They are still reading the Alex Jones verdict.  It has cleared the $1 Billion (with a B) mark for all the Connecticut cases.

That’s all we need to know.

He’s toast and a strong message gas been sent.

Here’s my plan.

This is the headline in Newsweek and it appears to be true.

Y’all.  Florida.

I mean Cuba is close. I checked it out on the map. Or, we easily cut it off and float it over.

Now I know there are those who think we should volunteer Texas, but Texas is harder to move. A whole lot of floatation devices would be needed. And we can’t build a fence on the border so what makes us think we could build a trench.  And you’d have to get Louisiana to squench over to make make room to pull it out. And then Oklahoma would have to quit sucking and New Mexico wouldn’t have any visitors at all.  Nah, it’s Florida.

I’m sure we can get a document in order.  Trump could steer the whole shebang and then everybody is happy.

Just as a heads up – No verdict in Connecticut yet – I’m bumfuzzled. And there is a hearing in the bankruptcy court this morning.  Jones’ lawyers are all trying to kill each other in the most painful way possible.

There are any number of moments in politics when our best intentions boomerang around on us. This likely happened to Sean Hannity when he aired a private voice mail from Joe Biden to his son Hunter. Of course, this assumes that Hannity has the emotional intelligence to understand exactly what he’s done.

If you’ve been living in a cave, we can simply say that Hunter Biden has been dealing with a drug problem off and on for most of his adult life. This drug problem has caused him to be in and out of trouble and that trouble has sometimes involved his father. Of course, anyone that has an extended family knows this story all too well. There’s someone in the family that could be called the “black sheep.”

Anyone that is a mother or father spends their days and nights praying this never happens to them. If it does happen to them they pray for the kind of patience, grace, and wisdom to know how much to help, when to show tough love, and when to just accept their child as they are. The message from Joe Biden to his son is posted below.

So, what you have is a loving father who is acknowledging his son’s struggles and trying to get him to see those same struggles. It’s a father that wants his son to get help, but also to make sure his son knows that he loves him no matter what. It’s a father that admits he doesn’t have all the answers. There for the grace of God go us.

There is a passage somewhere in the Bible about living in glass houses. I’m sure that same sentiment is in nearly every holy book. Hannity’s own life could be laid open for the whole world to see and I’m sure there are parts that he wouldn’t be so proud of. In particular, the obsession with Hunter Biden and his criminality is just bizarre. No one is arguing that he skate on any of his so-called crimes. Maybe he has gotten preferential treatment over the years, but I’m sure Hannity doesn’t want us to look too closely at his own situation.

If we are looking for direct parallels we could look at TFG’s own children. It is pretty clear to everyone that is paying attention that his oldest son has some sort of problem. I’m not here to speculate because it is not my place and it directly flies in the face of the point I’m making. However, if we can see the problem couldn’t his family as well? Have they offered him the same love that Biden offered his only surviving son? We can’t know for sure, but something tells me they haven’t.

Either way, our disparate humanity demands compassion. It demands genuine empathy for those around us. We hope and pray that we never have to go through what Joe Biden has gone through. We do everything in our power to prevent it. Sometimes we succeed and sometimes we fail in spite of our greatest efforts. We can’t shield our children of every evil the world can throw at them. We are truly horrible people if we revel in someone else’s struggles.

I’m going to be posting from my iPad, which is something I do not do well. It’s amazing I can do it at all so shuddup about it.

I couple of things have been on my mind.  First of all, I have to let know that the Jones trial in Connecticut has been a goat rodeo.  There are eight families suing all at once go things can get confusing even though their lawyers have been excellent.  Mark went to Connecticut to watch for a few days and I watched online.  We talked immediately after the case went to the federal six-person jury and both of us predicted that the jury would be out a day – federal juries have to fill out all manner of confusing forms – and then come back in and award them One. Billion. Dollars.

Not so much.  After two days, the jury decided to take off three days over the weekend and they came back today.  They have sent out a slew of questions, most of which no one understands.  Everyone in the courthouse is confused about what is happening.  I follow Elizabeth Williamson on Twitter because I know her, she’s smart as the dickens, she’s in the courtroom and her book on Sandy Hook is winning all kinds of awards.

Since I’ll be in and out of pocket, you might want to follow her on Twitter.

And I sent John Fedderman $25 more today for this.

Dr. Oz is still going to be a fraud.

That’s worth a round of applause.

Earlier this week the NYTimes published an investigative story that had several revelations including an account of TFG demanding that yet another lawyer lie for him early last year that he had returned all the documents and that lawyer refusing.  More important, it’s damned likely he still has government documents somewhere else like his NY apartment, in Bedminster, or even Mar a Lago.

But the story also recounted TFG’s desire to used the stolen documents as trade bait.  The key quote:

“Mr. [TFG], still determined to show he had been wronged by the F.B.I. investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia, was angry with the National Archives and Records Administration for its unwillingness to hand over a batch of sensitive documents that he thought proved his claims.

In exchange for those documents, Mr. [TFG] told advisers, he would return to the National Archives the boxes of material he had taken to Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Fla.”

So there it is.  Not only did TFG recklessly steal top secret and other government documents, he then concocted a plan to use his unlawful possession of stolen documents as a hostage to get evidence to support his contention that the FBI was out to get him.  It’s classic mobster behavior; worse, it’s stupid, careless, and another example of the danger this man poses to not only the country but to himself.

I’ve had several theories about why TFG stole these documents and then toyed with the DOJ for over a year and a half; first, obviously TFG is a dumbass with shit for brains; second, I figured he saw value in them to sell to the highest bidder; third, he loves all the trappings of being president and continued playing Oval Office and pretending he’s still there; lastly I figured he just likes pissing off the “deep state”.  All of these theories are plausible and damned likely; what I hadn’t thought about that he believed he could use the stolen documents to steal more documents.  That act is just a glimpse into how evil TFG truly is.

Two of my favorite songs on my playlist are “Vegetable Man” and “Scream Thy Last Scream” by Pink Floyd. They were not officially released until the last decade because the band didn’t want to make them available for public consumption. They represented a time in Syd Barrett’s life when he was in a really bad way. Roger Waters said that they were akin to showing naked pictures of an aging actress.

In a similar way, saying anything about the rise and fall of Hershel Walker feels wrong in many instances. You have someone that is very clearly not all there. You can’t know whether a former athlete has CTE until you do the final autopsy, but we are about as sure about this as we can of anyone that played in the NFL.

However, Walker represents something bigger than himself. Everything old is new again in politics. Those that know U.S. history remember learning about the Know Nothing Party. The similarities don’t just end with the name. The platform is also pretty similar when we consider the brand of conservative politicians coming out these days. Give those pre-Civil War guys Twitter and 24 hour news and I imagine they would have come up with something eerily similar.

What can we say about Walker? He said he graduated with honors from the University of Georgia. He didn’t graduate. He said he was in law enforcement. He wasn’t. He fathered multiple children out of wedlock. He didn’t tell us the truth about that. The children we do know about all seem to be coming out against him.

Finally, we get the news that he funded an abortion in 2009. Yet, this is where you get into a pickle if you are a true progressive. We want people to be able to have the choice to have an abortion. So, ultimately do we care whether he funded one? The quick and simple answer is that we don’t, but that isn’t really the point. The point is that you don’t get to run on a sanctimonious platform when you have entire collection of skeletons in the closet.

Watching conservatives fumble around with representatives and candidates that are clearly intellectually deficient is hilarious on one level, scary on another, and just pitiful on the rest. Whether it’s not knowing that “wanton” murder doesn’t refer to the soup found in Chinese restaurants or watching Walker be told that the lieutenant governor said something about him, watch him ask who the lieutenant governor was, be told who he was, and then ask what that guy was currently doing.

Commenting about such things is the true no win scenario. No one should make fun of half-wits. It would be akin to making fun of someone with a physical handicap. Yet, here we are and this is the field that the GOP has laid down before us. At some point we need to put the blame on the powers that be that parade these folks out there for us to exploit and laugh at. Laughing feels utterly awful, but at a certain point you just can’t help it.