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Another secret painting. Now I need to get all three framed and gift them on October 17th.
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34 Days until the Midterms!
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GOP senator suffers embarrassing blunder while grilling Jack Smith in hearing
ReplyDeletenordy...I left a message for you just now on the last thread. But here it is for your convenience:
ReplyDeleteOh yes, indeed! My apologies...and I even had responded to your comment! Gee, I guess I have been doing way too much lately. I need very much to slow down. Almost able to.
don't worry too much, listener -- nordy
Delete💛
DeleteToday we went to pick up our pickup truck from the service dept and learned it needs $2000 worth of brakes before it can be inspected. Oh joy. So that will happen October 14th...the same day I get my permanent crown at the dentist...for another $2000.
ReplyDeleteWe searched for and did not find frames for the three paintings I did that need framing to surprise Youngest. Then we put together the daybed a neighbour gave us, and it looks great! I'll post a photo one of these days.
It's going to rain on Friday, so we're going to pull our boat out of the water tomorrow. The weekend ahead will be for tucking it in for Winter. Monday would have been Shiloh's 48th birthday, and we want to go up on the mountain again to the place where we scattered some of his ashes last year. With the wind it will feel like 38ºF up there, but we're going to do it anyway.
^ Ironically, when we hiked across the top of the mountain last year, to scatter some ashes, it was in the low 80s!!
DeleteHere's part of Heather Cox Richardson's latest post...about Jack Smith testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. It's soooo good.
ReplyDeleteIt’s unclear why Senate Republicans thought it was a good idea to remind people of Trump’s attempt to overthrow an election when the midterms are less than forty days away. Some of them, though, clearly intended to appeal either to Trump or to the MAGA base by using their protected speech to insult and abuse Smith.
Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) launched a hit on Smith, setting up the idea he was part of a conspiracy with Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney Fani Willis and her colleague Nathan Wade to persecute Trump.
Schmitt asked Smith: “Did you go to an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks on February 3, 2024?”
Smith looked confused at the sudden turn in the hearing and asked Schmitt to repeat the question. Once Schmitt did, and asked him if he had ever been to Atlanta during his time as special counsel, Smith answered: “I really don't think so. It’s possible I flew through the Atlanta airport on the way to Florida, but I do not have a recollection of going to Atlanta. I definitely did not go to a Hawks game. I’m sure of that.”
“Did you ever meet Nathan Wade or Fani Willis in your time as special counsel,” Schmitt asked.
“No,” Smith answered.
Then Schmitt pounced: “What would you say if I had a series of text messages from your team that said you were in Atlanta at a Warrior/Hawks game on February 3, 2024, the day after Willis and Wade announced their affair?” A staffer briefly flashed a poster board. Then Schmitt said: “I don’t think you know that we have this stuff, so I’ll give you a second to process it so you don’t, you know, perjure yourself.”
Smith said: “You just took it down really quick. If I could look at that again?”
Schmitt answered: “We’ll put it in a file. You can respond. I think you’ve already perjured yourself.” He went on to call Smith a “villain” and a “dirtbag.”
Smith said: “[I]f this is the correct basketball game, I recall going to a University of Maryland basketball game where Caitlin Clark was playing right around that time…. You could check if that was the exact date. It was Maryland playing Iowa, I think, February of 2024.”
Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) figured it out. Schmitt was accusing Smith of being in Atlanta at an Atlanta Hawks game, where he could hypothetically have met up with Willis and Wade. In reality, he was in Maryland at a game in which Maryland played the University of Iowa: the Hawkeyes.
Klobuchar addressed Schmitt: “Could it then be that University of Iowa’s the Hawkeyes, could that be it, and maybe before we show this kind of thing…that might be the confusion over the names of the team but perhaps you should’ve looked at it more carefully….”
continuing...
DeleteSchmitt exploded, accusing her of “trying to rehabilitate the witness.” And yet, newscasters who reviewed tapes of the games found Smith in the stands at the Maryland game.
“You had the teams wrong, sir,” Klobuchar told Schmitt.
Indeed, although Schmitt’s poster board featured a picture of Fani Willis and another of the Atlanta arena, the messages on it appeared to be between Smith’s deputy special counsel J.P. Cooney and another person, asking, “Is 109 Row 1 reserved for Jack?” Hunter Walker of Talking Points Memo notes that the Atlanta State Farm Arena uses letters to denote rows in section 109 rather than numbers. The University of Maryland arena uses numbers.
After the hearing, Schmitt appeared on The Charlie Kirk Show, where host Andrew Kolvet cheered Schmitt’s attack on Smith. “Jack Smith is a total dirtbag and you caught him out on this NBA game…in Atlanta,” Kolvet said. “It was a great moment. Good for you on that.”
So Schmitt got his right-wing media hit from a completely fabricated storyline. One newscaster noted: “When a witness lies under oath before Congress, he can face prison. When a senator gets it wrong, he says he was just ‘asking questions’.”
A little more...
DeleteSmith, in contrast, stood firmly on facts and the rule of law. “I have been fortunate to serve a country that I love for nearly 30 years in local, national, and international settings,” he said in his opening statement. “My service has spanned both Republican and Democratic administrations. I am not a politician, and I have no partisan loyalties. My career has been dedicated to serving our country by upholding the rule of law and the core principles on which our country was founded.
“I believe that there is no role for politics in the proper administration of justice. A prosecutor’s decisions must be based on the facts and the law. The status, power, prominence, or political affiliation of the subject of an investigation must play no role in decisions to investigate, prosecute, or decline prosecution.”
As special counsel, Smith said, he and his office “took actions based on the facts and the law.” “Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in criminal activity,” he said. “If asked whether to prosecute a former President based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether that President was a Republican or a Democrat.”
“The charges against President Trump were the result of the evidence,” he said. “Grand juries in two separate districts reached this conclusion based on his actions…. Rather than accept his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power….
“And…President Trump stored classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago social club after he left office in January 2021 and he repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents. Highly sensitive information was held in non-secure locations, including a bathroom and a ballroom where events and gatherings took place.”
Smith promised to answer the senators’ questions truthfully. “I will not be silenced by the continued threats of prosecution from the President or others.”
“As I appear before you today, it is my belief that the rule of law faces challenges unlike any we have experienced in our lifetime. Individuals are threatened with criminal investigation because they are perceived to have opposed the President. Predetermined outcomes increasingly seem to take precedence over the Justice Department’s long-standing core values, traditions, and norms. History teaches that the rule of law is rarely destroyed all at once. It is often weakened by attacks on the institutions and public servants sworn to uphold it. Since January 2025, we have witnessed precisely such an effort, including the vilification of the career prosecutors, FBI agents, and support staff who served on my team, simply because of their unwavering commitment to the fair and impartial administration of justice without regard for any personal costs.
“I myself have been threatened with jail by the President of the United States.
“I remain confident, however, that the rule of law will endure because so many continue to uphold it faithfully each day. Throughout our legal system, public servants have remained faithful to their oaths despite extraordinary pressure to do otherwise. Their example demonstrates that while fear may be contagious, courage is as well.”
Impeachment needed!
ReplyDeleteSupreme Court allows Trump’s ‘third country’ deportation policy
BBC: The US state replacing power plants with home batteries
ReplyDeletenordy, I guess the lingering question is whether you would be willing to join a secret FB group, if the blog here gives us difficulty. Just planning ahead because it would be a huge mess in real time.
ReplyDeleteWas your account hacked and posts went missing, or were you spoofed and friends got strange messages to refriend you?
More like the former. I could join a secret facebook group as long as it was subversive enough. -- nordy
DeleteGot it. Thanks!
DeleteOh, I imagine we could be pretty subversive. 😁
Flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv diverted to Saudi Arabia after pilot stabs copilot
ReplyDeleteLord help us!
DeleteVideo: The RAF Fairford Video They Want To Ban — THIS EXPLAINS EVERYTHING! - Click
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