Former New York congressman Michael Grimm is running for re-election
and his constituents couldn’t be happier about it. What are the
qualifications that make this law-breaking lawmaker so special in the
eyes of the GOP? Here’s a brief list:
* He’s a convicted felon who “ was indicted on 20 counts of tax evasion. He also admitted to hiring undocumented workers, hiding $900,000 from tax authorities and making false statements under oath.” The judge in his trial said Grimm needed to have his moral compass readjusted and sent him to prison in 2015. He served seven months.
* He threatened to throw a reporter off a balcony in the Capitol after the reporter asked him about a federal investigation looking into campaign finance violations. “I will break you in half,” he told the reporter. “I’ll break you in half, like a boy… “Let me be clear to you, you ever do that to me again I’ll throw you off this fucking balcony.”
* The FBI investigated allegations that Grimm “abused his authority as a FBI agent in a nightclub in 1999. Grimm denies the incident, in which he allegedly threatened people and waved a gun around. From the New Yorker article: “Grimm left the club, but at 4 a.m., just before the club closed, he returned again, according to [an off-duty N.Y.P.D. officer named Gordon Williams, who was working at the nightclub], this time with another F.B.I. agent and a group of N.Y.P.D. officers. Grimm had told the police that he had been assaulted by the estranged husband and his friends. Williams said that Grimm took command of the scene, and refused to let the remaining patrons and employees leave. ‘Everybody get up against the fucking wall,’ Williams recalled him saying. ‘The F.B.I. is in control.’ Then Grimm, who apparently wanted to find the man with whom he’d had the original altercation, said something that Williams said he’ll never forget: ‘All the white people get out of here.’”
* His oil trucking business received 11 safety violations by the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Grimm and another convicted criminal candidate, former Sheriff Joe
Arpaio, both stand an excellent chance of winning in the upcoming
congressional elections. Anthony Scaramucci, who served as Trump’s
communication director for 11 days before he was fired for calling
Reince Priebus a “fucking paranoid schizophrenic” and for saying Steve
Bannon tries to suck his “own cock,” announced that he is going to raise
funds for Grimm’s campaign.
It’s May Day, and McDonald’s workers in Manchester, Watford, Crayford
and Cambridge have walked out, demanding an end to zero-hours contracts
and a £10/hour living wage.
The Bakers Food and Allied Workers Union is asking to be recognised as
representing the McDonald’s workers, with demands that include
fixed-hours contracts and pay equity for young workers.
Many Republicans and Democrats were offended by comedian Michelle
Wolf’s performance at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association
dinner. Professional liar Sean Spicer said it was a “disgrace.” New
York Times writer Maggie Haberman falsely accused Wolf “intense
criticism of [Sarah Huckabee Sander’s] physical appearance.
>Political satire in less troubled times exaggerates
existing facts, pointing out the absurdities inherent in all ideologies,
or playing up smaller disagreements and failures for bigger laughs. But
Trump is hard to exaggerate—it is enough, it seems, merely to mirror
him. But why does faithful portrayal of fact-based reality elicit
laughter in a country that has a free press and a healthy public sphere
in which, it seems, reality is robustly represented? What do late-night
comedians reclaim from the Times?
Wolf’s performance at the White House
Correspondents’ Association dinner suggests an answer. She called the
President a racist, a truth as self-evident as it has proved difficult
for mainstream journalists to state. Her humor was obscene: she joked
about the President’s affair with a porn star; about his “pulling out,”
as promised (of the Paris agreement); and about the G.O.P.’s former
deputy finance chair Elliott Broidy’s $1.6 million payoff to a former
mistress. She also made mincemeat of White House staff, House and Senate
Republican leaders, the Democrats, and journalists on the right and
left, in their presence or in that of their colleagues.
I just picked up a new marker to attempt fancy writing for the first time in over a decade, and this is what I decided to write with it. Quote courtesy of a friend who played gnome alchemist in Pathfinder, who was known for coming up with really out of the box ideas.
This is what my one friend’s paladin should preface every session with, if our first 2 were any evidence
A classic, lantern shield with gauntlet for the left hand and several blades, some of which are retractable. The ultimate multi-purpose tool. German, ca. early 17th century, housed at the Kunsthistorisches Museum.
can you imagine being this extra? “My shield has a sword, two knives and can punch you. Also brass accents because fashion, bitch.”
I don’t even know what that hole at the top is. A grenade launcher?
I think that’s the lantern but i like your idea better lol
“Nothing is significant for long, everything is episodic, and old scandals are regularly knocked out of the headlines by new ones. … If there are too many scandals for any one of them to seize our attention for long, all of them taken together allow what are potentially very unpopular policies to take root without much scrutiny. … at a moment when we need politics to be thoughtful and engaging, we have a government whose profound swampiness only further deepens public doubts about democracy. Also consider this: Budget director Mick Mulvaney last week made a brash admission about his time in Congress. “If you were a lobbyist who never gave us money,” he said to an audience of banking executives, “I didn’t talk to you.” In a more innocent age, this confession would have provoked sustained indignation over how our political money system fundamentally corrupts our politics. (And imagine if Hillary Clinton had said such a thing.) But Mulvaney’s words just seemed to slide by.”
