Tag: law

Senator Sexual Harassment

Sen. Al Franken must step down from the U.S. Senate at once for physically molesting Leann Tweeden.

As a TV host and sports broadcaster, as well as a model familiar to the audience from the covers of FHM, Maxim and Playboy, I was only expecting to emcee and introduce the acts, but Franken said he had written a part for me that he thought would be funny, and I agreed to play along.

When I saw the script, Franken had written a moment when his character comes at me for a ‘kiss’. I suspected what he was after, but I figured I could turn my head at the last minute, or put my hand over his mouth, to get more laughs from the crowd.

On the day of the show Franken and I were alone backstage going over our lines one last time. He said to me, “We need to rehearse the kiss.” I laughed and ignored him. Then he said it again. I said something like, ‘Relax Al, this isn’t SNL…we don’t need to rehearse the kiss.’ He continued to insist, and I was beginning to get uncomfortable.

He repeated that actors really need to rehearse everything and that we must practice the kiss. I said ‘OK’ so he would stop badgering me. We did the line leading up to the kiss and then he came at me, put his hand on the back of my head, mashed his lips against mine and aggressively stuck his tongue in my mouth.

I immediately pushed him away with both of my hands against his chest and told him if he ever did that to me again I wouldn’t be so nice about it the next time.

I walked away. All I could think about was getting to a bathroom as fast as possible to rinse the taste of him out of my mouth.

I felt disgusted and violated.

Molesting a sleeping woman? Even a Kennedy wouldn’t stoop so low. Franken has to go, and go now. Let’s see if Messrs. McConnnell, Cruz, and Ryan can summon up the same outrage for actual sexual harassment 11 years ago for which there is photographic evidence as they have for the nonexistent kind that didn’t happen 40 years ago.

Nor is it likely to be the only time (((Franken))) did something like that.

During the meeting, writers are brainstorming about how to develop a sketch in which one of the actors plays “60 Minutes” commentator Andy Rooney, who finds an empty pill bottle in his desk. According to the article, Franken’s suggestion includes Rooney saying: “I give the pills to Leslie Stahl. Then when Leslie is passed out, I take her to the closet and rape her. Or ‘That’s why you never see Lesley until February. Or, ‘When she passes out. I put her in various positions and take pictures of her.’ ”

This isn’t new and this isn’t news. Read Portnoy’s Complaint. It’s all right there, courtesy of Mr. Roth. Notice the bitter, butthurt behavior (((Franken))) exhibits after Tweeden refuses to play along with his “joke” too.

UPDATE: Once the true nature of these harassers is revealed, the floodgates tend to open:

Phil Kerpen‏@kerpen
I’ve already heard about a second Al Franken victim.

A poem, updated

There’s a miserable family called Stein:
There’s Gert and there’s Ep and there’s Wein.
Gert’s poems are noise,
Ep sold little boys,
And Hollywood was raped by Wein.

It’s rather remarkable to see how some Judeo-Christians will twist and contort themselves to try to somehow a) condemn pedophilia and child molestation while b) avoiding any condemnation of the teachings of their rabbis or the rabbis themselves.

Consider this recent Twitter exchange:

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
Hollywood values are Jewish values. There are no “Judeo-Christian” values. Ask any rabbi.

((( ?)))‏ @usershem
Why imply that Hollywood degeneracy is a Jewish value?

Mr. Smith‏ @ClazyAsylum
Is this the Jewish version of “Islam is a religion of peace”?

((( ?)))‏ @usershem
Judaism is not degenerate

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
The entire history of the Jews in the USA proves that to be a false statement. Do you accept Christian morality as the metric?

((( ?)))‏ @usershem
I agree that most Jews are degenerate. I disagree that Judaism is degenerate. Most Jews don’t follow Judaism.

Mr. Smith‏ @ClazyAsylum
Following Judaism wouldn’t be degenerate at all. Oh, wait… (Warning: picture of rabbi performing metzitzah b’peh.)

((( ?)))‏ @usershem
What does the rampant pedophilia in the church tell us about Christians?

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
That Vatican II was an abomination, it is a mistake to permit homosexuals in the Church, and Christians should be guided by the Bible.

((( ?)))‏ @usershem
I have not seen you condemn pedophila in the church in this exchange. Tell us more about your Christian values.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
Weak, degenerate. All pedophile clergy in the Church should be excommunicated, then executed. Do you support the same for those rabbis?

((( ?)))‏ @usershem
Why can you disavow degeneracy on behalf of Christians but I can’t disavow degeneracy on behalf of Jews?

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
You can. But you are not disavowing the teachings or the authorities that EXPRESSLY PERMIT that degenerate behavior.

((( ?)))‏ @usershem
Show me a degenerate teaching and I will condemn it and the claimed authority that teaches it.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
Do you condemn and disavow Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai? At what age does the Talmud say “the sexual matureness of woman is reached”?

((( ?)))‏ @usershem
I’m not a fan of Shimon bar Yohai, since he had a low opinion of common folks.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
That is not a disavowal. Do it unambiguously. Don’t play word games. Condemn him and disavow him as an evil man teaching evil laws.

((( ?)))‏ @usershem
I’m not sure what you hate about bar yohai so much, but I condemn all rape, pedophilia and degeneracy, and any who condone it

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
You are not fooling anyone, liar. You know Simeon ben Yohai’s teachings and yet you will not condemn or disavow him. Why not?

((( ?)))‏ @usershem
As far as I know he did not condone pedophilia, but if he did I condemn and disavow. How can I be clearer?

((( ?)))‏ @usershem
As for the Talmud, there is a difference between when a woman is a woman and when one is allowed to marry her.

((( ?)))‏ @usershem
Talmud does not permit rape, pedophilia or child marriage.

((( ?)))‏ @usershem
It does however hold that if a young child is molested/raped in violation of the law she remains a virgin for legal/marriage purposes

((( ?)))‏ @usershem
So degenerate, protecting the innocent.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
No, it is to protect the ASSAILANT. The innocent cannot throw guilt on him. You are literally defending pedophiles now, degenerate.

((( ?)))‏ @usershem
Just because a raped child is legally considered a virgin doesn’t mean the rapist is not punished. You are the one contorting.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
Either condemn Simeon ben Yohai as an evil man teaching evil practices and disavow him or stand revealed as a degenerate pedo-defender.

Needless to say, he continued to equivocate and feign ignorance until I finally blocked him for wormtonguery. Now, don’t take my word for any of this. Look up the rabbi’s teachings on sex, marriage, and children, then decide for yourself. But do notice that usershem NEVER ANSWERED the questions that would have nailed down his position, whether it was a Christian metric for morality or the age of female sexual maturity. His behavior was even intellectually shadier than it looks here, because on another tangent he defended the degenerate practice of metzitzah b’peh as abuse, but not molestation, because he somehow magically knows the pure intentions of every rabbi who ever put mouth to underage genitals.

Also notice the way his attempt to deflect moral degeneracy onto the Christian Church was abandoned as soon as he realized that I was not going to defend the degenerates there, but was perfectly happy to condemn them, disavow them, and see them punished. The contrast between my reaction and his on the subject could not be more clear.

This is the Judeo-Christianity that our conservative friends hail so warmly. This is the Judeo-Christian values that many conservatives claim to be the basis for America’s founding. This is the intellectual spirit of Judeo-Christ. It is devoted to the exact opposite of the truth as it is designed to conceal, obfuscate, distract, and mislead.

I did find it a little ironic to see how willing this usershem was to throw literally “most Jews” under the degenerate bus in order to try to break the observable link between the religious teachings and the infamous Hollywood/Media/Wall Street degeneracy. There are plenty of decent Jews who abide by the Christian standards of morality as well as any Christian, and indeed, there are more than a few Christians who happen to be of Jewish descent. They would not hesitate to condemn evil teachings or evil men.

But it should be obvious that “Judeo-Christianity” is not Christianity and that “Judeo-Christian values” are not Christian values and neither reflect nor respect Christian morality.

Now, I understand that the urge to defend one’s identity is a natural, powerful, and instinctive one. But should you ever find yourself tempted to defend the ongoing commission of unmitigated evil targeting innocent children on the grounds of tradition, fear, or good intentions, you should seriously consider the source of that temptation. There simply is no defending this sort of thing, or pretending that there is no possible connection between the medieval teachings and the actions today.

UPDATE: Larry David does his best to get out in front of the growing Hollywood Values scandal.

A strange, newfound respect

Rod Dreher is on a roll.

Donald Trump, in his rough way, is right:

President Donald Trump, during a White House Cabinet meeting Wednesday, said he wants to terminate the Diversity Visa Lottery, a program that distributes around 50,000 visas to countries where there is a low rate of immigration to the US.

“I am, today, starting the process of terminating the diversity lottery program,” Trump said, seated next to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. “I am going to ask Congress to immediately initiate work to get rid of this program, diversity lottery, diversity lottery. Sounds nice, it is not nice, it is not good. It hasn’t been good and we have been against it.”

He added: “We’re going to quickly as possible get rid of chain migration and move to a merit-based system.”

Trump added that based on preliminary information, the attacker in New York “was the point of contact, the primary point of contact for, and this is preliminarily, 23 people, that came in or potentially came in with him and that is not acceptable.”

Of course the God-Emperor is right. The USA has to get rid of a) birthright citizenship, b) chain migration, c) dual nationality, and d) post-1965 immigrants and their descendants if it is going to survive intact.

Which is why it probably won’t. But it’s not over until it is actually over.

It is amusing how Dreher still has to qualify that he does not approve of the God-Emperor’s tone. After all, saving the nation would be so much more palatable if it were done wearing the proper bowtie.

Podestagate

Is it… is it beginning?

Tony Podesta stepping down from lobbying giant amid Mueller probe

Podesta announced his decision during a firm-wide meeting Monday morning and is alerting clients of his impending departure. Democratic power lobbyist Tony Podesta, founder of the Podesta Group, is stepping down from the firm that bears his name after coming under investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Podesta announced his decision during a firm-wide meeting Monday morning and is alerting clients of his impending departure.

Podesta is handing over full operational and financial control to longtime firm CEO Kimberley Fritts, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the meeting. Fritts and a senior group of the Podesta team will be launching a new firm in the next one or two days. Sources said the transition has been in the works for the past several months.

Curiouser and curiouser… but /pol/ is always right.

We knew the switch in the narrative from Trump/Russia to Clinton/Russia would take a little time. We had them drop the Uranium One article exactly one week before we would make the first arrests. Couple of days later, we dropped the dossier info. We needed to hammer the train. The first arrests will be Manafort and Tony Podesta. These guys are not the real target, they are just soldiers. The real targets are Hillary, Holder, Rosenstein, and John Podesta. We would love to expose Obama as well but Pres Trump is adamant about protecting former Presidents. Even if they are corrupt pieces of shit, he believes in the dignity of the office. He feels that ruining the legacy of a President will do nothing but hurt our country. This is why both Bush’s., Bill Clinton, Obama, and even LBJ will be spared. The rest of the JFK files released will not include the essential information implicating LBJ and Bush Sr.

This is it. The final moves will take place over the next 4 weeks. They could have let this go. Honestly, Pres Trump wanted to get on with Making America Great Again. Period. But Hillary and the DNC just couldn’t let it go. They asked for this. They kept making up shit and now they’re going to pay. If they kept their heads low and faded in to obscurity, we would not have gone this route. They have no one to blame but themselves.

Keep in mind that was posted two days ago. Who was the first arrest? Who looks to be the second one? Anyhow, we’ll see.

UPDATE: Smells rather like… pizza?

Records show that alleged child molester Kevin Spacey flew on the infamous ‘Lolita Express’ – the private jet owned by pedophile Jeffrey Epstein – along with former President Bill Clinton. The revelation has resurfaced in the aftermath of claims by actor Anthony Rapp that Spacey sexually assaulted him when he was a 14-year-old boy after a party at Spacey’s apartment in 1986 when Spacey, then 24, picked up Rapp, placed him on his bed and climbed on top of him.

Which reminds me

Hey, Legal Legion of Evil. Are any of you licensed to practice in New Hampshire or know anyone good there? If so, shoot me an email.

Never cross the God-Emperor

From Peter King’s increasingly NFL-free MMQB column:

2015: Megyn Kelly, proving to be a tough and formidable moderator in a Republican Primary debate, asks the question of all presidential-debate questions to Donald Trump, about why he has called women he didn’t like “fat pigs, dogs, slobs, disgusting animals.”

2016: In an interview with Kelly on FOX five months before the election, Trump tells Kelly in another headline-maker that if he does not win in November, “I will consider it to be a total and complete waste of time, energy and money.”

2017: Kelly hosts a segment on the “Today” show about how to dress your dog for Halloween.

Keep that in mind when Robert Mueller announces his long-anticipated indictments today.

UPDATE: The Russian investigation appears to be the nothingest of nothingburgers.

The former chairman of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has been told to surrender to authorities on charges including tax fraud, according to people familiar with the matter.


UPDATE: Or perhaps not. But it’s looking more Deep Swampy than anything:

Paul Manafort and Rick Gates were told to surrender to face charges including conspiracy against the United States and conspiracy to launder money. Other charges are being an unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) statements, false statements, and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts.

Paddock brother arrested

I wonder what Paddock’s brother knew, or if his arrest for child porn was just fallout from having his computer searched in the aftermath of the Las Vegas shootings:

A brother of the man who shot and killed almost 60 people in Las Vegas, has reportedly been arrested on possession of material relating to child sex abuse. Bruce Paddock, one of the brothers of Vegas gunman Stephen Paddock was detained in Los Angeles. The Associated Press said it was unclear whether the charges against Bruce Paddock, who is not a suspect in the shooting, predates the Las Vegas massacre.

If this all somehow connects to Pizzagate, a lot of minds are going to be blown. Some literally, one presumes.

DNC + FBI = Russia

Remember, they always give you a clue about where to look because they always project:

Investigators looking into the so-called “Trump dossier” were not surprised when news broke Tuesday night that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC, working through the Democrats’ law firm, Perkins Coie, financed the “salacious and unverified” compilation of allegations of Trump collusion with Russia in the 2016 presidential campaign. (The “salacious and unverified” description comes from former FBI Director James Comey.)

There had been plenty of talk about the Democrats and Perkins Coie, so much that investigators almost assumed that was the case. But it wasn’t until the Washington Post broke the story that it was confirmed.

“I’m shocked,” one lawmaker joked Tuesday night. “Who could have ever guessed?”

And why did the story break when it did? Credit the much-maligned Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. The California Republican has been pursuing the dossier more aggressively than anyone else, and it was his Oct. 4 subpoena for the bank records of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that handled the dossier, that finally shook loose the information.

But knowing that the Clinton campaign, the DNC, and Perkins Coie supported the dossier is not the end of the story. The most important next step is the FBI.

Sometime in October 2016 — that is, at the height of the presidential campaign — Christopher Steele, the foreign agent hired by Fusion GPS to compile the Trump dossier, approached the FBI with information he had gleaned during the project. According to a February report in the Washington Post, Steele “reached an agreement with the FBI a few weeks before the election for the bureau to pay him to continue his work.”

It was an astonishing turn: the nation’s top federal law enforcement agency agreeing to fund an ongoing opposition research project being conducted by one of the candidates in the midst of a presidential election. “The idea that the FBI and associates of the Clinton campaign would pay Mr. Steele to investigate the Republican nominee for president in the run-up to the election raises further questions about the FBI’s independence from politics, as well as the Obama administration’s use of law enforcement and intelligence agencies for political ends,” wrote Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.

Lock her up already! And then continue to drain the swamp.

Kaepernick sues NFL for collusion

Colin Kaepernick confirms league-wide suspicions that he’s more of a pain than he’s worth:

Colin Kaepernick has been waiting patiently for his next NFL opportunity. His patience has now expired. PFT has confirmed that Kaepernick has filed a grievance against the NFL under the Collective Bargaining Agreement. The grievance alleges that the NFL’s teams colluded in not signing him to a contract, presumably due to his decision to kneel during the national anthem in 2016.

Kaepernick has retained outside counsel to handle the claim. The NFL Players Association will remain in touch with Kaepernick as the grievance proceeds; however, Kaepernick’s private counsel will be spearheading the effort.

The filing of the grievance was first reported by Mike Freeman of BleacherReport.com.

Kaepernick became a free agent in March after opting out of the final year of his contract with the 49ers. (San Francisco G.M. John Lynch has said that the team would have cut Kaepernick if he hadn’t opted out.) The Seahawks brought Kaepernick in for a visit, but did not sign him. The Ravens were considering adding Kaepernick during training camp. Owner Steve Bisciotti publicly acknowledged that fans had expressed opposition to the possibility.

The last straw may have been the failure of the Titans to give Kaepernick a tryout after quarterback Marcus Mariota suffered an injured hamstring. The Titans instead brought in Brandon Weeden, Matt McGloin, Matt Barkley, and T.J. Yates, before signing Weeden.

The clever part is that if Kaepernick wins, the Collective Bargaining Agreement will be voided, so even players who don’t support Kaepernick will have an incentive to hope he wins. The not-so-clever part is that it appears highly unlikely that he will win. The fact that nobody wants him on their roster is not indicative of collusion, it is merely a sign that no team wants to anger its season-ticket holders.

The company knew

 So much for the protestations of innocence.

Harvey’s brother and fellow co-founder Bob Weinstein, as well as the company’s president, David Glasser, had told concerned staff as recently as Tuesday that they were shocked and unaware of the confidential settlements made with various women.

However, according to a clause in his 2015 contract, if the movie mogul was charged with sexual harassment he was in charge of all legal payouts and had to pay an additional fine to the company.
‘You [Weinstein] will pay the company liquidated damages of $250,000 for the first such instance, $500,000 for the second such instance, $750,000 for the third such instance, and $1,000,000 for each additional instance,’ the contract reads.

According to the document, as long as Weinstein pays it constitutes a ‘cure’ for any misconduct and no further action can or will be taken.

In more simple terms, that means that no matter how many times he is sued – as long as he is willing to pay he won’t be fired.

If Weinstein were to ever be indicted for a crime the contract contains language that would allow the Board of Directors to fire him.

No, but you see, it was only “to cover consensual affairs.” Sure it was. Good luck trying to hold that line of defense.

UPDATE: And the knives are now out, now that it is clearly safe to declare opposition.

Hachette Book Group is disbanding the company’s Weinstein Books imprint, effective immediately.

“Going forward, titles currently under the Weinstein Books imprint will be published by our Hachette Books imprint, and the Weinstein Books imprint team will join Hachette Books,” the company said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter.

Perseus Books, which is part of Hachette, has had a co-publishing agreement with The Weinstein Co. that has produced about 10 books a year.

UPDATE: Ronan Farrow deserves all the credit he is getting, and then some. When NBC shut down his investigation, he kept it going on his own dime, then brought it to the New Yorker. Suffice it to say this is NOT normal journalistic behavior.