Rudy Giuliani Lev Parnas associate convicted of campaign finance charges

(Permanent music Accompaniement to the last post of the week from the Canadian living favorite of the blog)

Oh, all the chickens, Kiev and the like, are coming home to roost, it seems. First, the FBI raided the home of Oleg Deripaska, Paul Manafort’s former running buddy in 2016. Then, Friday, Rudy Giuliani’s voucher tovarich, Lev Parnas, is convicted in federal court of violating a whole truckload of campaign finance laws in the name of… well, you know. Of CNBC:

Both men were charged and convicted of using money from a Russian man named Andrey Muraviev for donations to U.S. political candidates in a purported effort to start a recreational marijuana business. Foreigners are not allowed to make political donations in the United States. Parnas, 49, was also convicted of making illegal donations to PACs that supported Republicans, committees, which included a Trump super PAC. Florida resident born in the former Soviet Union, Parnas already played a role in Trump’s first impeachment, cooperating with Democratic investigators in this case. Parnas had aided Giuliani in an effort to dig up dirt on the president Joe biden in Ukraine.

Trump had withheld Congress-approved military aid for that country while pressuring its president to investigate Democrat Biden.

I cannot speak of the possible punishment of disbelievers, known and unknown. But it is the element of corruption from the previous administration that I think is most likely to come out in its near totality. There are cooperating witnesses. It’s all about the money, which most Americans understand. And, frankly, the Volga Bagmen in Moscow don’t care if it comes out or not. It can’t touch them, and they got pretty much everything they wanted from 2016 anyway.

John Eastman, Thomas Paine of Camp Runamuck Rebellion, gave a lengthy interview to National exam in which he described his very detailed memo about how Mike Pence was able to topple the government as a mere intellectual wool-gathering exercise that was never meant to be a plan of action.

But Eastman now tells National Review in an interview that the first of two strategies Giuliani highlighted on stage – getting Pence to reject the election votes – was not “viable” and would have been “crazy” to pursue.

What makes this admission remarkable is that Eastman was the author of the now infamous legal note claiming that Pence had that same power – that the Vice President was “the ultimate arbiter” in deciding how to count the votes. of the Electoral College. The two page memo writing by Eastman proposed that Pence reject the Certified Electoral College votes and then declare Trump the winner or invalidate enough votes to send the election to the House of Representatives, where Republicans controlled the majority of delegations. This memo was first published in September in the book by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa Danger.

Yeah, that’s a remarkable admission, because, I believe, this is 100% Grade A bullshit.

“These were internal discussion notes for the legal team. I was asked to write a memo of all the available scenarios that had been offered, ”Eastman says. “I was asked to sort of describe how each of these scenarios would work, and then to orally present my take on whether I thought they were valid or not, so that’s what these notes did.” Who asked Eastman to write the first memo? “It was someone from the legal team. I just don’t remember, ”Eastman says. “It was through a phone conversation, and I went back to my phone records, and I have so many calls, I can’t tell, you know, what call it was.”

Here, see if putting your hand on this Bible right here helps your memory a little bit.

It reminds me of when, in the midst of the Watergate scandal, we learned that The Huston Plan, a plan drawn up by an ambitious White House aide named Tom Charles Huston in 1970. He called for an internal security apparatus that would destroy all provisions of the Bill of Rights. President Richard Nixon loved it and sent it to various federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Even J. Edgar Hoover turns pale. (It’s not that elements of it didn’t survive long enough to be part of what John Mitchell called “the horrors of the White House” three years later.) But that it was allowed to exist in a US administration long enough to be seriously discussed. How could officials of a so-called democratic republic even maintain this notion? This is the question that John Eastman does not answer in his semi-excuse. This is the only question worth asking.

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Choose WWOZ Weekly to click: “Royal Garden Blues” (The Paul Barbarin Jazz Band of New Orleans.) Yes, I still pretty much love New Orleans. (Also: I couldn’t find the Barbarin version so I replaced it with Louis Armstrong’s version.

Weekly Visit To Pathe Archives: Here from 1966 is the mass burial of the children killed in the horrific coal mud avalanche in Aberfan, Wales. They built a mountain of garbage on top of an area crossed by natural springs. Heavy rains on saturated soil caused the mountain to fall on the city. He buried a school and 116 children died at their desks. Queen Elizabeth II refused to come to Aberfan immediately afterwards, which she later cited as the greatest regret she had during her reign. And, just to add a note, there are millions of tons of this stuff all over Joe Manchin’s West Virginia. The story is so cool, but not when you ignore it.

Hey, nature.com, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

Most specimens were found in a narrow area and stratigraphic interval, with a few articulated skeletons clustered in clusters of individuals of approximately the same age. Our new findings indicate the presence of lifelong social cohesion and age segregation within a herd structure, in addition to colonial nesting behavior. These results provide the first evidence of complex social behavior in dinosaurs, predating previous records of at least 40 Ma. The presence of sociality in different lines of sauropodomorphs suggests a possible Triassic origin of this behavior, which may have influenced their early success as large terrestrial herbivores.

In other words, Dinos have come together to enjoy each other’s company sooner than us stupid humans ever thought they did.

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It really blows the goats. Of the bbc:

A private and anonymous collector from the United States purchased the Big John skeleton, which was on display to the public at the Drouot auction house in Paris last week. The collector was “absolutely delighted to be able to bring a piece like this for his personal use,” said Djuan Rivers, a buyer’s representative. The paleontologists who discovered Big John managed to unearth 60% of the dinosaur’s skeleton. Its 200 pieces – including the 2m wide dinosaur skull – have been painstakingly assembled by specialists in Trieste, Italy. These bones form a skeleton 8 m long by 3 m high. There are signs of damage to the skull where researchers believe the dinosaur may have been hit by another during a battle.

Hell, Big John lived then to make us happy now, not to be a gozillionaire’s garden gnome.

I’ll be back on Monday to see if any other Russians have been presented to the FBI. Wear well and play well, assholes. Stay above the snake line, wear that damn mask, and for god’s sake get the hits and boosters too.

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