February 5, 2020

Florida police made a traffic stop and found a bag full of drugs labeled 'Bag Full Of Drugs'

A Florida traffic stop turned into a surprise narcotics bust after police found what looked to be a bag full of drugs in the car.

The clue?

It was labeled "Bag Full Of Drugs."

A Florida Highway Patrol trooper made the stop after observing a car going 25 miles per hour over the limit Saturday, the Santa Rosa County Sheriff's Office said.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/04/us/florida-bag-full-of-drugs-trnd/index.html

Now that's a polite and novel way to help the police.

February 4, 2020

Michael Bloomberg ramps up California campaign as rivals finish race in Iowa

The huge sums that billionaire Michael R. Bloomberg is dumping into ads for his presidential campaign have impressed Leslie Chiles of Sacramento. It’s not just that she agrees with him. It’s also that the money he’s devoting to oust President Trump seems limitless.

“Otherwise, he would be a nobody,” said Chiles, a retired social services worker who went to see the former New York City mayor speak Monday at a coffeehouse near the state Capitol. “Like every other Democrat, I’m looking for someone who can win.”

With Californians starting to vote by mail this week in the March 3 presidential primary, Bloomberg has already plowed $35 million of his personal wealth into television, radio and digital ads in the state, according to Advertising Analytics, an ad-tracking firm. It eclipses those of all of his opponents combined.

As much as his stands on climate change and other touchstone issues for Democrats, the extravagant spending itself is starting to convince some that Bloomberg, one of the richest people in America, might have the best shot at unseating Trump.

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-02-03/bloomberg-california-democratic-presidential-campaign

February 4, 2020

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope Ends 16-Year Mission of Discovery

On Thursday, NASA’s Spitzer space telescope signed off and went silent. But even during its final week of operation, the spacecraft was making one-of-a-kind observations.

The telescope, the size of a family sedan, follows Earth in its orbit around the sun, but trails 158 million miles behind. Lately, it has gazed out with its infrared eyes, taking sensitive measurements of fine cosmic dust that pervades the space between planets in the solar system. The resulting imagery will enable researchers to better understand our local celestial neighborhood, while informing models of worlds circling other stars and giving insight into the early universe.

Since it launched on Aug. 25, 2003, Spitzer has provided unique contributions to science. It gave us new views of distant galaxies, newborn stars and nearby exoplanets, as well as of asteroids, comets and other objects in our solar system. Its infrared cameras have observed the universe in a light imperceptible to human senses, providing otherwise unattainable visions of the sky.

“There is no field of investigation that has not been touched by Spitzer,” said Daniela Calzetti, an astronomer at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who has used the telescope to study galactic evolution.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/30/science/nasa-spitzer-space-telescope.html

February 4, 2020

The Money Behind Trump's Money

One Day in early 2017, Mike Offit went to the Yale Club in Manhattan for a lunch hosted by a group called Business Executives for National Security. Offit, who has a craggy face and shoulder-­length hair, had spent much of his career in banking, but that had ended nearly two decades earlier. Since then, he had puttered around the outskirts of finance, dabbled in journalism and even published a novel about a pair of murders at a fictional German-­owned Wall Street bank that bore a striking resemblance to the one that he worked for until 1998: ­Deutsche Bank.

These days, Offit had time on his hands, which is how he found himself at the Yale Club that afternoon. Slanting winter sunlight illuminated the white-­columned walls of the club’s dining room. Offit was chatting with an American military officer about weaponry when his iPhone buzzed. He saw an email from the White House Executive Office of the President. How strange, Offit thought.

The message contained a PDF file: a scanned printout of an email he had sent Donald Trump several months earlier, in the waning days of the presidential campaign. Offit had known Trump for decades. At ­Deutsche Bank, he had lined up huge loans to finance Trump’s construction and renovation of landmark Manhattan skyscrapers, at a time when the default-­prone real estate developer and casino magnate was no longer able to get loans from most mainstream financial institutions. The two men stayed in touch afterward. Offit’s 2014 book, “Nothing Personal,” even featured a blurb from Trump: “Michael Offit offers a colorful insight into how the big money is made — and/or taken — on Wall Street.”

In October 2016, Offit tried to return the favor. Democrats were pillorying Trump’s shaky — not to mention murky — personal finances, including his companies’ chronic bankruptcies. Offit thought he might dispense a little advice to his erstwhile client. On a Friday evening, he emailed Trump a lengthy message, explaining that the defense Trump was offering at the time — that he was simply using the bankruptcy law in an advantageous way — wasn’t resonating with voters. “I believe there is a much better answer, that may help defuse this issue, and am just arrogant enough to suggest it,” Offit wrote.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/04/magazine/deutsche-bank-trump.html

February 3, 2020

It might be time to take Bloomberg seriously

Count on this: If Bernie Sanders manages to win the Iowa caucuses Monday and then storms into New Hampshire, where the Vermont senator already holds a commanding lead in virtually every poll, anxiety on Wall Street and among the Democratic donor class will quickly erupt into a full-fledged panic.

And yet I can think of one billionaire Democrat who would look at that scenario and think that, once again, fortune favors the rich.

His name is Mike Bloomberg. And even a few weeks ago, I’d have told you he was wasting his money.

Bloomberg’s entry into the Democratic primary field in November struck me as nonsensical. The plan was to skip the first four contests while buying up virtually all of the airtime in the larger Super Tuesday states, amassing a long list of endorsements from mayors and spreading a lot of money around to candidates and party organizations.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/02/it-might-be-time-take-bloomberg-seriously/

February 1, 2020

When the impeachment trial ends, the Senate's reputation will be hopelessly in tatters

What will be left of the impeachment power after the Senate’s acquittal of President Trump? Not much. What will be left of the Senate’s reputation as the world’s greatest deliberative body? Same answer.

Same scary answer.

The two are interconnected, of course, but my point is not that the Senate was obligated to convict the president. Conviction and removal from office are warranted, but that was never a realistic possibility. And a reasonable senator with an eye on the electoral calendar could have concluded that it would be better for the country to let voters decide.

What a reasonable senator could not do was what happened here: wholesale shirking of the Senate’s constitutional responsibility to assess — which includes a responsibility to obtain — all the evidence of potential wrongdoing. Senators offered up an unconvincing grab bag of excuses for this dereliction of duty:

That the House didn’t do its homework and it wasn’t the Senate’s job to make up for that — as if the Senate had not been entrusted with the “sole power to try” impeachments. That it would take too long and distract the Senate from its other pressing work — as if there were anything more important, and as if the Senate were actually doing anything beyond ramming through judicial nominees.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/our-president-is-unchecked-and-our-system-is-unbalanced/2020/01/31/575ecacc-4473-11ea-aa6a-083d01b3ed18_story.html

February 1, 2020

It wasn't just the National Archives. The Library of Congress also balked at a Women's March photo.

The Library of Congress abandoned plans last year to showcase a mural-size photograph of demonstrators at the 2017 Women’s March in Washington because of concerns it would be perceived as critical of President Trump, according to emails obtained by The Washington Post.

The massive 14-by-10-foot print of the photograph — showing tens of thousands of demonstrators filling Pennsylvania Avenue NW for the Women’s March on Jan. 21, 2017 — was envisioned by the library as one of the dominant displays of the “Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote” exhibit celebrating the centennial of women’s right to vote. Instead, the exhibit opened June 4 with that photograph replaced by an image of eight people taking part in a Women’s March in Houston.

The change was made so late in the process — just five days before the exhibit opened — that the photographer who captured the original image, Kevin Carroll, is credited in the exhibit’s brochure and the photographer of the replacement image is not.

The library’s decision is the second-known instance of a federal government institution acting to prevent images it determined to be critical of Trump from being shown to the public. The National Archives said two weeks ago it made a mistake when it blurred out anti-Trump signs from a large photograph, also of the 2017 Women’s March but by a different photographer, that it displayed at the entrance of its exhibit on the history of women’s suffrage in the United States. The Archives has since removed the altered image and replaced it with the original.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/it-wasnt-just-the-national-archives-the-library-of-congress-also-balked-at-a-womens-march-photo/2020/01/31/491f4f3e-42b3-11ea-b5fc-eefa848cde99_story.html

February 1, 2020

Coast Guard Lt. Christopher Hasson sentenced to more than 13 years in alleged terror plot

Source: Washington Post

A Coast Guard officer accused of stockpiling 15 guns and other weapons in his Maryland home as part of an alleged plot to kill people in support of white nationalism was sentenced to more than 13 years in prison by a federal judge Friday in a case that illustrates the difficulty of prosecuting accused domestic terrorists who are arrested before carrying out violent crimes.

Former lieutenant Christopher P. Hasson, 50, was indicted last year and pleaded guilty to federal firearms and drug charges. Authorities said he intended to embark on a murderous rampage targeting liberal politicians on Capitol Hill and prominent on-air figures at cable news networks.

The government argued he should be locked up for a quarter century. The federal public defender’s office in Maryland wanted the judge to release him from jail and let him go home. At issue is the problematic question of whether Hasson’s alleged plotting ultimately would have led to lethal action.

Sentencing memos filed by defense lawyers and the U.S. attorney’s office in Maryland offer vastly differing depictions of Hasson, who was a Marine Corps aircraft mechanic in the first Gulf War and joined the Coast Guard in 1996 after a stint in the Virginia National Guard.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/coast-guard-lt-christopher-hasson-set-to-be-sentenced-in-alleged-terror-plot/2020/01/31/d01b048a-43ce-11ea-aa6a-083d01b3ed18_story.html

February 1, 2020

The cringing abdication of Senate Republicans

Republican Senators who voted Friday to suppress known but unexamined evidence of President Trump’s wrongdoing at his Senate trial must have calculated that the wrath of a vindictive president is more dangerous than the sensible judgment of the American people, who, polls showed, overwhelmingly favored the summoning of witnesses. That’s almost the only way to understand how the Republicans could have chosen to deny themselves and the public the firsthand account of former national security adviser John Bolton, and perhaps others, on how Mr.?Trump sought to extort political favors from Ukraine.

The public explanations the senators offered were so weak and contradictory as to reveal themselves as pretexts. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said she weighed supporting “additional witnesses and documents, to cure the shortcomings” of the House’s impeachment process, but decided against doing so. Apparently she preferred a bad trial to a better one — but she did assure us that she felt “sad” that “the Congress has failed.”

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said the case against Mr. Trump had already been proved, so no further testimony was needed. But he also said, without explanation, that Mr. Trump’s “inappropriate” conduct did not merit removal from office; voters, he said, should render a verdict in the coming presidential election. How could he measure the seriousness of Mr. Trump’s wrongdoing without hearing Mr. Bolton’s firsthand testimony of the president’s motives and intentions, including about whether the president is likely to seek additional improper foreign intervention in that same election?

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) echoed Mr. Alexander’s illogic, only he lacked the courage even to take a position on whether Mr. Trump had, as charged, tried to force Ukraine’s new president to investigate former vice president Joe Biden, or whether that was wrong. Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) managed to be even more timorous, telling reporters that “Lamar speaks for lots and lots of us” and refusing to elaborate.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-cringing-abdication-of-senate-republicans/2020/01/31/b35ac36e-444e-11ea-b5fc-eefa848cde99_story.html

January 31, 2020

Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow really doesn't want to talk about who's paying Rudy Giuliani

For all of the focus on corruption and foreign influence that lingers around the Senate’s impeachment trial of President Trump, there’s a significant potentially overlapping question that remains unanswered: Who’s paying Rudolph W. Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney?

In October, Giuliani told The Washington Post that he wasn’t being paid by the president.

“My other clients are paying me for the work I do for them,” Giuliani said. “Nobody is paying me for a single thing I’m doing for Donald J. Trump.”

Since Giuliani isn’t an administration official, he doesn’t need to reveal that information publicly — so he doesn’t. After his associates Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas were arrested that same month, Giuliani admitted that he’d received $500,000 from the pair for his work representing them, money that originally came from a personal injury attorney on Long Island. (After his arrest, Parnas was accused by federal prosecutors of failing to report a separate $1 million payment he’d received from a lawyer working for an oligarch named Dmitry Firtash.)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/01/30/trump-lawyer-jay-sekulow-really-doesnt-want-talk-about-whos-paying-rudy-giuliani/