FYI

There was a security breach last week and apparently it got a huge amount of information. I have been getting crap loads of fake stuff and some of them are pretty darn real looking.

I just ordered a free sample to see if there is any effect at all. I’m skeptical but curious.

I think the whole OT board should order some today and we can compare notes on results in the coming weeks/months.

Yes, my decision was mostly driven by my now bald head. Maybe Nugenix can make me feel like I’m 25 again. If it doesn’t succeed in that regard, next step is to test out whatever Larry King was taking the last 30 years of his life.

in Scottsdale? My wife and I are going to Scottsdale in a couple of weeks and we are wondering if anyone has done the 1 hour self guide tour ($45) versus the 2 hour ($90) for the guided tour. In other words is the 2 hour tour worth the xtra cost? Thanks!

A court in Georgia has harshly upbraided Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and ordered her to pay a substantial sum for repeat violations of Peach State open records laws.

As Law&Crime previously reported, the violation occurred when the prosecutor’s office, in response to an open records request, denied having any documents showing any communications with special counsel Jack Smith or members of the since-defunct House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Late last year, in response to a lawsuit filed by conservative government watchdog group Judicial Watch, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney ordered the district attorney’s office to provide the requested documents and/or offer an explanation for their continued absence — while leaving open possible attorneys fees.

After hearing what Willis and her office had to say, the judge assessed an award of $21,578 in attorneys’ fees and costs for the plaintiffs, according to the court’s latest order, dated Jan. 3 but just released this week.

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“Fani Willis flouted the law, and the court is right to slam her and require, at a minimum, the payment of nearly $22,000 to Judicial Watch,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a press release. “But in the end, Judicial Watch wants the full truth on what she was hiding — her office’s political collusion with the Pelosi January 6 committee to ‘get Trump.’”




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In the underlying lawsuit, Judicial Watch accused Willis of making “likely false” representations about the retention of the documents in question.

In sum and substance, the court agreed with the plaintiffs, finding that Willis had both procedurally lost the case by refusing to respond and violated the law on the merits by repeatedly lying about the existence of at least some of those requested documents.

The court’s order is withering in its appraisal of how Willis and her underlings violated the Peach States Open Records Act (ORA).

“Most basically, by operation of law Defendant acknowledged violating the ORA when she defaulted,” McBurney writes. “But actual evidence proves the same: per her Records Custodian’s own admission, the District Attorney’s Office flatly ignored Plaintiff’s original ORA request, conducting no search and simply (and falsely) informing the County’s Open Records Custodian that no responsive records existed.”

To date, Willis has since admitted that documents responsive to the Jan. 6 committee do, in fact, exist. Her office continues to maintain there were never any communications with the special counsel’s office. Initially, and for over a year, Willis claimed no such records — in response to either request — were anywhere to be found.

“We know now that that is simply incorrect: once pressed by a Court order, Defendant managed to identify responsive records, but has categorized them as exempt.” McBurney continues. “Even if the records prove to be just that — exempt from disclosure for sound public policy reasons — this late revelation is a patent violation of the ORA. And for none of this is there any justification, substantial or otherwise: no one searched until prodded by civil litigation.”

But, the court explains, Willis’ office, in fact, also had at least one responsive document that was not exempt — a letter Willis wrote to the Jan. 6 committee chair. Notably, this letter was the focus of Judicial Watch’s lawsuit — the nonprofit came into possession of the document after Willis denied the letter even existed.

Finally, after defaulting, Willis provided the letter directly — attached to a memo filed in response to a court order directing her to do so.

The judge glaringly recounted this turn of events:

In this memo, Defendant announced that there still were no records responsive to one set of Plaintiff’s requests (communications with former Special Counsel Jack Smith) but that there were in fact records responsive to Plaintiff’s second set of requests (communications with the United States House January 6th Committee) — but those were exempt from disclosure. Defendant, despite these reservations, did gamely attach to her memo a copy of the letter she wrote to the Chairman of the House Committee that (1) does not appear to be covered by any of the exemptions identified in the memo and (2) had already been identified by Plaintiff as a responsive record that was wrongly withheld.

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“Somehow something had changed,” the judge angrily went on. “Despite having previously informed Plaintiff four separate times that her team had carefully searched but found no responsive records, now there suddenly were — but they were not subject to disclosure under the ORA.”

The district attorney’s office eventually provided some key admissions about how all of this transpired.

“Plaintiff’s deposition of Defendant’s Records Custodian shed some light on this mystery: he admitted that there was no search for records back in August 2023,” the court order goes on. “Just a ‘no, go away.’ He further clarified that, when Plaintiff did not go away but instead sued, there still was no organized, comprehensive examination of the District Attorney’s Office’s records.”

In a footnote, McBurney further criticizes the DA’s office for the sum of their efforts to comply with the law. The judge observes: “Even after litigation began, Defendant’s Records Custodian initially merely asked certain employees if they thought they had any responsive records; there was no rigorous review of e-mails or case files.”

The lawsuit was filed in March 2024; by April of last year, Willis was in default. The legal process has played out slowly since then; the formal default verdict was entered in December.

After the prosecutor was found in default, Judicial Watch filed a separate motion asking for the court to appoint a special master in order to scour the agency’s files for the documents. Willis has until Jan. 16, to respond to that motion.

For now, her office has a bill to pay — due on Jan. 17.

“The ORA is not hortatory; it is mandatory,” McBurney lectured. “Non-compliance has consequences. One of them can be liability for the requesting party’s attorney’s fees and costs of litigation.”

Shortly after 1 a.m. on Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump took to social media to attack one of his long-standing foes, someone whose power had long frustrated the former president. Then, having excoriated NBC's Seth Meyers for some jokes, Trump turned his attention to former special counsel Jack Smith.


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Smith’s report documenting the investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election had been publicly released shortly before. The president-elect — without having read the report, we can safely assume — disparaged Smith’s probe as simultaneously political and tired. Smith’s report was “based on information that the Unselect Committee of Political Hacks and Thugs” — that is, the House select committee investigating the Capitol riot — “ILLEGALLY DESTROYED AND DELETED,” Trump wrote. He added that this material had been destroyed (it wasn’t) because it “showed how totally innocent I was,” which would suggest that Smith’s report also shows how totally innocent he was (it doesn’t).
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This scattershot approach to spin is by now familiar. Everything that is good for Trump is exceptionally good, the best, while everything that’s bad is fake and dishonest and illegal in its own right. Trump didn’t need to read the report to craft his social media post any more than we needed to read his post to know what it said. It said what it always says: He did nothing wrong but Smith et al did.


Americans, though, should read Smith’s report. What it lays out entirely undercuts the idea that Smith’s actions were political, detailing instead precisely how and why charges against Trump were warranted. Not because he was a threat to Biden’s reelection (as Trump insists) but because he engaged in an exceptional effort to subvert the results of the 2020 election.
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It’s striking to consider the extent to which even the most obvious elements of that effort have been successfully bogged down in partisan debate. For example, Donald Trump (as the report notes) called on people to come to a “wild” protest in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. That morning, he stoked the anger of a large crowd and told them to head to the Capitol. They did, attacking police and pushing into the building, delaying the final step of confirming Trump’s loss. Trump watched on TV, waiting hours before he called on the protesters to leave.
All of that is obviously true. The scattershot response — it was the feds; it wasn’t that bad; Trump told them to be peaceful; it wasn’t his fault — has nonetheless effectively convinced millions of Americans that Trump bears no culpability for what unfolded.


Smith’s report doesn’t focus specifically on that event. Instead, it delineates Trump’s broader effort to retain power, an effort that culminated in the riot. That effort …

“included attempts to induce state officials to ignore true vote counts; to manufacture fraudulent slates of presidential electors in seven states that he had lost; to force Justice Department officials and his own Vice President, Michael R. Pence, to act in contravention of their oaths and to instead advance Mr. Trump’s personal interests; and, on January 6, 2021, to direct an angry mob to the United States Capitol”

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… as the report explains.
Smith insists that his team was prepared to prove Trump’s culpability in these efforts and that he would have obtained a conviction. But the Justice Department has prohibitions against prosecuting sitting presidents and, in one week, that’s what Trump will once again be. So he ended his probe and released his report.
There are mandated elements to the report, according to the statute that dictates how special counsels conduct their work. One element is that the counsel must explain any charges they brought or any that they declined to bring. So Smith’s report walks through the charges Trump faced in the election-subversion case, explaining that they met the requirements of prosecution: serving a “substantial federal interest” that couldn’t be prosecuted in another jurisdiction and which couldn’t be addressed with non-prosecutorial action.


The most striking — and, with Trump’s re-inauguration looming, most disconcerting — articulation in Smith’s report of the “federal interest” served in bringing charges against Trump is the threat that his power posed to his critics and opponents.
“Consistently, when elected officials refused to take improper actions that Mr. Trump urged, like discarding legitimate votes or appointing fraudulent electors, Mr. Trump attacked them publicly on Twitter, a social media application on which he had more than 80 million followers,” the report states. “Inevitably, threats and intimidation to these officials followed.”
The end of the prosecution means the end of accountability for that deployment of power — and therefore, no disincentive not to engage in similar deployment in the future.

As he did in a filing last year, Smith also establishes that Trump’s efforts to subvert the election results were not consistent with past efforts to challenge the election results. None of the examples of past challenges offered by Trump’s attorneys, though, involved attempts “to use fraud and deceit to obstruct or defeat the governmental function that would result in the certification of the lawful winner of a presidential election.” Trump’s push was exceptional.

That’s a central part of Smith’s case: This wasn’t normal. The special counsel “would not have brought a prosecution if the evidence indicated he had engaged in mere political exaggeration or rough-and-tumble politics,” the report states. Trump’s effort went far beyond that, from repeated lies about the election results — one 1,000-word footnote lists more than 30 examples of Trump’s lies being refuted in real time — to pressuring allies to acquiesce to his attempts to retain his position.
There was one charge that Smith’s team contemplated but didn’t charge: a violation of the Insurrection Act. As explained in the report, the stumbling block was less that Trump hadn’t attempted to subvert the transfer of power but, instead, that it wasn’t clear what legal standard for “insurrection” needed to be fulfilled to obtain an indictment.

There isn’t much that’s surprising in Smith’s final documentation of Trump’s actions, mostly because those actions have been explored and explained in the media and by the House select committee for years now. What the report adds instead is a forceful rebuttal to the idea that Trump’s indictments weren’t deserved, given his actions.

Trump best bet to beat the prosecution for his efforts to subvert the 2020 election was always to win the 2024 one. He did. “THE VOTERS HAVE SPOKEN!!!” he wrote to conclude his social media post, suggesting that this was the only verdict required.
Now, Smith has also spoken. It’s safe to assume that history will reflect that his presentation of Trump’s actions is more accurate and fair than Trump’s presentation.

Latinos said Trumps economy was better for them.
Black men said the democrats prioritized illegal immigrants over them.

You knew the dems were in trouble when they were trotting out old man Obama and Oprah to scold black men and tell them how they should think and how they should vote.

https://apnews.com/article/walgreen...urth-quarter-5df931861e1e4111eaa5ef2372ec173a

Had to happen. They cannibalized their own stores by building way too many. I think there are like 5 in IC/NL

Crypto doesn't have to turn into the next Tulip Mania - although I think that's likely. Nor will it necessarily boost the activities of criminal and terrorist organizations - although it's already used in those realms. But it's clear that Trump, Elon and Vance's tech buddies plan to push it and ride it to greater personal wealth. Personal wealth, not national wealth - although it might boost that, too.

The #1 question is whether Trump will (if he has the authority) declare crypto currencies as legal tender for paying taxes and debts. In David Graeber's excellent book, he discusses how making the currency of the state the only legal tender for paying taxes (in particular) strengthens the currency and the governments that do so. To me, that raises the question whether making an alternative currency legal for taxes will undermine the US dollar. I expect that it will.

All of that, of course, is irrelevant to whether investing in crypto is a good idea in the short term. It probably is - if you can afford the risk. People made fortunes on tulips, too - for a while.

So . . . which cryptos are the best bets?

It seems unfair to blame politicians for natural disasters. Yet try saying that today to the people of Los Angeles. For more than a decade, the Democratic figures who run the state of California have bleated on about the perils of global warming and the failure of their Republican opponents to prevent a climate catastrophe. Yet now LA County is ablaze, five people are dead, 130,000 have been ordered to evacuate their homes, and it’s increasingly clear that the Democrats have spent years stubbornly, almost vindictively neglecting to protect citizens from severe weather.

LA Mayor Karen Bass swanned off on a diplomatic junket to Ghana and only reappeared on Wednesday afternoon, to be greeted by a TV reporter as she stepped off the plane. Would she apologise for her absence? Why had she cut her fire department’s budget by $20 million in spite of warnings from fire chiefs that their teams would be unable to cope with an emergency? Would she resign? Nope, no comment.

Last month, Bass had promised: “We are making significant investments... to ensure our city continues to weather the impacts of climate change and maintain access to critical life services of water and power.”

Yet power outages are now happening across Southern California and severe water shortages have made it almost impossible for firefighters to stop the burning. Californians, who pay the highest rate of taxation in the US and whose state shares 850 miles of coastline with the Pacific Ocean, are understandably asking why the response to the fires has been on a par with a landlocked developing country.

Across America, too, voters are seeing the unfolding horror as a fitting epitaph to the Biden presidency, which spent far too much time and resources pursuing politically correct causes at the expense of competent or even sane governance. Democrats are supposed to make government work, yet their wasteful incompetence has turned California from one of America’s best states into arguably its worst.

Official Californian programmes focused on reducing the number of white male firefighters, as if anybody cares about the skin or sex of the person with the hose when their house is immolating. The Californian governor, Gavin Newsom, regularly touted as the next Democratic presidential nominee, has often tried to present himself as more pragmatic than his peers. In 2019, he promised to revamp the state’s emergency response systems. Yet he then slashed some $150 million from the state’s wildfire prevention budget, even as he kept some 90 per cent of the state’s $50 billion climate budget.

“Gavin Newscum [sic] should resign,” declared Donald Trump on his Truth Social platform yesterday. “This is all his fault!!!” The President-elect’s critics immediately accused him of playing politics with tragedy. Yet Trump, thanks to his extensive experience with real estate and golf courses, actually has quite a sophisticated understanding of land management. For a long time, he has raised the alarm over the shortcomings of California fire management systems, only to be dismissed by Democrats as a raving fool.

In his first term as president, Trump demanded that Newsom stop listening to the concerns of environmentalists and conduct more controlled burns and forest sweeps to remove deadwood, measures that could have prevented much of the carnage now taking place. He’s also regularly criticised California for redirecting much of its abundant water supply into the Pacific Ocean in order to protect “a tiny little fish”, the smelt. Ecologists and media fact-checkers are currently debating the veracity of that claim. Meanwhile, Los Angeles is burning like hell and the fire hydrants are empty.

California remains solidly Democratic, yet the state government’s myopic obsession with climate change has impoverished its residents in all sorts of other ways. The home of Silicon Valley – the most powerful driver of wealth on the planet – fails to teach basic literacy to a majority of its children. Today, the so-called Sunshine State has one America’s highest rates of unemployment, shocking amounts of dire poverty and huge net outmigration as more economically mobile residents flee to better ruled states, such as Republican-controlled Florida.

Donald Trump believes that, by the end of his second term, Californians will embrace his America First agenda. That may be wishful thinking. It’s increasingly evident, however, that under the control of Joe Biden, Gavin Newsom and the climate change lobby, California came last.

Not like.. pepper flakes or ranch. Something you can share that most of us will go "huh.. never thought of that before."

President Joe Biden gave himself a pat on the back Monday for his policy in Afghanistan, infuriating family members of Americans who were killed in a suicide bombing in Kabul during the botched 2021 withdrawal.

Calling himself “the first president in decades who's not leaving a war in Afghanistan to his successor," Biden said his Afghanistan policy was correct, according to Fox News, saying, "In my view, it was time to end the war and bring our troops home, and we did."

”By ending the war, we’ve been able to focus our energy and resources on our urgent challenges,” Biden said, according to the New York Post.

After claiming that remaining in Afghanistan would have delighted Russia and China, Biden said that "ending the war was the right thing to do, and I believe history will reflect that."

During his speech at the State Department, he cited “those brave service members whose lives were lost during the withdrawal” but did not mention the Kabul incident by name.

Biden’s congratulatory self-praise grated on Darin Hoover, father of Marine Staff Sgt. Taylor Hoover, who was among the 13 Americans killed in the suicide bombing, according to the U.K.'s Daily Mail.

“It blows my mind that he is taking credit for ending the war and being proud of it!!!” Darin Hoover said in a statement.

“WE LOST OUR KIDS for him to think that history will reflect him as this great human being when he is Satan to me,” he wrote.

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Hoover said Biden was “100 percent incompetent.”

“He's a disgusting man who holds ZERO integrity or any respect in my mind and has no idea how it feels to be in our shoes, especially when the withdrawal happened the way it did,” Hoover said. “There was NO need for it to happen that way.”
Christy Shamblin, whose daughter-in-law, Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee, was killed in the bombing, also criticized Biden.

“So sad. Disappointed to see the same head in the sand mentality,” she said in a statement.

“Terrorist attacks are happening. It has absolutely taken Afghanistan back to Taliban rule and armed terrorist groups. Claiming success no one else can see. He should have said NOTHING,” Shamblin said.

“We need problem solving for our national security not hiding behind Ukraine relief and railroads in Africa," she said.

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