Trump’s normal response to one of his inner circle being indicted/convicted/named as one of his accomplices is, “I don’t know him, I don’t know what he does, blah, blah, blah.  It’s his trademark Throw Your Friends Under the Bus strategy.  This week, he did it again with Lev Parnas, indicted for campaign finance laws, when he started singing like a canary about his role in trying to frame Joe Biden over fabricated corruption charges.

Trump immediately declared that he didn’t know Parnas.  Sure.  He never heard of him –

President Donald Trump standing with Lev Parnas at the White House in Washington.

Here’s Trump’s normal response to being caught in a lie as applied to Lev Parnas:

Back when Ken Starr was trying to impeach Bill Clinton for getting a blow job, my Aunt Bessie was flabbergasted. “Of course he lied about sex,” Aunt Bessie proclaimed, “that’s what a southern gentleman does.”

Ken Starr and Friend

The next time I heard about Ken Starr, he had been named chancellor of Baylor University.  During his tenure, a scandal broke out.  Baylor went deeply into debt for a fancy new football stadium and drafted hot shot players right out of high school. Sounds like a plan, right?, because the hot shot players started winning and filling the expensive new stadium.

One small problem. Some of the best players began raping Baylor coeds.  In a 2017 lawsuit, victims suing the university alleged that from 2011 to 2014 at least 31 football players committed at least 52 rapes.  All the adults at Baylor refused to do anything about it.  They allowed it to continue.

The buck stops at Ken Starr’s desk.  I guess if Clinton had just been a football player instead of president.

So, today when I heard that Trump named Ken Starr to his defense team, I knew for a dead certain guaranteed fact that there is a pee-tape.

Mark my word – it’s real.  However, at this point, it may be the least disgusting thing that Trump has done.

Martha McSally, the Trumpist right winger from Arizona who former astronaut Mark Kelly is challenging, stupidly fumbled on national television this morning by insulting CNN reporter Manu Raju, when he asked her if the Senate should consider additional evidence in Trump’s impeachment trial.  Instead of just answering the question, she retorted, “Raju, you’re a liberal hack.  I’m not talking to you,” and stormed past him.

Suddenly, Mark Kelly started trending on Twitter.  Kelly is a formidable candidate, and doesn’t need her making an ass of herself on national television, but it damn sure helps.  Have a look.

This morning the GAO announced its finding that, by withholding military aid to Ukraine against the appropriation passed by Congress, Trump violated federal law.  In issuing it’s opinion, the GAO said, “OMB withheld funds for a policy reason, which is not permitted under the Impoundment Control Act.”

Cue the noise machine, which has already started.

Virginia governor Ralph Northam has declared a state of emergency in advance of a planned open carry rally in Richmond on Monday, Martin Luther King Day.  You’ll recall that the Dems took the statehouse and governor’s mansion in November, and are planning to enact common sense gun safety laws after finally ousting NRA shills who had previously controlled Virginia for years.  The response to this news by gun nuts was predictable – threaten legislators with violence if they dared do that as well as whipping up a huge rally with thousands of gun toting weirdos bussed in from all over the country galvanized by wild conspiracy theories about gun confiscations. Northam is trying to prevent the nonsense that happened at Charlottesville in 2017 when the “Unite the Right” rally turned into a melee including several so-called “militias” (they’re not) parading around playing Army dress up and confusing an already chaotic scened that resulted in one death and dozens of injuries when a white supremacist, so incensed at anti-racist demonstrators that he plowed his car into a crowd of them.

In my interactions with gun nuts I’ve always found one consistency – the level of their obsession with their “God given gun rights” is directly coordinated with their lack of qualifications to get near a firearm including criminality.  AND, these people just don’t have the common sense to understand that threatening a legislator’s or their family’s lives with gun violence is not a good way to make their case that they should be allowed to parade around in public toting an assault weapon with a loaded 30 round magazine.  It’s like trying to negotiate with a cornered badger.  There’s just no upside in even trying.

Much to Trump Brown Noser Greg Abbott’s consternation, a federal judge just blocked Trump’s cruel, idiotic and illegal executive order to keep immigrants from resettling in states or communities without prior approval of those jurisdictions.  In his order, the Maryland judge said that the order “does not appear to serve the overall public interest.”  He went further, saying,

…the order gives states and local governments “the power to veto where refugees may be resettled — in the face of clear statutory text and structure, purpose Congressional intent, executive practice, judicial holdings and Congressional doctrine to the contrary.”

The argument placed before the judge was about the Refuge Act of 1980, and argued that Trump was trying to circumvent the federal law by implementing a state by state ban.  The judge agreed:

“The objectives of this Act are to provide a permanent and systematic procedure for the admission to this country of refugees of special humanitarian concern to the United States, and to provide comprehensive and uniform provisions for the effective resettlement and absorption of those refugees who are admitted.”

One more for the good guys.