.

The two bolted, jumped into the truck and took off. I asked the server to slow up the food.

Seven minutes later, they called to say that they were on they were on their way back to the restaurant. Everything at home was secure.

An additional seven minutes later, our friend explained.

The Amazon delivery driver’s photo caught the storm door glass at such an angle that it reflected the porch side wall (looking like an interior wall), making it appear in the image that the front door was not closed. This set off the frantic chain of events only made possible through fulfillment centers, package tracking, email, digital photography, and cell phone technology.

Thus does modern technology improve our lives.

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For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

Awwwww.

Can you believe this?

Former President Trump on Thursday filed a sprawling civil lawsuit against 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee (DNC), White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan and more than a dozen others alleging a vast conspiracy to undermine his 2016 presidential campaign and administration with accusations of Russian collusion.

“Acting in concert, the Defendants maliciously conspired to weave a false narrative that their Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump, was colluding with a hostile foreign sovereignty,” a 108-page complaint filed Thursday said.

“The actions taken in furtherance of their scheme — falsifying evidence, deceiving law enforcement, and exploiting access to highly-sensitive data sources — are so outrageous, subversive and incendiary that even the events of Watergate pale in comparison.”ADVERTISEMENT

The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, claims that the former president has suffered at least $24 million in damages in addition to the loss of present and future business due to Clinton, the DNC and others.

Trump alleges that Clinton, her 2016 campaign and various figures associated with it participated in a “far-reaching conspiracy” to incite a media frenzy and law enforcement investigation into his purported ties with the Russian government.

His lawsuit argues that the alleged conspiracy constituted a criminal enterprise under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

The complaint names as defendants 28 individuals and organizations, including Clinton, her 2016 campaign chairman John Podesta, the campaign’s general counsel Marc Elias, former FBI Director James Comey and others.

Clinton and several other defendants could not immediately be reached for comment.

The lengthy complaint rehashes many of the grievances Trump has repeatedly aired since the 2016 campaign. In sum, he has maintained that the various investigations into that campaign were part of a politically motivated witch hunt against him.

The lawsuit comes as Trump has voiced frustration with the progress of John Durham, the special counsel appointed during his administration to investigate the origins of the FBI’s probe of his 2016 campaign.

Durham’s probe has resulted in three indictments since it began in 2019 but has provided little evidence of a vast conspiracy to undermine Trump.

The lawyer who is representing him is the lawsuit is, shall we say, not the beat. Even Trump’s legal team can’t stand her.

I think they just want to make Clinton and the others have to spend time and money which isn’t a problem for Trump because he doesn’t pay his lawyers.