Well, lookey here – Trey Gowdy, who dragged out the Benghazi investigation of Hillary Clinton for years and wasted millions of taxpayers dollars, used $150,000 more taxpayer dollars to settle a discrimination claim against him from a former employee.  Yes, this is the same Trey Gowdy who joined in with other goons in Congress to attack the FBI for…wait for it…corruption.  Maybe the FBI should take this opportunity to investigate Gowdy, eh?

So, Roy Moore is a pervert, at least as alleged now by 2 women in Alabama who claim he fondled them when he was in his 30s and they were young teens.  It shouldn’t be a surprise – think about it; it seems that EVERY guy who rails about sex is hiding his own proclivity.  In Moore’s case, apparently he likes young girls.  So, while on the Alabama Supreme Court bench he gets censured and even removed from his office for failing to enforce laws determined by the US Supreme Court.  He rants about gays, holding himself up as some kind of righteous messenger who is out to save us all from our sexual perversions.  Then this comes out.

I would expect nothing less, especially from some clown who wears a drugstore cowboy hat with his tiara.

LOL

The national poster child against the cancer of gerrymandering is Louie Gohmert. Here in Texas we call him Screwy Louie, as he is famous for babbling streams of offensive insults and nonsense.  One of his most infamous blatherings came after the tragedy at Newtown when he wistfully mused what would have happened had the school principal kept an M4 (a semi-auto rifle) in her office.  He regularly spouts this kind of bullshit.

On Tuesday, Louie Gohmert opened his mouth and again Louie Gohmert came out.  In a hearing of the subcommittee on energy and mineral resources considering a bunch of bills that essentially undo much of the regulation around oil and gas development, Gohmert testified that the oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon blowout really didn’t damage anything, that nature “does amazing things” and that on his personal trip to the Louisiana Gulf Coast he never found more than “a drop or two” of oil on the beach.  I would speculate that he never found any oil because you can’t see anything when you have your head up your ass as Gohmert often does.

The gulf blowout in 2010 was the worst offshore oil spill in history.  The well flowed  approximately 5 million barrels of oil and unmeasured billions of cubic feet of natural gas.  Much of that oil was never recovered.  Oh, and 11 men died in the blowout that caused the disaster.  Did some of the oil that came to the surface degrade naturally?  Of course, but it was a tiny amount.  What most people don’t understand is that oil that is spilled from a well in deep water reacts completely differently than oil spilled on the surface like happened during the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska.  In deep water, the vast majority of oil never comes to the surface, becoming entrained in the deep water column for God knows how long, killing marine life and polluting the ocean floor.

Of course, you wouldn’t expect Screwy Louie to understand any of that, especially since he’s an expert in only one subject, namely being a jackass on national television.  Screwy Louis Gohmert, National Embarrassment of Texas.

Hell came to a grinding halt today, frozen solid.  For the first time since Charlton Heston started screaming, “From my cold dead hands!” the NRA blinked and is endorsing “additional rules” on the sale and use of bump stocks, used to convert a merely deadly weapon into a mass murder machine.  For those who don’t know, bump stocks are devices that allow the recoil of a rifle to reset the trigger of a semi-auto weapon into full auto without taking your finger off of the trigger.  The murderer in Las Vegas had TWELVE, yes, I said TWELVE semi-auto rifles fitted with bump stocks, which were used very effectively to shoot over 500 people in about 11 minutes, killing 58 innocents.  He had a number of other weapons with him, apparently in the just in case he wanted to kill more people if needed.

Even congress is starting to come around; we’ve learned that apparently the magic number for a mass shooting is 500 in order to get a congressvarmit to do something besides look down their own trousers to make sure everything is still there.  Those little old run of the mill shootings that kill 20 to 40 victims at a time don’t seem to ring the bell, but shooting 500 damn sure does.  Republicans are falling all over themselves to ban bump stocks, but they’ll probably stop there and set a new threshold for maybe universal background checks at around 1,000 or more victims.

I’ll take what I can get, and hope the devil can’t find any ice picks.

Bruce Bartlett, Reagan’s domestic policy advisor wrote a great piece in the Washington Post yesterday which ripped away the veil from Republican tax mythology.  That mythology has been peddled to Americans since Reagan and is dependent on successfully peddling the lie that taking in less money results in revenue going up.  The tax cutting myth is a myth because it’s a lie and has always been a lie.

Low taxes became an article of faith among Republicans started by Ronald Reagan who preached tax cuts as the cure-all for the nation’s ills.  Repubs have never seen a tax cut they didn’t like and live in a world where 2-1=3.  Reagan’s tax cuts probably dampened the recovery after the years of stagflation, the recovery from which was more affected by interest rate reductions made by the Fed.

GWB was also propelled to the WH in 2000 on a tax cutting platform, and his two tax cuts accelerated the downturn of 2007 into the Great Recession that brought our economy to it’s knees.

Once again, the Repubs, now in control of Congress and the WH, have come back to the tax cut trough, peddling their same BS of how cutting taxes makes revenue to up.  They’re also patently dishonest about taxes themselves, continuously lying that the US has the highest taxes in the developed world.  They always point to statutory tax rates which bear no actual resemblance tor effective tax rates actually paid.

Bartlett makes the point that taxes don’t drive business investment.  Tax cuts don’t make revenue go up; they drive revenues down.  It’s simple.  It’s math.  Which Republicans don’t understand.

In May, two days before trial, Jeff Session’s DOJ abruptly settled a $230 million Russian money laundering case for a measly $6 million.  The case, United States v. Prevezon Holdings Ltd, alleged that Russians were using New York real estate to launder Russian money into the US.  To add just a little intrigue, the Russian attorney who discovered the fraud, Sergei Magnitsky, died in a Russian prison under mysterious circumstances.  Even more important, though, was that one of the attorneys representing Prevezon in the case was none other than Natalia Veselnitskaya…that’s right, that Natalia Veselnitskaya, who met with DJT Jr last summer promising dirt on Hillary.

But that’s not all.  The US attorney in New York who was going after Prevezon?  Correct. Preet Bharara, who Trump summarily fired earlier this year.  In describing the case before he was fired, Bharara said,

In 2007, a Russian criminal organization engaged in an elaborate tax refund fraud scheme resulting in a fraudulently-obtained tax refund of approximately $230 million  from the Russian treasury….

Members of the criminal organization, and associates of those members, have also engaged in a broad pattern of money laundering in order to conceal the proceeds of the fraud scheme. In a complex series of transfers through shell corporations, the $230 million from the Russian treasury was laundered into numerous accounts in Russia and other countries ….

PREVEZON HOLDINGS laundered these fraud proceeds into its real estate holdings, including investment in multiple units of high-end commercial space and luxury apartments in Manhattan, and created multiple other corporations, also subject to the forfeiture action, to hold these properties.

Why was Bharara fired?  We’ll never really know, but he was hot after Trump’s Russia connections and other cases involving him and his companies.

This case received little attention in May when the settlement happened, but in the wake of the firestorm around DJT Jr’s emails and meeting with Veselnitskaya last summer, Democrats in Congress are beginning to connect the dots and have now demanded disclosure from Jeff Sessions about this case and its connections to both Trump and DJT Jr.  Are all of these Trump/Russia intersections simply coinkidink?  I think not, but it will take persistence of the press and honest prosecutors to uncover it, for sure.

Drip, drip, drip.