A video submitted as part of an insurance claim in January appeared to show a brown bear tearing up the interior of a Rolls-Royce.Similar videos involving other cars were turned in to two additional insurers. All together, the three insurance companies collectively paid out over $140,000.
Those things at the bottom were used to imitate bear claw marks.
The California Department of Insurance has arrested Ruben Tamrazian, 26; Ararat Chirkinian, 39; and Vahe Muradkhanyan, 32, all of Glendale, Calif.; and Alfiya Zuckerman, 39, of Los Angeles. They face charges of insurance fraud and conspiracy.
Speaker Mike Johnson is saying he does not think the House Ethics report into the conduct of Attorney General nominee Matt Gaetz should be released, even though Gaetz must face a Senate confirmation hearing. “I’m going to strongly request that the Ethics Committee not issue the report, because that is not the way we do things in the House,” Johnson said. “And I think that would be a terrible precedent to set.”
“The rules of the House have always been that a former member is beyond the jurisdiction of the Ethics Committee,” Johnson said, when asked if the public has a right to see the report. “And so I don’t think that’s relevant.”
Of course the report is relevant. In fact, what the report contains is essential to determining whether President Trump has nominated a pedophile, criminal drug users and general slimeball as the nation’s top lawyer or not. “That is not the way we do things in the House” is no argument at all. How many times as a member of Congress been nominated for Attorney General with an ethics investigation pending? “Never”is the answer, so “how they do thing in the House” in this situation will be decided by the House. The House has a duty to the American people first, not to its members, or in Gaetz’s case, non-members. It wouldn’t be a terrible precedent—why does Johnson think that? For the House to willfully withhold relevant information from a Senate confirmation hearing for a key position in a President’s Cabinet would be the terrible precedent. Johnson’s position looks like part of a cover-up operation.
Now, if Gaetz were really a trustworthy and admirable nominee, he would publicly request that the Hose Ethics Committee release the results of their inquiry, since there wouldn’t be anything damning in it.
Apparently the lessons of the past election are not sinking in for many as quickly as some thought.
Since the election, it has been confirmed that the Harris campaign paid Oprah Winfrey’s production company Harpo a million dollars for the elaborate event including Winfrey’s fawning interview of Harris on stage, and that it paid Al Sharpton’s National Action Network a half-million dollars before Sharpton did his Harrs interview. This is unethical. It is cheating. To the extent that the interviews were journalism ( Winfrey used to be a journalist and is still accorded the credibility and status of one, Sharpton pretends to be a journalist rather than what he is, a race-hustler, on MNBC) accepting such payments create a conflict of interest and a breach of journalism ethics. Even if they are not technically unethical journalism, the lack of transparency is.
Or was she thinking? Or can she think any more? To be fair, having to be on “The View” and deal with that panel of idiots might drive anyone crazy. Still, this was a gratuitous, self-inflicted wound, and there will be consequences. Good.
Goldberg celebrated her 69th birthday on “The View” this week, and told her fellow panelists and viewers that her order for several dozen Charlotte Russe cup cakes at an unnamed bakery was initially refused because, she surmised, they objected to her politics. Goldberg didn’t mention the name of the bakery, taking defamation off the table, particularly since the Staten Island bakery in question, Holtermann’s, a 146-year-old institution in Great Kills on Staten Island, went on the offensive. The owner denied refusing the pre-order because of politics, explaining that she was dealing with a broken boiler and couldn’t commit to the large advance order.
The self-indicting that is arising from the 2024 Election Freakout has nicely exposed the hypocrisy behind the progressive masks of decency and virtue. Let’s listen to Ashli, the lovely young thing above, who has enthusiastically embraced the South Korean “4B Movement.” The name ‘4B’ comes from the Korean words for four ‘Nos’: no heterosexual sex, no marriage, no children, and no relationships, all starting with the letter ‘b.’ Her journey is described in a revealing piece in the Daily Mail.
The brutal murder of a woman in a subway station by a man who reportedly said he was ‘sick of being ignored by women.’ sparked the ptotest by many Korean women against all men. That seems fair and logical. No, in fact it makes no sense at all, but it does to Ashli. “Out of this tragedy, a wave of female anger turned into action. Women took control of their lives,” she writes. I’ve come to the conclusion that men can be dangerous. That’s why, two years ago at the age of 34, I chose to disengage from men entirely.
She gives her reasons. “I knew so many women who were hurt by the men they loved and trusted. Men they vowed to love and who vowed to love them. Men they slept next to at night.” Then, “the overturning of Roe cemented everything I already knew. Five justices—four of them men—decided we didn’t deserve control over our own bodies. The new MAGA Republican Party, with its hyper-masculine, power-hungry grip, cheered it on.”
For once, the over-the-top criticism of a Trump decision is completely justified, and maybe even understated. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), just nominated by the President-Elect to be his Attorney General, has no legitimate qualifications for the job at all, which requires managing a 115,000-person agency. He has no management experience. He has no prosecutorial experience. He is a licensed lawyer, but has very little legal practice experience. No previous Attorney General, going back to Edmund Randolph, Washington’s first AG, had such a sparse legal resume. Randolph had been governor of Virginia.
I am more qualified to be the Attorney General than Matt Gaetz, and I can think of many personal friends and colleagues who are more qualified for the job than I am. If I threw a rock into a cocktail reception at the D.C. Bar, I would hit a more qualified lawyer.
He didn’t have to be gracious. Few would have blamed him if he was not. He could have followed through with the obligatory meeting between an outgoing POTUS and an incoming one from the other party stiffly, coldly and as formally as possible. After all, Donald Trump had refused to extend the courtesy of such a meeting to him, when Biden won the election in 2020.
But instead of tit-for-tat, payback, bitterness or resentment, President Biden said, “Welcome back.” Never mind that this is an odd thing to say to man whom his party (and Biden himself) had pronounced a fascist and an existentialist threat to democracy. Trump, himself addicted to outrageous hyperbole as a lifestyle, knows more than most that this was just a campaign ploy, albeit a particularly divisive and unfair one. “Welcome back” is as close as President Biden could come to saying, “It’s over, you won, and no hard feelings,” even if the hard feelings are there, for how could they not be?
It is supremely ironic that Joe Biden’s most remembered quote as President will be this one, uttered as he his administration is going out not with a bang, but a whimper. (George Washington also had a famous quote acknowledging his successor: “I am fairly out and you fairly in! George said to John Adams. “See which of us will be happiest!”)
At the end of ” MacBeth”Malcolm says of vanquished Thane of Cawdor, “Nothing dignified him in this life more than his leaving it.” It may be said of Joe Biden that “Nothing so dignified his Presidency as his leaving it.” I suspect that it will be.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a troubling, if not unexpected report, “Cheating Has Become Normal: Faculty members are overwhelmed, and the solutions aren’t clear.” It begins with an anecdote that would be funny if it weren’t so apocalyptic. A professor caught a student cheating, and warned him that the next time this happened, he would be failed in the course. The student wrote an abject apology, full of contrition and assurances. Then his next assignment was found to be composed by an AI bot. Then, just for giggles, the prof asked the same bot to compose a letter of apology for a student who had been caught cheating. The bot produced exactly the apology the student had submitted, word for word.
“I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done.”
I can’t find the date of that speech or the context of the quote, but what possible context could justify it? If that isn’t pure Big Brother, what is? “Can’t let the truth get in the way of progress!” This is the totalitarian mindset that (I hope) was one of the things enough voters rejected a week ago. This is the ends justifies the means ideology embraced by the Axis of Unethical Conduct, including the news media that lied, dissembled, covered up and broadcast false narratives during the campaign and, of course, long before.
I saw Marlene sing that song, which always ended her concerts, in her penultimate performance in the U.S. That time, she shouted out “Gone to graveyards every one!” I have never felt such a jolt of emotion in any live performance I have ever attended. A woman near me broke into tears. It was particular effective because of Dietrich’s personal history, and her work for the Allies, some of it covert, during World War II.
