Right Wing Smokes Crack

Brent Scher, executive editor at the right wing Free Beacon, which started the fake Biden admin “crack pipe” story, admitted to @washingtonpost that it was made up: “You are correct that the spokesman did not specifically say pipes in response to our questions.”

Meanwhile let’s start hassling greedy companies driving inflation:

My conversation with Chipotle online:

“We are adjusting menu prices to continue providing quality beef”

“Well maybe ask your CEO to sacrifice some of his $38 million salary (a 137% increase over last year) to buy more beef”

“I will pass along your concerns”

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Author: craigcrawford

Trail Mix Host. Lapsed journalist, author & retired pundit happily promoting nothing but the truth for Social Security checks.

31 thoughts on “Right Wing Smokes Crack”

  1. Bill marks Valentine’s Day weekend with jokes about Donald Trump’s mishandling of “love letters” from North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

  2. Anarchy? 10-4 | The Seattle Times

    […]
    The protesters in Canada’s capital represent only a fraction of truckers, let alone Canadians, the vast majority of whom have gotten vaccinated and support government efforts to stop the spread of COVID-19. Yet, they are calling for an end to all pandemic-related restrictions, as well as the resignation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his government.
    Their demands are absurdly presumptuous, and the aggressive behavior exhibited by some of the protesters against the people of Ottawa is outrageous. In a different world, this small mob in their big rigs would have remained a local annoyance, but, in the interconnected world of the internet, not only has their bellicosity been hugely amplified on social media, they have received millions of dollars to sustain their effort through crowdfunding sites.
    Canadian authorities strongly suspect that much of that support comes from right-wing extremist groups that are well-organized and financially robust, as well as from foreign entities that target Western democracies whenever they find a ripe opportunity. Those bad actors easily hide in the murky corners of cyberspace, but not every backer of the truckers shuns attention. Donald Trump, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and other Republican leaders have rushed to find a spotlight in which they can echo the truckers’ cry for “freedom.”
    The freedom the truckers and their cheerleaders insist upon is the liberty of a spoiled child or a schoolyard bully. They want to be able to do whatever they want, no matter how much it may endanger the people around them. There is another name for that kind of freedom: anarchy.

     

  4. uh oh

    US orders evacuation of embassy in Kyiv amid threat of Russian invasion | TheHill

    The U.S. State Department issued a travel advisory early Saturday morning, announcing that the American embassy in Kyiv had been evacuated amid the threat of Russian invasion.

    “On February 12, 2022, the Department of State ordered the departure of most U.S. direct hire employees from Embassy Kyiv due to the continued threat of Russian military action,” the travel advisory read.

    The level four advisory also urged U.S. citizens not to travel to the area and those who remain in the country to depart “immediately.”

    The State Department added that on Sunday, the embassy in Kyiv will halt all consular services, and the embassy will “maintain a small consular presence in Lviv, Ukraine to handle emergencies, but will not be able to provide passport, visa or routine consular services.”

    [continues]

  7. https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/08/ottawa-trucker-freedom-convoy-exposed-donation/
    “The donation site used by truckers in Ottawa who are currently protesting against national vaccine mandates has fixed a security lapse that exposed passports and driver licenses of donors.”
    “…GiveSendGo became the primary donation service for the so-called “Freedom Convoy” last week after GoFundMe froze millions of dollars in donations, citing police reports of violence and harassment…”
    “A fundraising page on GoFundMe reached about $7.9 million in donations before the crowdsourcing giant stepped in to block the campaign…”
    “…GiveSendGo said it had processed more than $4.5 million in donations for the Freedom Convoy protesters during its first day of the company hosting the campaign.”
    “…a person working in the security space found an exposed Amazon-hosted S3 bucket containing over 50 gigabytes of files, including passports and driver licenses that were collected during the donation process.”
    “S3 buckets are used for storing files, documents or even entire websites in Amazon’s cloud…”
    “The exposed bucket had over a thousand photos and scans of passports and driver licenses uploaded since February 4, when the Freedom Convoy’s page was first set up on GiveSendGo. The filenames suggest that the identity documents were uploaded during the payments process, which some financial institutions require before they can process a person’s payment or donation.”

    Always follow the money. This isn’t just truck drivers, there is some big money being funneled to fuel this mess.

  8. The closing ceremonies In Beijing are on the 20th.   Xi won’t be happy if Vlad invades before then. 

    I have relatives in California who refuse to watch the Olympics because it’s in China. Those kids worked hard for the chance to compete. It’s not their fault the games are in god-forsaken China.

    Me, I just forget they’re on.

  9. underlining that uh oh, 

    UK troops sent to help train Ukrainian army to leave country | Ukraine | The Guardian

    British troops helping with training in Ukraine will leave the country this weekend, the armed forces minister James Heappey said as he warned that Russia could launch an attack “at no notice”.

    Heappey said the small number of UK personnel sent to train Ukrainian troops on anti-tank missileswould be withdrawn, alongside about 100 helping with wider troop training as part of Operation Orbital.

     

    Britain, in common with all other Nato allies, has said it would not fight against any Russian attack, a point repeated by the minister in a BBC interview. Ukraine is not a member of Nato, although in 2008 it was given a promise that it would one day be able to join.

    “There will be no British troops in Ukraine if there is to be a conflict there,” Heappey said. “They will be leaving over the course of the weekend.”

    The military evacuation follows a string of warnings, led by the US but supported by the UK, that Russia had assembled a force capable of invading Ukraine. Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, said on Friday night: “We are in the window when an invasion could begin at any time.”

    Western intelligence fear the most likely scenario, in the event of a conflict, is that Russian forces would mount a lightning attack aimed at encircling Kyiv, a city of more than 3 million people, and trying to force a change of regime. As a first step, Moscow’s forces would aim to rapidly degrade Ukraine’s military in a lightning attack.

    Russia was now in a position to attack “very, very quickly”, Heappey said, though he hoped no invasion would take place. He told BBC Breakfast: “We are now confident that the artillery systems, the missile systems and the combat air are all in place that would allow Russia to launch – at no notice – an attack on Ukraine.”

    [continues]

  10. as the major league pitcher preacher roe once opined: “some days you eat the bear and somedays the bear eats you…”

    roe went on to say: “yesterday the bear ate us.”

    that bear better beware of a mighty case of indigestion in re ukraine snack attack.

  13. Yes, greed is horrible. Chipotle is awful but they have lots of company! Oh, and I tried the food here at the new one in New Smyrna Beach, no thanks. :0)

  16. @PentagonPresSec.@SecDef has ordered the temporary repositioning of @FLGuard troops out of Ukraine. Abundance of caution, safety and security of our personnel his paramount concern. We remain committed to our relationship with the Ukrainian armed forces.9:13 AM · Feb 12, 2022·Twitter for iPhone

  17. The nearest Chipotle is about a 40 minutes drive from here.  I’ve never eaten there and don’t intend to try it.  Their commercials’ food looks very unappetizing.
     
    ps… same distance to the nearest Chick-fil-a….  never eaten there either.

  18. for all Al fans out there here’s an excerpt from

    Transcript: “Capehart” with Al Franken – The Washington Post

    MR. CAPEHART: […]  Now, of course, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand was the one who led that effort to get you to leave the Senate. You recently said that you would not run for Gillibrand’s seat in the Senate. But this leads to a Twitter question that came in, that asks, “Are you going to run again?” Do you have it in your bones or in your blood to jump back into the political arena and run for elective office again?
    MR. FRANKEN: I don’t know. I certainly loved my time in the Senate. I loved the job. I got a lot done. I was able to accomplish things I couldn’t accomplish anywhere else, I don’t think. So yeah, it would be tempting to try to do that again.
    MR. CAPEHART: Mm-hmm. At some point.
    MR. FRANKEN: Yeah.
    MR. CAPEHART: Perhaps.
    MR. FRANKEN: I’m only 70, so I’ve got–let’s see. Grassley’s running for reelection.
    [Laughter]
    MR. CAPEHART: So you’ve got all the time in the world–
    MR. FRANKEN: I do.
    MR. CAPEHART: –to run again.
    MR. FRANKEN: You know that when someone is 87 and they won’t stand up–even though he denounced Trump early on, then he hugged him on the stage–you know that if he won’t kind of go down on principle at 87 he’s not going to do it at probably any other time.
    MR. CAPEHART: So we’ve gotten to my list of questions here that was getting into political stuff. We talked about the discomfort bill in Florida. You jumped ahead on that. But, you know, you’re a former politico. What grade would you give President Biden?
    MR. FRANKEN: I think grading people is kind of silly. Asking the question, perfectly valid.
    MR. CAPEHART: Okay. All right. So you’re not going to answer the question. So don’t grade him. What do you think of how he’s done so far? It’s been a year and a month.
    MR. FRANKEN: Well, he’s had some ups and downs. What I hope is, is that by November he’ll have accomplished a lot of things, including a lot of the elements of Build Back Better. Because I think that there’s been a little bit of a disservice, and it’s been all around, in terms of, especially in the media, of instead of–I think the Washington media does this a lot, which is it gets into inside baseball and horse race and doesn’t cover the content of these bills.
    So what I would suggest now for the Senate is for Chuck Schumer and for the rest of my Democratic colleagues and former colleagues there is to put the elements of Build Back Better onto the floor, at least the ones that Manchin and Sinema at least would consider backing. For example, Manchin has said he is for expanded pre-K, universal pre-K. That would be a great thing. Americans would be for that. You put that on the floor, Americans want that, and if Republicans vote against it, if we don’t get 60 votes, we put it in a reconciliation package. But at least Americans know what we’re fighting for.
    The same on extending–or subsidies for childcare. That would be wildly popular. You know, in Europe the average country subsidizes the average kid $14,000 for childcare, and in the United States we do $500. $500. And that would be wildly popular. It would also make sure that people could go to work, that moms could go to work or dads could go to work, and actually would help maybe bring down a little bit of the inflation on salaries and wages, because more people would be able to go out into the workforce.
    There’s a whole bunch of stuff like this. Getting costs down on prescription drugs, on insulin, on child tax credit. My God. If you put that out there–and I don’t understand why we just don’t put one after the other out there so the American people can see what the elements of this are, because if they did, we could pass this stuff. And I wish it had been done sooner. I wish that some of this stuff, people could see the results of it before November. But I think people will see what Democrats are for, and it would help us a lot in November.

  19. the hill:

    The German Foreign Office announcedon Saturday they would be reducing embassy staff in Ukraine’s capital city of Kyiv amid growing fears of a Russian invasion. 

    “We will keep our embassy in #Kiew open but reduce our diplomatic staff. Our Consulate General Donetsk, based in Dnipro since 2014, is temporarily being relocated to Lyiv,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said. 

    Germany also issued a warning to German nationals in Ukraine, saying they should consider leaving the country. 

    [continues]

  21. Corporate greed: Shipping containers used to cost $5,000. They now cost $20,000. We can’t pass that kind of cost onto our customers.

    On a personal note, oat milk has risen from $2.99 to $4.09/container. Shelves were very sparse, some were empty.

    Would Vlad invade during Xi’s games? Does he have Xi’s approval? Does he realize Americans will be in a stupor from eating and drinking too much, and, that most Americans don’t even know where Ukraine is located? How does Fluffy at Fox feel about it?

  22. https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/12/europe/russia-ukraine-invasion-paths-map-cmd-intl/index.html

    “But if an invasion were to occur, it is not clear where it would begin. Russia has created pressure points on three sides of Ukraine — in Crimea to the south, on the Russian side of the two countries’ border, and in Belarus to the north.”

    Someone here said maybe bomb the perimeter of Ukraine so tanks can’t advance. Maybe it’s not such a far out idea.

  25. Invasion: I don’t think it’s going to happen.  Don’t know how or why but I just don’t think so.   But if they do….I’ll be looking at Taiwan next.  We had our invasions now they’ll have theirs. We set some fine precedent.    Pinche Republicans.   Pah.  

  26. Amazing some 20,000 Americans in Ukraine refusing to leave. I checked, a flight from Kyiv to London just $160. But FOX will accuse Biden of leaving them behind. State Department actually calling Americans in Ukraine begging them to leave but so many still refuse
     

  27. For some of the Americans in Ukraine, the Ukraine is home and they don’t want to abandon ship.   Some probably don’t believe anything will happen. I think it will, and, I don’t think it will look like anything we can imagine. 

  28. So it’s just me maybe, but if I was running the RCMP response I’d consider having semi wreckers back up to the parked trucks and have them hauled to the nearest impound so the drivers can pay the impound fee after they make bail. But that’s just me.

  29. The crowd funding kitty (where’s that big money coming from?) will pay to get their rigs out of impound. 

    Sure, there are others jumping in the bandwagon to protest, but this thing is being driven by some entity. The leak of names should help crack it open, but the crowd funding companies (both who have handled their donations) could hand all of it over if any charges are filed.

  30. NBC is weird. They’re covering the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics, but this morning they were airing a soccer game.

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