Author: clearandpresentdanger

Donald Trump receives regular briefings about several legal cases that appear to be closing in around him. At Mar-a-Lago, he has taken to griping about the man overseeing two chief federal inquiries, special counsel Jack Smith.

Trump has also been “keeping tabs” on a contingent of aides that have testified in front of two grand juries convened in the inquiries Smith is conducting into Trump’s handling of highly sensitive documents and his attempt to subvert the 2020 election.

Silicon Valley Bank on Friday paid out annual bonuses to eligible U.S. employees, just hours before the bank was seized by the U.S. government, Axios has learned from multiple sources.

They went ahead with collecting their bonuses, just as the run on their bank reached the crisis stage.

State of play: An unknown number of SVB employees were emailed by the FDIC on Friday evening, offering them employment with the remnant organization for the next 45 days.

• The employees would be compensated 1.5x times their normal salaries, while hourly workers would receive 2x their normal wages for overtime.
• An FDIC spokesperson tells Axios: “Without commenting on salaries, it’s our standard practice to ask retain [sic] bank employees to assist with an orderly transition as part of our resolution process.”

Bankster rules: ‘Heads, you lose, Tails, we win’

Kevin McCarthy had long dreamed of being speaker of the House, and in January he finally held the gavel in his hand. Granted, it took 15 humiliating votes (and a near fistfight), making secret deals with Freedom Caucus holdouts, and sucking up to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, not to mention handing over most of the power of the speakership to the most extreme elements of his party … but he did get a really nice chair. And the gavel.

So, what is the result of that very public self-abasement? A gift to Democrats that just keeps giving and giving. Let’s recap some highlights from the first two months with McCarthy at the helm.

Normally when grading a speaker’s leadership, one would start with legislative accomplishments. But we are talking about McCarthy here, so let’s instead begin with the hearings being held by the maniacs he handed plum committee assignments to.

For example, a vital oversight hearing to finally learn why a social media company kept Republicans from seeing pictures of Hunter Biden’s penis, prompting a group of former Twitter executives to be hauled in and accused of pedophilia, all while getting yelled at for having community moderation, not to mention being threatened with prison time for unspecified crimes. Sadly for Republicans, the most memorable moment was when we learned that Donald Trump was really mad about a celebrity being mean to him on Twitter, with this memorable exchange being officially entered into the Congressional Record:

NAVAROLI: Would you like me to give the direct quote?

FROST: Yeah.

NAVAROLI: Please excuse my language. This is a direct quote, but Chrissy Teigen referred to Donald Trump as a “pussy ass bitch.”

A moment in congressional hearing history unmatched since Watergate, when Alexander Butterfield admitted that Richard Nixon had a recording system in the Oval Office.

Republicans promise that there are plenty more hearings coming down the pike. We can only hope.

More recently, perhaps upset that his House colleagues were grabbing all the headlines, McCarthy decided to step into the spotlight … by giving Tucker Carlson “exclusive” access to 41,000 hours of security footage from the Jan. 6 insurrection, never mind the security concerns. When Carlson aired cherry-picked clips and described the rioters as persecuted tourists, the blowback was immediate. And while McCarthy has tried to defend his decision in the name of “transparency,” the only thing he accomplished was putting the violent attack back into front-page news. And as an added bonus, his new best friend, Greene, is promising to lead a congressional delegation to a Washington, D.C., jail to visit Jan. 6 defendants to expose the “human rights abuses” being perpetuated against those poor, innocent victims. So well played, Mr. Speaker.

In all fairness to McCarthy, there have been legislative victories. Granted, they’ll never see the light of day in the Senate, but an A+ for effort. For example, right out of the gate the Republican-controlled House passed a bill to roll back $72 billion in funding from the IRS—a cut the Congressional Budget Office determined would cost more than $114 billion. They followed that up with the passage of the “Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act”—a bill so extreme that voters in Montana rejected a similar measure last November—as their first step toward the ultimate goal of a national abortion ban. Way to read the room. And coming soon are their plans to burn down the economy, burn down the planet, and if we’re really lucky, a vote to burn us all with a 23% national sales tax. Good times.

When the “red wave” never materialized in the 2022 midterms, McCarthy made a decision to relinquish whatever ethics and morals he had left, preferring to cave to the extremists in his party, all in pursuit of the speaker’s gavel. What he really handed over was a gift to Democrats.

As we approach the 2024 elections, attacks on abortion, human rights, the economy, and the planet (along with endless hearings for the airing of grievances) are the only accomplishments that McCarthy will be able to point to as “accomplishments.” And Democrats will be right there, pointing out those very same things.

In a new book one of the 19 children who were the center of the popular Christian reality show which eventually was rebranded as “19 and Counting,” recounts growing up in the highly restrictive home of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar and how she has made a major move to separate herself from what she called an “unhealthy version” of Christianity.

In an interview with the New York Times to discuss her book “Becoming Free Indeed: My Story of Disentangling Faith from Fear,” Jinger Vuolo describes what the Times calls the “darker side” of growing up Duggar.

According to the now 29-year-old whose family’s world was rocked when brother Josh was accused of molesting his sisters and then later sent to jail for possession of child pornography, she lived in fear of doing anything outside the lines of what the family permitted in their tightly orchestrated world that was shared with their fans.

As the Times Ruth Graham wrote, “Even after the image began to crumble, the family has maintained a largely united front. No other siblings have spoken as critically about the family’s theology and values as Mrs. Vuolo. With an online following that includes 1.4 million followers on Instagram, her declaration of independence is being closely watched as a high-profile example of re-examining one’s own religious upbringing.”

Speaking with Graham, Jinger Vuolo explained, “I was just so crippled with fear, and I didn’t know why,” with the Times report adding, “She described herself as a ‘serious rule-follower,’ who took to heart her family’s admonitions to dress in long skirts, avoid rock music and date only under parental supervision. In Mrs. Vuolo’s world, it was never a question that she would bypass college, marry a man approved by her parents and devote her life to parenting and home-schooling.” (Bypass college, have kids, home-school them — and produce more kids who bypass college and home-school their kids and after 2 or 3 generations, you have truly ignorant kids producing more truly ignorant kids.)

In the interview, she discussed the influence of Bill Gothard, who was later accused of sexual harassment, on her family’s lifestyle, telling the Times, “That was all I ever knew. His words, in my mind, were almost the words of God.”

With that in mind, in her book, she writes that she is in the process of “disentangling,” as she separates “the truth of Christianity from the unhealthy version I heard growing up.”

The report goes on to note that she claimed that “she hoped the book, and her ordinary life itself, would show her friends and family who still follow the teachings of her childhood that there’s another way.”

“Even though you’re told your life is going to fall apart if you leave, it’s not. You don’t have to even lose your faith in God,” she explained.

You can read more here and watch her describe her upbringing below or at the link:

The owner of this blog was born in rural Mississippi and spent about 1/3 of his life in East Tennessee and Southern West Virginia.  He has a PhD in Whitetrashology and knows white trash when he sees it . . . much of his extended family is white trash.

And now we have proof the Republican Parity is white trash.

FIRST.  Sarah Huckabee Sanders — governor of Arkansas and a proud graduate of Ouachita Baptist College — just signed a bill legalizing child labor for kids as young as 14.

Here’s a pic of Sanders displaying her stupid shit-eating grin after signing the pro-child labor bill into law — notice the parents are the only ones smiling, licking their lips over the money the kids can bring in by putting them to work instead of wasting their time in school.

SECOND.  As reported earlier here, Rep. Lauran Boebert announced that she will soon be a grandmother — because her 17-yr-old son knocked up his 16-yr-old girlfriend (when she was 15) — the age of consent in Colorado is 17.  Boebert herself has a string of DUI and her husband was arrested for exposing himself to teenaged girls in a local bowling alley more than once.  The 17-yr-old son was arrested a few times for terrorizing the neighborhood by racing his 4-wheeler through lawns.

And that, friends, is today’s Republican Party:  Young boys at labor and young girls in labor.

Trump’s supporters do not measure his success by what he does FOR them.

No — instead, they measure his success by what he does AGAINST people they don’t like.

This is why they see him as successful.  This is why they will never abandon him.  His tormenting and attacking others is what makes Trump’s supporters happy.

Trump supporters are sick, unhappy, negative people who take delight in “sticking it to” someone else.  Does not matter how wretched their sad, meaningless lives are, as long as “owns the libs” or “sticks it to” the people they hate, they love him.

How sad.

Every night, Fox TV personalities put on makeup, get dressed up, and read fairy tales to their audience.

It’s a Drag Queen Story Hour for Republicans.

They had all these grandiose ideas about how they were going to show their people “the other side” of the story about the January 6th insurrection. They created a Weaponization Committee to prove it was all politics and nothing criminal ever happened.

They called the Twitter executives before them to prove they were biased against the Republicans and supportive of the Democrats. That backfired rather dramatically. The exact opposite was proven.

The Chairman, Jim Jordan, doesn’t have the courage to tell his people that there are no bullets in his weapon. He is shooting blanks.

Likewise, the move by Speaker McCarthy to give Tucker Carlson of FOXNews access to all the video files, was nothing but an act of desperation. They know there is no evidence to prove their case. They are only trying to kill time and keep the hounds from the door.

Republicans in the Senate have mostly decided to follow Mitch McConnell and admit that January 6th was an attack upon our Capitol and our democracy. Several of them finally spoke out in the last couple of days.

Republicans are backing themselves into a corner from which there is no exit.

You will not believe this . . . but it is for real.

One of the most stunning revelations from Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News has been the fact that Trump attorney Sidney Powell got her ideas about fraud in the 2020 election from a woman who believes that the wind sends her messages.

The identity of this mystery woman has remained a mystery — until now.

The Daily Beast’s Will Sommer tracked down Powell’s mystery source and found that she is a Minnesota-based “cactus artist” named Marlene Bourne, who thinks that she could be a ghost after seemingly surviving an “internal decapitation.”

During the interview, Sommer asked her to elaborate on her claim that “The Wind tells me I’m a ghost,” to which Bourne responded by asking Sommer if he believes in telepathy.

Bourne says that she believes she can receive hidden messages embedded in movies, song lyrics, and even conversations from strangers in the supermarket, and that she decided to email Powell one day because she was “on a roll” in using her powers to uncover the purported truth of election fraud in 2020.

“It’s just really interesting where I’ll have the TV on, and I’ll hear a word or a person’s name, and for whatever reason I can’t explain it, it’s going to compel me to look it up online, I’ll do a little digging,” she tells Sommer. “Instead of saying I rely on my intuition, I say ‘the wind’ is talking to me. It’s just a fun way of living my life, don’t you think?”

In addition to her conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, Bourne also thinks that the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered as part of a human hunting expedition carried out by globalist elites at Bohemian Grove.

“What’s one way to get rid of a Supreme Court justice in order to get the kind of people that you want on it?” she asks Sommer rhetorically. “Hunting.”