Okay, I DO kind of love this. Trump’s lead attorney in the theft of state secrets case is a guy named Jim Trusty. If you can’t trust a lawyer named Trusty, who CAN you trusty? It’s hard to keep track of which lawyer is leading which criminal defense. Having a lawyer named ‘Trusty’ is going to make it easier in this case.

Apparently, Trump is planning to ask for a “Special Master” to oversee a review of the documents Trump stole that had to be forcibly retrieved from Mar-a-Lago. I’m not sure I’ve EVER heard anybody whine about being picked on as much as Trump does. Sure, he forced the FBI’s hand by refusing to actually turn over documents he wasn’t legally allowed to have until they had to execute a search warrant. Ever since, the whiner Trump calls it the “illegal break-in of my beautiful home.” So, for clarity, it wasn’t illegal and it wasn’t a break-in.

The right have offered every explanation, possible and impossible, to try and justify Trumps theft. None have held up to scrutiny by people who understand things. (ALL are now dogma to the true believers of Cult 45.) It’s funny. Talking heads on TV and the internet keep speculating about what’s possible, what’s illegal, who did what evil thing to harm their beloved chosen one. None of the speculation works out as presented on TV once in the courtroom. It turns out, the law doesn’t always work the way people think it does and it certainly doesn’t work the way conservatives want it to. That is, liberals are always guilty, but never, EVER Trump. Oh, by the way, the Trump team, to date, still have not filed any such motion. At this rate, by the time they do, the FBI will have gone through just about all of the documents. It DOES create yet another fraudulent – but profitable – talking point…

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Speaking of Cult 45, there’s a group out there called the Cult Education Institute. They put out a meme of five warning signs of a cult.
1. The leader is always right.
2. Criticism of the leader or questioning the leader is considered persecution.
3. Anything the leader does is justified no matter how harmful it may be.
4. The leader is the only source of truth, everybody else is lying.
5. Disciples must be devoted to the leader and never question him.

I’ll tell you this: the next time you get dragged into a discussion about Trump and discover the person you’re talking to simply cannot – will not – understand factual reality, remember the warning signs. His followers don’t know or care if he’s guilty…for them it’s a matter of faith. One cannot argue against faith…

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Well, this is kind of sad. The daughter of a powerful Russian Putin ally was killed when a car bomb exploded in the car she was driving. Russia, of course, blamed Ukraine. Zelenskiy denied any involvement. So…who to believe? On the one hand, we have Vladimir Putin, an established murderer who has never hesitated to kill anyone for his own purposes and who has prosecuted an illegal war that seems to violate the Geneva Conventions every chance it gets. On the other hand, there’s Zelenskiy, who seems to have fought quite an honorable war, if, in fact, the words “honorable” and “war” can ever be written together.

Putin’s war doesn’t seem to be going too well for him. He thought he’d have it over and done in a few days. But then it turned into a few weeks, then a few months. There’s a lesson from history, here. The United States of America once invaded a country illegally. (Okay, so we’ve done it more than once. In this case, I’m referring to Vietnam.) We thought, being a Super Power, we were going to “win” in a cakewalk. We didn’t. See, our soldiers were fighting because they were told to. Their soldiers were fighting for their homes and families. It turns out, when one county attacks people’s homes, those people tend to defend their homes with great ferocity. The same thing happened when the greatest empire on Earth at the time, Great Britain, came at the colonists in the Americas. Their soldiers were fighting because they were told to. Ours were fighting for their homes and families. Now it looks like Russia is having a similar experience in Ukraine.

I’ll tell you this: I suspect Putin needs something to keep his people riled up and supporting his war and the death of an innocent is just the ticket…

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I see a lot of speculation about what’s going to happen with Jimmy Garoppolo, the ex-starting Quarterback of the Santa Clara Forty-Niners. Here’s mine: I think Jimmy G will end up in Seattle. I think the Niners think Jimmy G will end up in Seattle, too. The team doesn’t WANT him in Seattle. The dude may be a mid-level Quarterback but he has first class knowledge of the team and how it operates. That will be important information to any team the Niners face, let alone one the Niners face twice a season.

They keep saying they’re hoping for a trade but every team in the league knows the Niners are going to cut Jimmy G just before they have to pay him a whopping sum for the next season. No other team is going to trade for Garoppolo at his current price, most especially when they know they don’t have to. All they have to do is wait out the Niners then get him off the waiver wire for whatever they can negotiate.

The only leverage the Niners have is knowing that waiting to get Garoppolo into their facility slows his progress with the new team. Hopefully, Jimmy G won’t have time to master Seattle’s system in time for the scheduled Week 2 match-up. The other side of that coin? The Niners know Jimmy’s weaknesses better than any other team, with the possible exception of the Patriots, Jimmy’s last team. Maybe the Niners aren’t as worried about a QB who panics in the pocket in pressure situations as they’re pretending to be…