(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog's Favourite Living Canadian)

The ratfcking of Georgia's elections got a big boost on Friday when, as expected, (from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution):

The Georgia Election Board’s Republican majority voted Friday to require a hand count of all ballots after polls close on election night, a new requirement that could delay results of the presidential race.

County election directors universally opposed the eleventh-hour counting mandate, saying it would undermine voter confidence in the election results. They said results will come in more slowly, ballot box seals would be broken and manual counts could be inaccurate.

Which is, of course, the point. The State Elections Board was hijacked by election-denying MAGA fanatics who dedicated their service to rectifying the mistake Georgia made by not voting for the former president* back in 2020. They sought out anything that would work to mess with the results the next time around, preferably anything that would delay the count and, therefore, the certification of a Democratic victory. The ultimate goal would be to toss the election into the House of Representatives which, by rule, could vote to hand the election over to the former president*. Hence, the move to hand-count is little more than a way to throw sand in the gears. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has not been shy about what he's seeing in plain sight. From his office:

“Activists seeking to impose last-minute changes in election procedures outside of the legislative process undermine voter confidence and burden election workers,” said Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. “The General Assembly knew that quick reporting of results and certification is paramount to voter confidence and passed S.B. 202, but misguided attempts by the State Election Board will delay election results and undermine chain of custody safeguards. Georgia voters reject this 11th hour chaos, and so should the unelected members of the State Election Board.”

But this Elections Board doesn't care what Raffensperger thinks. It answers to a higher authority—and a lower class of human being—down in Florida.

Eric Hovde is a smiling stretch of California that the Republicans parachuted into Wisconsin in an attempt to beat incumbent Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin. Hovde's campaign was sucking wind even before Daniel Bice of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel came along to drop this rock on its head.

Banco Azteca, the 10th largest financial institution in Mexico, has had its share of problems in recent years. Accused in past news stories of having links to the Mexican drug cartel.

Dropped as a financial partner by some U.S. banks because of "risk and compliance concern. And now caught up in a Texas bribery scheme with an American congressman. But Sunwest Bank, the Utah-based financial institution run by Republican U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde, doesn't mind doing business with it. In December, Banco Azteca sent $26.2 million in cash to Sunwest on four airplane flights as part of a massive currency conversion called "repatriation," records show.

This sounds like an institution with which you don't want to do any kind of business whatsoever if you plan on running for the Senate from a state where you neither live nor work. It's tough to bail out once you've bailed in.

The strangest story of the week comes to us from Kentucky, where a local sheriff allegedly took his complaints about a local judge to...another level. From the Whitesburg Mountain Eagle:

Stines allegedly walked into the judge’s outer office, told court employees and others gathered there that he needed to speak with Mullins alone. The two then went into the inner office, closed the door and those outside heard shots. Stines walked out with his hands up and surrendered to police. Court employees were on the sidewalk outside the courthouse in shock following the shooting. Stines was handcuffed in the foyer of the courthouse. Officials expected the investigation to continue for several more hours.

In 2022, a lawsuit was filed in the local U.S. District Court by a woman alleging that a local deputy offered to trade sexual favors for "favorable treatment." From the Louisville Courier-Journal:

In the suit filed Monday in U.S. District Court, Sabrina Adkins says Deputy Ben Fields met her in a district judge’s chambers late at night six times last year and forced her to engage in unwanted kissing, oral sex and intercourse. “Plaintiff was coerced and compelled to comply with defendant Fields’ advances” given his “position and power and because she could not afford to pay for the ankle monitor and did not want to return to Letcher County Jail,” the suit says.

The suit said the abuse occurred in Mullins's chambers, and Stines was a named defendant in that he was charged with failing to train the deputy properly.

In late June, the suit says, he asked her to meet at the courthouse after dark and took her into a judge's chambers, telling her there were no cameras there. He allegedly then took off her ankle bracelet and told her she would not have to pay any fees but could remain on home incarceration. Between late June and December, Fields met her there at night or in the early morning about six times and allegedly sexually abused her there. The suit says he would put her bracelet on before court appearances. She said after certain unnamed persons at the courthouse reported Fields was having inappropriate contact with her and provided text messages proving it, he filed a complaint against her that she wasn’t complying with the terms of home incarceration to punish her and “in an attempt to save his reputation.”

It's still too early in the current investigation to conclude that this previous episode had anything to do with what happened this week. But we'll be keeping our eyes on it.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Peanut Butter In The Desert" (John Hicks): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here, from 1964, Earl Warren hands President Johnson a copy of the Warren Commission Report into the assassination of President Kennedy. That's 60 years ago, and there still are documents relating to the murder held back by the CIA, which did its best to ratfck the Commission hearings, and the 1978 investigation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations. History is so cool, but only when it's honest.

Politico ends the week with a front-page worthy of the name Tiger Beat On The Potomac.

Story One: Donald Trump suddenly changes his mind on the SALT exemption, giving an assurance to three gullible Republican congresscritters, an assurance that nobody with a functioning cerebral cortex has any earthly reason to believe. The headline: The Trump tax flip-flop that could help Republicans win the House.

Story Two: Teamsters mucky-mucks withhold endorsement in the presidential election despite the fact that many of the locals have endorsed the Democrats, and despite the fact that the national Teamsters endorsement hasn't been Democrat-friendly since Jimmy Hoffa bought off Nixon. The headline: Democrats privately worry the Teamsters non-endorsement is a warning sign.

Trust me. The two stories are very faithful to their headlines.

Matt Gaetz is up to his immobile forehead in deep shite. From The New Republic:

The court filings contain sealed affidavits from three eyewitness testimonies that the party was held at the Florida home of lobbyist Chris Dorworth, who is also a friend of Gaetz, NOTUS reported Friday. The filings were part of a civil lawsuit brought by Dorworth in 2023. Dorworth ultimately dropped the lawsuit, but Dorworth’s attorneys filed the documents in federal court to try and recoup legal fees. One of the witnesses said in a sworn affidavit that the teenager, who was a junior in high school at the time, was naked; people attending the party engaged in “sexual activities”; and partygoers consumed alcohol, cocaine, ecstasy, and marijuana. Testimony from the witness and two other women, one of whom was Gaetz’s then girlfriend, all placed the congressman at the party. A digital forensic examiner also confirmed activity from Gaetz’s cell phone at Dorworth’s house.

If Freud were tasked with analyzing modern conservative Republicans, he'd get out of the business and take up underwater welding.

Discovery Corner: Hey, look what we found! From Smithsonian:

On November 2, 1856, the passenger steamship Le Lyonnais was sailing off the coast of Massachusetts when it collided with a sailing vessel called the Adriatic. The Adriatic suffered minor damage and continued on. Le Lyonnais, meanwhile, had a small hole in its hull. Crews tried to patch it, but they ultimately couldn’t stop water from pouring in. Three days later, Le Lyonnais sank beneath the surface. Just 16 of the vessel’s 132 passengers were rescued. The exact location of Le Lyonnais’ final resting place in the Atlantic has been a mystery for the last 168 years—until now. In August, a team of shipwreck hunters discovered the vessel on the seafloor roughly 200 miles from New Bedford, Massachusetts.

There seems to have been quite a bit of negligence involved here.

After the accident, the crew aboard the Adriatic assumed Le Lyonnais was fit to continue on its course. The Adriatic headed to Gloucester, Massachusetts, for repairs, leaving the crew aboard Le Lyonnais to fend for themselves. A few weeks after the collision, the Adriatic’s captain, Jonathan Durham, said in a statement published in the New York Times (then the New-York Daily Times) that the crew “hailed the steamer, and requested them not to leave us, but received no answer.” The captain was later put on trial in France for the accident, per the Boston Globe.

In case you were wondering, the Adriatic weighed in excess of 800 tons, so it was more than big enough to sink a steamer.

Hey, CBC? Is it a good day for dinosaur news? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!

Victoria Arbour, curator of paleontology at the Royal B.C. Museum, said it was her team's third time to the Spatsizi Plateau Wilderness Provincial Park, about 200 kilometres south of the B.C.-Yukon border. The area is rough terrain, so the team has to be flown in by helicopter. Usually, well-preserved dinosaur bones are found in deserts, where rocks are exposed, but Arbour said that on this particular mountain, her team hit the "mother lode of fossils." "We came back with over 90 dinosaur fossil bones, which we're super excited about because this is a relatively unexplored place for fossils," she told Daybreak North host Carolina De Ryk.

Holy Jackpot, Batman!

The team of researchers happened upon the cluster of fossils by chance, Arbour said. "One day, we went to a new spot on the mountain and started finding bones all around our feet," she said. "We were just picking them up off the surface." They found things like teeth and chunks of bone. In particular, Arbour is excited about what she believes could be a group of bones that all appear to belong to one dinosaur's foot or leg. "We're really excited to figure out what that could be. Is it a juvenile of a Tyrannosaur? Is it a small meat eater like a raptor dinosaur or other little meat eaters like that?" Arbour estimates the fossils are 66 to 68 million years old.

Fossils, just lying around on the ground, waiting to be picked up. It's The Dinos of the Sierra Madre! To show how happy we are now that they lived then, let's all do the Walter Huston dance!

I'll be back on Monday for whatever fresh hell awaits. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and wear the damn masks, and take the damn shots, especially the boosters and The New One. In your spare time, spare a thought for the folks in Winder, Georgia, and the people in Vietnam and in New Orleans, both places that faced the storm this week. And those people in Japan coming out from under Typhoon Shanshan, and those living through the aftermath of Hurricane Ernesto, and in Morocco, and Colombia, and in the flood zones in India and Bangla Desh, Libya, and the flood zones all across the Ohio Valley, and on the Horn of Africa, and in Tanzania and Kenya, and Sudan. and in the English midlands, and in Virginia, and in Texas and Louisiana, and in California, and the flood zones of Indonesia, and in Poland and central Europe, and in the storm-battered south of Georgia, and in Kenya, and in the flood areas in Dubai (!) and in Pakistan, and Brazil, and in the flood zones in Russia and Kazakhstan, and in the flood zones in Iran, where loose crocodiles are becoming a problem, and in the flood zones on Oahu, and in the fire zones in and around Los Angeles, and in Wyoming, Oregon, and western Canada, and Australia, and in north Texas, and in Lahaina, where they’re still trying to recover their lives, and under the volcano in Iceland, and for the gun-traumatized folks in Austin and at UNLV, and in Philadelphia, and in Perry, Iowa, and especially for our fellow citizens in the LGBTQ+ community, who deserve so much better from their country than they’ve been getting.