Author: Pogo

OK, today I may be a little embarrassed to be a lawyer. Devin Nunes (no stranger to idiotic and stupidity) sues a bunch of people and virtual entities, some who actually exist, for $250,000,000 (PLUS $350M IN PUNITIVE DAMAGES – GMAFB) in Virginia.

CNN)California Republican Rep. Devin Nunes is suing Twitter and three individual Twitter users, accusing them of defaming him in order to derail his re-election campaign and deter him from the Russia investigation.

Nunes, an ally of President Donald Trump and former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, filed the complaint Tuesday in Virginia state court, seeking $250 million in damages and $350,000 in punitive damages.

READ: Devin Nunes’ defamation lawsuit against Twitter, users who criticized him

The California congressman accuses Twitter of allowing the users to spread “false and defamatory statements” about him, alleging that the company harbors a political agenda against conservatives. 

“As part of its agenda to squelch Nunes’ voice, cause him extreme pain and suffering, influence the 2018 Congressional election, and distract, intimidate and interfere with Nunes’ investigation into corruption and Russian involvement in the 2016 Presidential Election, Twitter did absolutely nothing,” the complaint says.

The lawsuit was first reported by Fox News, which posted a draft copy of the complaint on Monday. CNN has reached out to both Nunes’ congressional office and lawyer.

 
Twitter declined to comment on the lawsuit. 

Nunes named Republican strategist Liz Mair and two other parody accounts — Devin Nunes’ Mom (@DevinNunesMom) and Devin Nunes’ Cow (@DevinCow) — in his lawsuit. 

He accused Mair and the two other accounts of engaging in a “concerted defamation campaign” to “cause immense pain” and divert his attention from leading the House Intelligence’s probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

Nunes pointed to several tweets that he said falsely accused him of federal crimes and includes vulgar language.

“Devin’s boots are full of manure. He’s udder-ly worthless and its pasture time to move him to prison,” reads one tweet from Devin Nunes’ Cow.

The Twitter account @DevinNunesMom was suspended after Nunes’ real mother complained, the complaint said. @DevinCow remains active and has gained followers since Nunes’ complaint was made public. The account posted Monday, “I’m not quitting my day job” in response to the lawsuit. Nunes has asked the court to reveal the users behind the two parody accounts.

Nunes told Fox News on Monday that the lawsuit will be “the first of many.”

“We’re actually going after Twitter first because they are the main proliferator and they spread this fake news and this slanderous news,” Nunes told Fox News.

Mair, who has been outspoken against the President and in 2015 set up an anti-Trump super PAC called “Make America Awesome,” said on Twitter that she is “declining comment on this for now.” 

Nunes’ lawsuit also accuses Twitter of “shadow-banning conservatives” — where a user is unaware his posts aren’t viewable by others except him.

[continues]

He found an attorney Steven Biss, (mylife.com reputation score 0.45/5 – look it up) to file this piece of crap. I hope he’s working on an hourly basis – actually, I hope he’s working on a contingency basis.

Good Lord….

Dana Milbank has an excellent opinion piece in today’s WaPo about WV, coal and trump’s utter failure to “save coal”.

Last August, President Trump went to Charleston, W.Va., for a “mission accomplished” moment.

He had already boasted to his Fox News fan base that “I’ve turned West Virginia around, because [of] what I’ve done environmentally with coal.” In Charleston, he said that “we are putting our great coal miners back to work” by ending what he had dubbed the Obama administration’s “war on coal” and that, under his leadership, West Virginia had “on a per capita basis one of the most successful GDP states in our union.”

“The coal industry is back,” Trump declared.

Alas, it was an illusion — or, as Trump might put it, a hoax.

Last week, the Commerce Department reported that during the third quarter of 2018 — the period during which Trump took his Charleston victory lap — West Virginia’s gross domestic product grew exactly 0.0 percent. As in, zilch. As in, the worst in the nation.

Quarterly figures are volatile, but clearly, two years into the Trump presidency, both West Virginia and the coal industry remain in bad shape. Coal-plant closures nationwide reached a near-record in 2018, production was off sharply, and U.S. coal consumption hit a 40-year low. Jobs in coal have barely budged, from 51,000 at the end of 2016 to 52,700 today.

West Virginia’s poverty rate, meanwhile, rose to 19.1 percent, among the nation’s highest, in 2017, the most recent year of reported data. The state is being propped up by temporary jobs (often held by out-of-state workers) to construct pipelines for natural gas. And the national economy, though humming along, isn’t near the level of growth Trump promised his debt-expanding tax cuts would deliver.

[continues]

And yet the by gawders will vote for him again because while they and their neighbors wallow in poverty he’s telling them he’s saved them.  Why, you ask – thinking they have some semblance of rational thought?  They do not.  After all who they gonna believe – SFB or their own eyes?  SFB every time.  (And yes, because I live in WV I see the bone deep stupid buy-in constantly).  NEVER make the mistake of believing WV voters (or KY or OH for that matter) engage in rational thought when it comes to trump, coal and jobs.  When belief clashes with experience, belief wins out every time.

Well, John Bolton found himself in the unenviable position of trying to explain (away) the inexplicable last Sunday on Chris Wallace and Jake Tapper’s shows. As WaPo pointed out in Monday’s column by Aaron Blake:

Serving President Trump often means trying to square a rhetorical circle. Sometimes it requires pretending he didn’t say what he said. Other times you’ll (gently) distance yourself from something you clearly regard as ridiculous.

And if you’re John Bolton on Sunday, it’s both.

On two Sunday shows, Trump’s national security adviser was asked to account for Trump’s controversial comments about Otto Warmbier. Before Trump departed from their failed Hanoi summit last week, he gave North Korean leader Kim Jong Un a little gift. He said he didn’t believe Kim knew Warmbier, a 22-year-old University of Virginia student, had been mistreated in a North Korean prison before his death. This strained credulity, to say the least.

[It continues]

Marc Thiessen, SFB bootlicker, takes aim at Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez in his WaPo opinion piece today.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is an economic illiterate — and that’s a danger to America

The left complains that conservatives are “obsessing” over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Well, there is a reason for that: Ocasio-Cortez is driving the agenda of today’s Democratic Party — and her economic illiteracy is dangerous.

Case in point: Last week, Ocasio-Cortez celebrated the tanking of a deal negotiated by her fellow Democrats in which Amazon promised to build a new headquarters in Long Island City, New York, right next to her congressional district. Amazon’s departure cost the city between 25,000 and 40,000 new jobs. Forget the tech workers whom Amazon would have employed. Gone are all the unionized construction jobs to build the headquarters, as well as thousands of jobs created by all the small businesses — restaurants, bodegas, dry cleaners and food carts — that were preparing to open or expand to serve Amazon employees. They are devastated by Amazon’s withdrawal.

Ocasio-Cortez was not disturbed at all. “We were subsidizing those jobs,” she said. “Frankly, if we were willing to give away $3 billion for this deal, we could invest those $3 billion in our district, ourselves, if we wanted to. We could hire out more teachers. We can fix our subways. We can put a lot of people to work for that amount of money if we wanted to.”

[It continued.]

Pogo says:

Says the trump bootlicker who apparently has no problem with a $399B deficit increase to pay for a tax cut that disproportionately benefits the wealthy since SFB took office, representing a debt to GDP increase of from 3.1 to 4.0%. Which, btw, Marc, affects all of America, not just Queens.   Talk about your economic illiteracy?  You personify it.  

That said I can’t imagine why she was opposed to Amazon locating in Queens.  The DC area will benefit from that decision.  But she is not the leader of the Dem party.

So what do you say?

By Pogo, a Trail Mix Contributor

In my haste to run away from 2018 – which I rank right up there with the worst years this country has ever seen, governmentally speaking, and ended on a somewhat familiar note – a government shutdown delivering a trumpian lump of coal to 800,000 people, including our own Blue Bronc – I thought I might not be being quite fair to 2018, so I cast my net a bit wider to see whether there is anything worth remembering (except to remember not to do this again) from the old year passing out of our lives tonight.

Looking about I did find this from Wapo: Best of 2018

Editors and critics from across The Washington Post choose their favorite stories, highlights and achievements that defined the year — from unforgettable movies and music to our most-read recipes. This is their roundup of the best of 2018.

There were apparently all sorts of things to see and read last year – enough to make me think I may have been too hasty in my dissing of the year. (Of course I just can’t shake the nagging feeling that something about 2018 was simply awful, and we shouldn’t do that again. For some reason the color Orange comes to mind.)

Regardless, HAPPY NEW YEAR!

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