Keeping Up With the Joneses 🌻🌻🌻

Truth or Consequences: Sometimes, just sometimes being a lying, despicable a-hole has consequences. Yesterday, right wing conspiracist, radio show host, owner of the Infowars website, Alex Jones found that out after a Connecticut jury awarded a group of parents of the children killed during the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre $965 million.  Jones, whose following includes a lot of demented individuals, including one well known conspiracist who previously served as the country’s 45^th president, was a key promoter of the Pizza Gate conspiracy that resulted in a gun toting maniac showing up at a Washington DC area pizza parlor to hunt for Hillary Clinton’s band of non-existent pedophiles.  He spent years pushing the deplorable lie that none of the 20 students or 6 staff members who had been killed at Sandy Hook had been killed, instead claiming that the whole event was just an elaborate performance, that the dead children and teachers were really crisis actors, and that the slaughter was staged to promote gun control.  That assertion may sound preposterous to the sane, but sadly a lot of Jones’ follows bought into it and spurred by his lies far too many of them spent the past decade making the lives of the Sandy Hook parents unbearable. Jones’ followers even tried to dig up the casket of one of the children to “prove” that it was empty.  It’s unlikely that Jones will end up coughing up the full $965 million, but expectations are that he will end up paying a considerable amount to the families despite his ongoing attempts to shirk his obligations through a variety of financial machinations. That said, he remains largely unrepentant, he’s still reaching out to his followers and yesterday he laughed off the jury’s award. By the way, Jones’ is also one of those who believes that the last presidential election was stolen, he helped fund the January 6^th “rally” and pleaded the Fifth when he was interviewed by the House January 6^th committee. 

Teflon Man: As to conspiracists, that other well-known one, the Former Guy, still hasn’t faced much in the way of consequences for his nefarious actions except, of course, for that 2020 election loss he continues to dispute, but he does have a few things to be concerned about.  Yesterday a federal judge rejected his attempt to “pause” his deposition in the defamation lawsuit brought by E Jean Carroll, the former Elle magazine columnist who has accused him of raping her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s. The deposition is scheduled to take place next week on October 19.  Naturally, the FG denies that he ever met her even though there is a photo of the two of them together.  More significantly, yesterday the Washington Post reported that an FG employee has come clean about moving boxes of purloined documents around Mar a Lago at the FG’s specific direction, direction that came after the FG had already received a subpoena for the boxes and documents from the Justice Department.  The employee in question had previously denied that he (or she maybe) had moved any boxes but started spilling his guts once he realized that the Feds had implicating security camera footage of the shenanigans.  Various legal pundits assert that this is a bigly deal because it confirms that the FG knew he had done something wrong and, instead of seeking to cooperate, he went the obstruction route, as he generally does.  Of course, he’s the FG so this could be just another thing that he gets away with as he prepares to run for reelection. 

The Mid Terms:  Current expectation, or pipe dream is that the FG will be indicted for his document stealing after the midterms.  To that end its worth noting that it’s not clear when that will be as the midterms could go on for a while especially in key state Georgia which could end up in another runoff if neither Senator Warnock nor footballer/abortion funder Walker manage to get 50% of the vote. Moving from Georgia to Pennsylvania, there’s been a lot of focus on Senate candidate/Lt Governor John Fetterman and his stroke recovery.  Though he’s back on the campaign trail, Fetterman is still suffering from some after-effects of his stroke and is upfront about having some auditory processing problems.  He appears to be speaking coherently but is relying on technology to help him properly “hear” words.  Ironically, though he’s far more coherent than a lot of politicians like Herschel Walker or dare I say a number of correspondents like MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell who frequently has a hard time coming up with words, NBC correspondent Dasha Burns claimed that he was having problems with small talk after she interviewed him.  She’s kind of retracted her already viral comment after being slammed by others who’ve spoken with Fetterman for their shows and/or podcasts including tech podcaster Kara Swisher who is herself a stroke survivor.  Swisher and others report that Fetterman was fine during their conversations, that he answered questions coherently and had no problem with idle chatter.  Unfortunately, Dasha Burn’s may have already tipped the increasingly close Pennsylvania Senate race towards the smooth talking Dr Oz, the one-time heart surgeon, purveyor of crank cures and NJ resident who’s been mocking Fetterman for having a stroke.  The first debate between Fetterman and Oz is scheduled to take place on October 25 and another, probably final, January 6^th Committee hearing will take place today starting at 1 PM Eastern time.

And: Lastly, in case you are wondering, Kanye “Ye” West has doubled down on his anti-Semitic comments and at least one podcaster says that he wasn’t surprised by Kanye’s remarks because he heard them before in 2018 when Kanye expressed admiration for Hitler and the Nazis during a TMZ interview. We didn’t hear them then because TMZ edited the despicable words out before airing.  Nothing to worry about though because Elon Musk, that “great” diplomat who is single handedly trying to mediate Russia – Ukraine peace by pushing Ukraine to cave to Putin’s annexations and who appears to have cut crucial Starlink communication services to Crimea to push his “solution,” says he’s spoken with Kanye to express his “concern” with his remarks and that Kanye has “taken them to heart.”  There were also reports that Musk spoke directly with Putin last week but at least so far Musk denies he did and has little to say about whether Putin even has a heart.