Clarence Thomas lives like a damn rock star, and all he had to do to get it is sell out his damn country. Easy peasy.

Just now exposed, it appears that Thomas has become a jet setter because of his owners.

At least 38 destination vacations, including a previously unreported voyage on a yacht around the Bahamas; 26 private jet flights, plus an additional eight by helicopter; a dozen VIP passes to professional and college sporting events, typically perched in the skybox; two stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica; and one standing invitation to an uber-exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast.

Here’s the part you’re going love. In discussing this with legal ethics experts, one of them says, “In my career I don’t remember ever seeing this degree of largesse given to anybody,” said Jeremy Fogel, a former federal judge who served for years on the judicial committee that reviews judges’ financial disclosures. “I think it’s unprecedented.”

Largesse?  That’s the operative word here? Holy damn crap.

I wanna be honest with you, the ProPublica is long, long, long but it’s not wordy. It’s packed with descriptions of these gifts and fascinating stories of a world I didn’t know existed among billionaires.  You probably need to read it to understand just how sleazy this guy truly is.

Okay, there’s some things I just don’t understand.

My county fathers, and I do mean fathers because there is not one single female on the county’s governing body of 5 males, have decided that we need a place to seat 10,000 people in case some semi-popular band comes to town. Okay, let’s pretend we do.

So, in the heat, hurricanes, and flooding of southeast Texas they decide to build it out of glass.  On a damn rice field. Seriously. This used to be riceland.

Okay, once you get your breath back, look at what these Einsteins named it. Epicenter. Look it up.

The center part of something unpleasant.

“Taxpayers Happy Town” wouldn’t fit on the sign?

Okay, okay. I’ve got another one.

There’s a company that just got fined $1,000,000 by the Department of Justice in criminal and civil penalties for a manufactured bypass of measuring emissions standards of diesel trucks.

According to court documents, [this company] from its 2010 incorporation to April 2020 – manufactured and sold parts intended to be installed on motor vehicles, particularly diesel trucks, to enable “deleting” the trucks by removing or disabling the trucks’ emissions control systems. Various products, referred to as “delete devices” or “defeat devices,” are used in the process of “deleting” a vehicle.

And the name of the company? Sinister Mfg. Company, Inc.

No, I am not kidding.

Do they own a dictionary because I am damn sure the Department of Justice does.

Wouldn’t it have been smarter to put out a “Welcome DOJ” doormat?

I think some people are just begging for trouble.

Okay, so at Trump’s hearing the judge warned him strongly against witness tampering.

The magistrate judge handling former President Trump’s arraignment on charges related to trying to overturn the 2020 election warned him Thursday against bribing or influencing witnesses.

That was unusual because it doesn’t take a damn genius to have watched Law and Order a time or three and know you can’t go around threatening witnesses against you.

So what did Trump do? Do I even have to tell you?

I dunno, y’all, that just rubbed me all over the wrong way. Whoop-de-damn-do, Trump. Everybody knows you were talking to Mark Meadows or one of the six unnamed people in your indictment who might flip to save their own butts, but I really really triple really hope that Jack Smith thinks you’re talking to him. If so, this is gonna last about as long as a knife fight in a phone booth, and we’ll be able to bury you on all your golf courses.

.

Just a short note on something I’ve been wondering about for 24 hours.

What the H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks is a “Speaking Indictment”?

It’s a term that has been applied to Jack Smith’s 45-page (double-spaced) 1/6 indictment by newsies on the cable TV, and a term I’ve never heard of.

So I looked it up on The Google.

Quoting Wikipedia: “…a speaking indictment is an indictment that goes beyond the legally required statement of the elements of the charged offense(s) by including a narrative of the alleged underlying conduct in more detail”.

In other words, a document that is absent of legalese and weaves a story, chronologically mostly, and is eminently readable by lay people like most of us.

So if you’ve been eschewing the perusal of the hereinbefore mentioned document because law stuff is unreadable, worry not. It’s a good read.

Yes, I know most readers here have already downloaded and read the 1/6 indictment, but if you haven’t yet, scroll down to Juanita Jean’s post and grab a copy.

Decades of unbalanced coverage and a profound misunderstanding of the job of media has finally come home to roost. As you’ve probably heard by now, Donald Trump has been indicted again. I won’t belabor that point specifically as we have covered this over and over again, That’s a large part of the problem. What we have is an intersection of lack of proportion with a steady diet of misinformation to create what apparently appears to be our collective decent into nihilism.

Those are big words. That’s also part of the problem. Conservative America and conservative media have managed to pull off a dumbing down of society in general which has led to a whole separate universe. So, the House of Representatives continues to go after Hunter Biden and Joe Biden. Hunter Biden has almost certainly taken short cuts in life and traded on his name to get ahead. Of course, that pales in comparison with what the Trump children have done, but that is an example of the problem we will get to. Did Joe Biden use his influence to help his son? Perhaps he did and if he did that’s a bad thing, but we certainly haven’t seen proof of it yet.

Let’s compare that with a president that literally committed treason. Let’s compare that with his children that made money hand over fist from foreign governments while actually working in the White House. Let’s compare that with a president that has now been found liable for rape, indicted for paying off a porn star to keep the story from impacting the election, been indicted for illegally possessing documents in his bathroom, hiding it from the authorities, and apparently showing them off to any Tom, Dick, and Harry that came to see him in his office.

Anyone other than someone like Trump would be standing before a firing squad. This is not hyperbole. This is literally true. We haven’t even gotten to his efforts to subvert the election and end our democracy. We haven’t gotten to him being on voice mail openly asking the Secretary of State in Georgia to find him enough votes to win. He will literally be indicted in four different jurisdictions and will be held civilly liable for defamation in another one.

The problem is perfectly plain. We do not live in a balanced world. There is no “well your guy did some stuff so it is okay for my guy to do stuff.” Even if that were remotely true, there is no comparison between the two things. They want you to believe it. They want you to believe that all politicians are overwhelmingly corrupt. They want you to understand that Biden has committed impeachable offenses. They aren’t quite sure what yet. They can’t prove it and they’ve spent the better part of a year trying, but by God it’s true.

The problem is that it all sounds like a fantastical conspiracy theory. It sounds similar to the yarns that are spun on the right. So, it all becomes political theatre, They say stupid stuff without any facts to back it up, so the seemingly bizarre truth that happened before our very eyes has to be equally nuts. Except it isn’t. We saw it with our very eyes. We heard it plainly with our ears. We aren’t stupid. Except maybe we are. Sometimes some things are so over the top and so up front that it is nearly impossible to believe. Would someone really be that stupid to do something that blatant? Well, the answer is yes.

Jack Smith indicted Trump on 4 charges.  The good news for Trump is that none are insurrection.  The bad news is that they are all serious and provable.  There are also six others (I hope I counted that right), mostly lawyers. John Eastman and Sidney Powell are surely two of them and probably Rudy.  I hope Rudy.

Break out the champagne!

Here ya go.  Click to see the official document.