Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Good lord, these people are nuts.

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Somebody needs to explain to DeSantis that nobody needs to do anything to make him look bad.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires Republicans to act in good faith.

Let there be snark.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

People are complicated. Love is not.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

I’m just a talker, trying to find a channel!

Battle won, war still ongoing.

We won’t go back.

Bad news for Ron DeSantis is great news for America.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Friday Night Open Thread: Project Veritas, Going Through Some Things

Friday Night Open Thread: Project Veritas, Going Through Some Things

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It won’t bring back ACORN, but any day where James ‘JOKe3’ O’Keefe III and his merry band of Repub ratf*ckers come under legal scrutiny is a pretty good day for me.

Due props to The Nation for getting there first:

… While the exact nature of the investigation is not yet public, the timing would suggest that it relates to O’Keefe’s alleged financial improprieties during his tenure as the group’s chairman and CEO. Back in February, O’Keefe was accused of spending “an excessive amount of donor funds in the last three years on personal luxuries” by the conservative nonprofit’s own board of directors, amid their very public feud over the management and future of Veritas. Westchester DA Miriam Rocah’s probe follows a raft of civil lawsuits, criminal investigations, and six-figure court losses that have trailed the group under O’Keefe’s leadership—including a still-active federal investigation into the theft of property belonging to President Biden’s daughter Ashley Biden…

Attorneys for Project Veritas also filed a civil complaint against O’Keefe in federal court this past May, accusing the ostensible investigative reporting outfit’s original hidden-camera sting artist of breaching his contract and fiduciary duties to the group, among other counts. Despite that pending litigation, made public alongside a detailed new timeline reiterating the board’s own version of its disputes and grievances with O’Keefe, Veritas says that the organization did not prompt the Westchester DA’s investigation into its former leader via a formal criminal referral…

… O’Keefe has made a name for himself by attempting to unearth further supposed malfeasance by liberal activists, politicians, and institutions—as well as by his perceived foes in the establishment media and Big Tech. Multiple people caught up in O’Keefe’s investigations have lost their livelihoods in the frequently incoherent and often inaccurate publicity maelstroms that have followed the typical Project Veritas exposé: nonprofit workers, Obamacare navigators, NPR executives, public school teachers, and news media employees among them.

In October 2021, a federal judge finally stated the obvious about O’Keefe’s latter day Nixonian dirty tricksters, declaring that it was acceptable for litigants to refer to Project Veritas in open court as a “political spying operation.”…

Following O’Keefe’s attempt to unilaterally fire Veritas Chief Financial Officer Tom O’Hara, in contravention of the 501(c)3’s bylaws, and O’Keefe’s own surprise resignation this past February, the Veritas board published a preliminary tally of its former leader’s financial misdeeds.

Pending a “third party investigative audit,” the board accused O’Keefe of spending “$14,000 on a charter flight to meet someone to fix his boat under the guise of meeting with a donor,” blowing over $150,000 on high-end limo services, and taking thousands of dollars more for personal DJ equipment. O’Keefe, they said, also requisitioned $60,000 for “dance events,” including the production of a semi-autobiographical pop music celebration of his life in muckraking: the Project Veritas Experience. Such self-indulgent expenditures would be what’s known within the Internal Revenue Code for tax-exempt 501(c)3s as “inurement.”…

It’s unclear how this parallel audit, or the group’s new civil complaint against O’Keefe, will aid or hinder the Westchester DA’s criminal investigation already underway. One former PV executive says that the DA sent a request to Veritas for “all financial docs” relevant to the case back in the second week of April—and another long-serving senior-level member of the group confirmed, saying, “We have complied and given them information.” In all cases, these sources close to Veritas would speak only on the condition of anonymity, citing either legal exposure from the group’s onerous use of nondisclosure agreements or physical threats made by O’Keefe’s incensed fanbase—or both.

Compounding all this scrutiny on O’Keefe’s past financial behavior, Veritas board member Matthew Tyrmand—the far-right Polish nationalist, Steve Bannon protégé, and alleged architect of O’Keefe’s ouster, according to O’Keefe’s diehard defenders—resigned last month…

O’Keefe was lucky in his timing when the Great ACORN Drama broke, and he’s kept afloat on the rich right-wing grifter tide ever since through a combination of media-friendly ‘dramatics’ and a Gish gallop of dishonesty at every turn — you couldn’t get a grip on one thread of malfeasance without a dozen squirmy little monsters & malefactors dropping out of the web. But there are far bigger and more professional grift-groups roaming the ‘conservative’ networks these days (*cough* TFG *cough*). When he was fired / jumped ship from Project Veritas back in February, seemed pretty clear Jimmy wanted to get ahead of the prosecutorial pitchforks & torches by hiving off a ‘new’, ‘totally different’ grifteration… but, Murphy willing, he may just have made too many enemies among his PV running buddies to slide out with a tap on the wrist, this time.

The Associated Press:

… The organization [PV] sued O’Keefe in May, accusing him of breaching his contract with “incredibly troubling workplace and financial misconduct,” including screaming at colleagues, exposing employees to obscene messages and having staffers run errands for him, such as picking up laundry and cleaning his boat.

Among O’Keefe’s lavish spending, the organization alleges, were: $10,000 for a helicopter flight from New York to Maine; more than $150,000 on private car services over an 18-month span; and expensive stays in luxury hotel suites while other employees were forced to stay in budget accommodations.

According to the lawsuit, Project Veritas’ board had intended to reinstate O’Keefe from his suspension “with appropriate safeguards,” but ultimately terminated his employment in May after he claimed in media interviews that the organization had fired him to appease a pharmaceutical company over its reporting on COVID-19…

Neither Project Veritas nor any staffers have been charged with a crime [*], and the group has said its activities were protected by the First Amendment.

*Yet.

Vanity Fair: “James O’Keefe Is Under Investigation and Project Veritas Is Finally Going to S–t”

… O’Keefe was removed from his leadership role with Project Veritas in February, after employees signed a joint letter accusing him of being “a power-drunk tyrant” who allegedly wasted company funds on personal expenses and was supposedly “outright cruel” to colleagues. Project Veritas later sued O’Keefe for alleged financial impropriety, and the District Attorney in Westchester, New York has opened an investigation into him, the Nation reported this week.

But employees who remained at Project Veritas said the company’s post-O’Keefe era wasn’t so great either. Staffers who were terminated this week complained that Project Veritas’ new CEO, Hannah Giles, struggled to fundraise and to articulate a clear mission for the company…

Project Veritas terminated five employees on Monday and 20 on Thursday, according to two former employees who were laid off. “We went from 43 to 18,” one of those former employees told The Daily Beast…

After O’Keefe’s ouster, Giles had been a promising candidate to return Project Veritas to conservatives’ favor. She co-starred in a 2009 sting video O’Keefe produced against the group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). In the video, Giles posed as a sex worker and O’Keefe as a pimp soliciting money. The clip catapulted O’Keefe to conservative stardom…

The optimism soon soured. Two recent Project Veritas employees accused Giles and her inner circle of being inefficient fundraisers, and of sending employees to chase impossible tips on stories whose subjects never materialized…

The differences extended to editorial decisions, including Giles’ alleged emphasis on a document cache that colleagues believed to be little more than a nothingburger. Recent employees claimed Giles had represented the documents as containing proof that China was manufacturing a bioweapon…

From what I can garner on twitter — not gonna befoul my beautiful mind digging into other RW sources — the usual wingnut mob is predictably ABSOLUTELY FURIOUS!!!! about this whole mishegas. They’re slightly handicapped, at this point in time, because they haven’t yet decided whether That Giles beyotch set him up!, or Biden’s DoJ minions at it again!, or (I suspect this one has legs, because QAnon) Proof that Big Pharma and the ChiComs are about to release another vaxx-based bioweapon!!!. I’m sure the leading Very Serious Media Mouthpieces will have the narrative smoothed out in time for the Sunday morning talk shows. (And it will be bad news for Democrats / good news for TFG, too also.)

The career arc of Sarah Palin should’ve warned Giles that ‘Conservatives’, as they are now, would never accept a mere female as the head of a proper conservative grift operation. A pretty face is all very well on the promotional material, but when it comes to the important things like money / power, one Y chromosome is among the absolute minimum requirements for leadership. I *do* hope that, since she’s been a JOKe3 ‘partner’ for so long, she’s been smart / self-aware enough to have collected enough evidence to bury her business ex under the jail… because why not be a Friday-night optimist, in a deeply Cynical way?

Reader Interactions

160Comments

  3. 3.

    MagdaInBlack

    My favorite Sociology prof left teaching to work for ACORN. I don’t know where he is now, but I do know this is making him smile.

  4. 4.

    SpaceUnit

    I had an epiphany today while watching a clip from 60 Minutes.  TFG is absolutely fucked down in Georgia.  It’s going to be Republican government officials that bury that son of a bitch.

    I’d seen it before but hadn’t really considered it in the context of an actual trial.

    He’s so fucked.

  7. 7.

    NotMax

    Loony, loonier, looniest.

    One of the featured speakers at Lindell’s wackadoodle thing this week was Emerald Robinson, who proved herself too chock full o’ nuttiness for Newsmax back in 2021.

  14. 14.

    Quaker in a Basement

    That guy is #4 on my list of conservative assholes I’d like to see in prison, behind Stone, Giuliani, and you=know-who.

  17. 17.

    RevRick

    Have you seen the commercials for Americans for Prosperity? They are what I suspected: a front for hack rightwing economic policies.

    Their answer to climate change? Screw the kids and grandkids and produce and burn more fossil fuels. Let the world burn as long as billionaires can add to their I’ll-gotten wealth.

  23. 23.

    RaflW

    Besides the obvious of calling it Project Very-TAAS, since it’s as reliable and ethical as the Russian state news organ, I’m certainly happy to see yet another GOP-aligned p.o.s. having some accountability.

    Pretty amazing how the Brookses, Douthats and so on never seem to put 2 + 2 (and 2 more, and 2 more after that…) together to realize the whole thing, back to McCord, Hunt, Atwater and right through to Manafort & Stone has been bamboozlers and outright lawbreakers.

  24. 24.

    bbleh

    Wait … what?  A paragon of honesty like James O’Keefe, accused of embezzling funds from his right-wing affinity fraud operation campaign for truth and good government??  It’s unpossible!

  25. 25.

    Scout211

    It’s no wonder that they are running out of money. I’m thinking that the times have changed politically so much that there really is no need for a gotcha-type private organization to expose what they’d like people to believe are Democrats’ underhanded schemes, fraud and malfeasance.

    The Republican House leadership does that now all on their own.

  27. 27.

    Scout211

    @bbleh: And as TIFG says, “if you’re famous they let you do it.”

    I guess O’Keefe wasn’t quite as famous as he thought he was, the dance video notwithstanding.

  28. 28.

    RaflW

    Ahem.

    The career arc of Sarah Palin should’ve warned Nikki Haley (currently in 5th place behind four men in RCP’s aggregate) that Conservatives, as they are now, would never accept a mere female as the head of a proper Republican presidential ticket.

    Heck, that RINO squish Mike Dense is ahead of Nikki!

  29. 29.

    BeautifulPlumage

    I can’t believe the board let him get away with that spending shit. They had to have known, or were completely incompetent.

  31. 31.

    RaflW

    @Scout211: “The Republican House leadership does that now all on their own.”

    With exactly the skill, deep research and panache of a Project V. ‘sting’, to boot!

  37. 37.

    Jackie

    @SpaceUnit: Watching that brought back the stunned shock of listening to that recorded phone call when it was first released. Whenever the Fulton County trial finally happens, the jurors listening to that phone conversation – many maybe for the first time – will be stunned. There’s no other adjective that encompasses the reaction to hearing that phone call for the first time. Other adjectives will follow; such as disgust, anger, shock, dismay… but stunned will be the first.

  39. 39.

    Dan B

    I thought I read that O’Keefe had an Only Fans account.  If so then sexual assault might be on the list.

  41. 41.

    BC in Illinois

    @RevRick:

    Have you seen the commercials for Americans for Prosperity? They are what I suspected: a front for hack rightwing economic policies.

    “Americans for the Prosperity of Charles Koch and Family”

  42. 42.

    SpaceUnit

    @Jackie:

    Yep.  I think Fani Willis could get a conviction with nothing else but those two officials’ testimony.  But she’ll have a whole lot more.  He’s screwed.

  43. 43.

    Villago Delenda Est

    O’Queef doesn’t have an ethical bone in his body. It’s no surprise that he is accused of neglecting his “fiduciary duties”. He’s just another reactionary grifter.

  46. 46.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @RaflW: Pretty amazing how the Brookses, Douthats and so on never seem to put 2 + 2 (and 2 more, and 2 more after that…) together to realize the whole thing, back to McCord, Hunt, Atwater and right through to Manafort & Stone has been bamboozlers and outright lawbreakers.

    Their ideological blinders prevent that from happening.

  48. 48.

    DougL

    @WaterGirl: I was there when it happened. I worked for Alliance for Justice at the time when the ratfucking video came out of the Acorn employee advising a client in such a way it could be construed to be enabling domestic terrorism. We partnered with Acorn to rally a defense but the fix was in so quickly. Total bs but congressional Dems and liberal funders could not throw Acorn under the bus fast enough. It was one of the most depressing episodes of my 3-decade long career in progressive advocacy groups. I’ve always had nothing but contempt for 0’Keefe and his project bs. Still, you can’t ignore how effective the monied right is in using people like him and creating mountains of bullshit we have to fight through to thwart any progress.

  53. 53.

    wjca

    He’s just another reactionary grifter.

    Just remember, every dollar ripped off from organizations like Veritas is a dollar less for them to spend on their primary objective of disinformation.  I’d almost rather he got to keep ripping them off for a couple more years.  Now those donations will just go to some other scum outfits.

  54. 54.

    BeautifulPlumage

    OT the paperwork goddesses hate me this week: I finally got the last form I needed to transfer the home title. I drove into Seattle this am and got the ‘recording’ section done. A lot of other Services are in the same place, so I was sent to the Dept of Licensing window for the final step….tadah – the computers for the whole state are down, no idea when they’ll be back up. I checked a couple times before I drove home and no luck. Now I need to plan another trip (gas, parking) to try to get this transaction done. grrrrrrrrrrrrr

  55. 55.

    smith

    @wjca:  I’d almost rather he got to keep ripping them off for a couple more years.

    The ideal outcome would be him embezzling them into bankruptcy, and then he goes to prison for it.

  59. 59.

    karen marie

    sending employees to chase impossible tips on stories whose subjects never materialized

    This made me laugh out loud.

  61. 61.

    Mr. Bemused Senior

    @WaterGirl: [obligatory Wire reference omitted]

    It is amazing, isn’t it? It’s like they never heard of recordings. Or Ollie North [e-mail server backups].

    Come to think of it, Project Veritas was in the recording business. [scratches head]. Is a puzzlement.

  63. 63.

    BeautifulPlumage

    @WaterGirl:

    .@Jackie: 

    It’s so minor but sooo annoying. I’m only 30 minutes from downtown but everything is more expensive there (parking fees & finding spots during the summer tourist season).

  65. 65.

    Jackie

    Off topic, but is something going on with RawStory? They haven’t updated since early afternoon (PT.) They’re not my primary source, but I do check them regularly to seek out other sources.

    They’ve been frozen on Santos’ claiming “everybody lies on their resume.”

  66. 66.

    smith

    @BeautifulPlumage:  It’s weird — they walk around in a state of deep paranoia, convinced that  powerful, shadowy forces are out to get them, but then they do their criming as if they were untouchable.

  67. 67.

    Mr. Bemused Senior

    @Jackie: They’ve been frozen on Santos’ claiming “everybody lies on their resume.”

    Well, to be fair, that is a show stopper.

  71. 71.

    opiejeanne

    @WaterGirl: I sure remembered that differently. I thought the pimp and working girl routine was what he tried at a Planned Parenthood, but I was wrong.

  72. 72.

    BeautifulPlumage

    @opiejeanne: they had totally stereotypical outfits in the video I remember. Now that we know J’okeef is a frustrated entertainer the outfits make more sense. It was definitely ACORN.

  73. 73.

    wjca

    @smith:

    It’s weird — they walk around in a state of deep paranoia, convinced that  powerful, shadowy forces are out to get them, but then they do their criming as if they were untouchable.

    Just brainstorming here.  But perhaps they figure the shadowy forces will only come after them for things done in secret.  So doing them on camera becomes protection.

    Sure, it’s ridiculous.   But so is how they behave.

  82. 82.

    BeautifulPlumage

    @opiejeanne: exactly! Did I tell you about the friend who married a woman from LA and they got him the bright yellow suite to wear around Las Vegas for his bachelor party! He’s tall & skinny and it fit great.

    ETA the photos rock

  83. 83.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    How is the Oklahoma thing not in there? That was my favorite weird grift of O’Keefe’s. Here’s one mention.

    In November, the nonprofit was legally obligated to report that O’Keefe, as the company’s executive, received $20,512 in “excess benefits” in 2021. The filings were posted by Hawaii’s Tax & Charities Division.

    Project Veritas’ executive director, Daniel Strack, later told The New York Times through a spokesperson the money was used to “accommodate” the CEO at a production of “Oklahoma!” in Roseland, Virginia, in which O’ Keefe played a lead role.

  84. 84.

    TS

    @SpaceUnit:

    I’d seen it before but hadn’t really considered it in the context of an actual trial.

    In the world down under, the video you linked can’t be seen – so I went to this one

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW_Bdf_jGaA

    which is the full call (1 hour). After noting everyone who is there Trump starts by saying how it’s obvious he won in Georgia

    when we go over some of the numbers – we won, very substantially, you can even see it by rally size, we got 25 – 35000 people per rally

    So rally size it is that determines who won an election SMH.

  86. 86.

    PaulWartenberg

    I’ve been going back through my personal political blog, getting to the stuff I wrote in 2009 and wondering about several of the blogs I enjoyed that stopped updating that year or soon after (by 2013 or so). Balloon Juice and Digby’s Hullaballoo seem to be the last ones standing from those years.

  87. 87.

    Redshift

    Hey, WG, I missed the earlier general news thread, but I have a response to this that I didn’t see anyone else mention:

    edit: April of 2026. We will surely find out that the choice of date has some significance that we will all find offensive in nature.

    It’s not about the date, but via Jay Kuo’s substack, the intro to TFG’s lawyers’ motion requesting that date has a long quote (with a citation) about how not giving them sufficient time is “not to proceed promptly in the calm spirit of regulated justice but to go forward with the haste of the mob.”

    It’s a quote from the Supreme Court opinion in the case of the Scottsboro Boys.

    Is that offensive enough for you?

  88. 88.

    smith

    Grifting has gotten to be so on-brand for right wingers by now it would be shocking to find an honest one.

  89. 89.

    danielx

    Unfortunately, that picture of James O’Keefe wearing his pimp outfit is something I will never be able to unsee.

  98. 98.

    NotMax

    Food for thought. (Emphasis added.)

    Protecting the Constitution from Trump

    Insurrectionists are ineligible to serve without congressional amnesty. Here’s how states can enforce this.
    [snip]
    …The authors explain, for example, that Section Three applies to all insurrections, not just the one led by Jefferson Davis. They demonstrate that no act of Congress is required to enforce Section Three. And they observe that no criminal conviction or charge is required for a Section Three disqualification. Source

  99. 99.

    SpaceUnit

    @TS:

    He dug himself a hole with that call.  God help me, but I’m actually starting to believe he might face some consequences.

  100. 100.

    Steeplejack

    @Yarrow:

    Thank dog! I was getting so strung out that in my crazier moments I was halfway thinking about getting a Twitter account. There are still accounts that I want to follow on that godforsaken site.

  101. 101.

    Omnes Omnibus

    Operation Free Jiminy has succeeded. The cricket that got into my place a couple of days ago and has been chirping like crazy has been trapped and then released unharmed into the wild.

  106. 106.

    Edmund dantes

    @WaterGirl: cause a lot of Dems were still scared of their shadows back then. And we still had a lot of stupid ones that thought they would look sensible being the “adults”. Thankfully most of that has been driven out of the party ( the joe Lieberman types self selected out) and the remaining Dems from that era learned from their mistakes.

  109. 109.

    Ken

    @Spanky: More likely third cowboy from the left.

    And I suspect most of the money was to buy him the part, like in the old cliché where the backer asks the director to find a small part for his “niece”.

  110. 110.

    Geminid

    @Spanky: Roseland is a very pretty place in Nelson County, about 45 miles south of Charlottesville, but I never heard of it having a theatre scene. Bluegrass, maybe.

  111. 111.

    Geminid

    @Ken: You could probably buy a part in a musical staged in Roseland for a bag of good weed. Most of that 20 grand likely ended up in O’Keefe’s pocket.

  113. 113.

    wjca

    @HumboldtBlue:

    East Bay police departments are going through some things. FBI arrested 10 officers from two departments

    What they are going thru is a very long overdue housecleaning with high pressure hoses.  I think there was an impression, from the outside around here, that there were problems.  Serious problems even.  But I don’t think people outside realized it was nearly as bad as it now looks.

  117. 117.

    a thousand flouncing lurkers (was fidelio)

    @Lyrebird: For those who do baseball, it’s time for the Little League World Series. Here’s highlights from the Friday afternoon game between Nolensville, TN (back for the third year in a row) and Smithfield RI. They’re known locally as Stella and the Fellas, for their pitcher, Stella Weaver—she pitched a shutout in the regional playoff game against the Alabama team.

  121. 121.

    Steeplejack

    @RaflW:

    You have to click on through to get a specific video link to give us. A Google search link just sends us to a possibly random search page that might not have the same results. And we can’t tell which video you mean.

  122. 122.

    Geminid

    @Geminid: Roseland, Virginia is not even a town, but there is a large brewpub there owned by Devil’s Backbone Brewing Company. Mega-brewer InBev bought them out in 2016). That must have been where the musical was staged.

  127. 127.

    Steeplejack

    @NotMax:

    Eh, all too many of these craft breweries (secretly owned by huge corporations) have cute/​edgy/​bullshit names. It’s practically a requirement. However, my latest purchase was a six-pack of Bell’s Amber Ale. Meek, inoffensive name.

  130. 130.

    sab

    @Steeplejack: We  have all these pubs around making alchoholic soda pop. I do not want high octane citrus flavored slightly sweet beer. I just don’t.

  132. 132.

    mrmoshpotato

    @NotMax: I’m not good with anything with that in the name.

    Even the actual hanging ball sack is weird.  Being able to sit on one of your nuts shouldn’t be physiologically possible.

  136. 136.

    Mai Naem mobileI

    @Jackie: i went on there and didn’t have any issues. I know sometimes they’ll recycle old stories, especially on the weekends. I think they just don’t have the content for the weekends.

  137. 137.

    Mai Naem mobileI

    @NotMax: did somebody ask for this?. This is like the weird flavored lays chips they’ll try and introduce and you just wonder who thought it was a good idea. Chocolate flavored chips or whatever.

  142. 142.

    Steppanhammer

    @Steeplejack: I want to say Devil’s Backbone is named for a local part of the Blue Ridge mountains there, but I can’t remember for sure.

    Though you are very correct about the larger trend!

  143. 143.

    NotMax

    @Odie Hugh Manatee

    As we used to describe the ingredients of the hot dogs served up at summer camp, which invariably turned gray when boiled, “everything but the oink.”
    ;)

  144. 144.

    Odie Hugh Manatee

    @NotMax:

    Lips and assholes shoved in some intestine. I wonder if they use the scrotum?

    On topic and all that…lol

  145. 145.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Odie Hugh Manatee: ​
     

    Lips and assholes shoved in some intestine. I wonder if they use the scrotum?

    If it’s usable, they surely use it.

    But don’t you dare put ketchup on that mish-mash of random internal organs!! Heaven forbid! //

  146. 146.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Odie Hugh Manatee:

    That’s Intelligent Design for ya…lol! 

    Yup!

    Percussion isn’t musical!

    /ducks thrown drumsticks

    Yeah, but the bass drum dropped on you is gonna meet its target!

    Odie Squashed Manatee!

  148. 148.

    Shalimar

    @opiejeanne: The pimp and ho outfits that O’Keefe and Giles wore were strictly for publicity photos designed to get media attention.  Which worked.  90% of the coverage was basically “look at these clowns. would you believe anyone bought this crap?”

    They dressed like normal people in all of the actual interviews, because of course no one would take people looking for aid assistance in the clown outfits seriously.

  150. 150.

    Barry

    @RaflW: “Pretty amazing how the Brookses, Douthats and so on never seem to put 2 + 2 (and 2 more, and 2 more after that…) together to realize the whole thing, back to McCord, Hunt, Atwater and right through to Manafort & Stone has been bamboozlers and outright lawbreakers.”

     

    I am not, because that is their job.  Whatever else they do, they have to turn a blind eye or blame it all on Democrats.

  151. 151.

    Geminid

    @Steeplejack: “Devil’s Backbone” is the name of a ridge and a ski run at Wintergreen Resort, up on the Blue Ridge. You can probably see the resort from Roseland, where a Mr. and Mrs. Crandal started their brewery maybe 30 years ago on their 100 acre property. They managed to grow their business and set up a larger brewing facility near Lexington, and then they sold the company to InBev in 2016 and made a lot of money.

    I think they might have held on to a large restaurant complex they built on Highway 151, right at the bottom of the road up to Wintergreen resort. Other brewers and a couple distillers have set up on 151; that’s where one-term 5th District Congressman Denver Riggleman and his wife operate a vodka distillery.

    These establishments attract a lot of people from the resort and from Charlottesville 25 miles to the east. The locals call that stretch of 151 “Alcohol Alley.”

  155. 155.

    J R in WV

    @BeautifulPlumage:

    Thanks for thinking of us!

    I had my next-to-last marathon yesterday and neet with the robotics surgeon Monday. I was amused to  see Little Brits cost for snacks — I get free snacks and pop during a chemo session  !

    There are obviously out of pocket costs, but i am somewhat amazed at how much is covered by Medicare and the supplemental coverage.

    I’m feeling OK following the all day chemo yesterday  — stopped by my family doctor’s office after leaving the chemo center,  he had been  visited by the top two administrators of the whole hospital group who gave him a plaque with congratulations on his work and a picnic lunch for the whole staff.

    He was over the moon with happiness and I was glad to share that with him.  Also  got some  needed prescriptions.

    Have never been this well feeling after all day of chemotherapy… I  don’t think you can get used to it,  cis-platin is toxic to the point where you need a dozen other drugs to protect you from it.

  157. 157.

    Miss Bianca

    @Frankensteinbeck: Oh, my! You mean a right-wing grifter/fraud who made it his business to harass and destroy liberal activists and groups was a big ol’ MEANIE to his fellow employees in the grifter/fraud business and fraudulently grifted a bunch of money to support his rock and roll lifestyle?

    SAY IT AIN’T SO!

  160. 160.

    Sebastian

    @SpaceUnit:

    I think people completely underestimate the real consequences of the RICO charges. EVERYONE in his orbit is guilty of furthering the conspiracy. The list of people who’ll be charged under RICO will grow like a wildfire and possibly even take out the Freedom Caucus.

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