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A federal judge sentenced Donald Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen to three years in prison on Wednesday following Cohen's guilty pleas to a number of political and finance crimes.

Those three years would be followed by three years of supervised release, and Cohen also is subject to forfeiture of $500,000, restitution of $1.4 million and a $50,000 fine.

...Cohen told authorities that Trump had directed him to arrange payments to two women ahead of Election Day in 2016 to keep them quiet about sexual relationships they said they had had with Trump — allegations Trump denies.

Federal authorities call that a violation of campaign finance law — one for which Trump also may be culpable.

Later, Cohen admitted that he and other Trump aides continued negotiations with powerful Russians about a potential real estate project in Moscow well into the 2016 presidential campaign.

Cohen had told Congress in 2017 that the talks ended in January, but his subsequent admission meant that Trump's aides had a channel open with Russia even as Trump was becoming the GOP front-runner and was denying he had any ties to Russia.

Michael Cohen Sentenced To 3 Years In Prison Following Plea That Implicated Trump

James A. Fields Jr., an avowed neo-Nazi who rammed his car into a group of counterprotesters at a white-supremacist rally, was sentenced to life in prison by a jury Tuesday after a trial that offered an unsparing view of the physical and emotional ruin he caused in this city with a burst of vehicular rage 16 month ago.

As he had throughout his two-week trial, Fields, 21, sat impassively at the defendant’s table, clad in a powder blue sweater, as the jury delivered its verdict at 12:20 p.m. after about four hours of deliberations that began Monday: life for first-degree murder; 70 years for each of five counts of aggravated malicious wounding; 20 years for each of three counts of malicious wounding; and nine years for leaving the scene of a fatal crash.

His overall sentence: life plus 419 years and $480,000 in fines.

Fields also faces a separate federal trial for alleged hate crimes related to the incident, including one offense that carries a possible death sentence. No trial date has been set, and the Justice Department has not said whether it will seek capital punishment.

Turns out that backing up first to give yourself more room to accelerate doesn't look so great when you are claiming self defense.

James A. Fields Jr. sentenced to life in prison in Charlottesville car attack

Holiday Classic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Accused of Being 'Seriously Problematic'

Twitter video

How braindead do you have to be to make that video? Braindead enough to work at Huffington Post's clickbait division. Wait, is there a division?

What we really need is Christianity to be completely crushed and to only allow the two truuuu pagan Xmas specials to be played on TV: The Year Without a Santa Claus and The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. 🎄💪🎅👍

Spiritual successor to Gaaark's journal.

America’s New Religions

For many, especially the young, discovering a new meaning in the midst of the fallen world is thrilling. And social-justice ideology does everything a religion should. It offers an account of the whole: that human life and society and any kind of truth must be seen entirely as a function of social power structures, in which various groups have spent all of human existence oppressing other groups. And it provides a set of practices to resist and reverse this interlocking web of oppression — from regulating the workplace and policing the classroom to checking your own sin and even seeking to control language itself. I think of non-PC gaffes as the equivalent of old swear words. Like the puritans who were agape when someone said “goddamn,” the new faithful are scandalized when someone says something “problematic.” Another commonality of the zealot then and now: humorlessness.

And so the young adherents of the Great Awokening exhibit the zeal of the Great Awakening. Like early modern Christians, they punish heresy by banishing sinners from society or coercing them to public demonstrations of shame, and provide an avenue for redemption in the form of a thorough public confession of sin. “Social justice” theory requires the admission of white privilege in ways that are strikingly like the admission of original sin. A Christian is born again; an activist gets woke. To the belief in human progress unfolding through history — itself a remnant of Christian eschatology — it adds the Leninist twist of a cadre of heroes who jump-start the revolution.

The same cultish dynamic can be seen on the right. There, many profess nominal Christianity and yet demonstrate every day that they have left it far behind. Some exist in a world without meaning altogether, and that fate is never pretty. I saw this most vividly when examining the opioid epidemic. People who have lost religion and are coasting along on materialism find they have few interior resources to keep going when crisis hits. They have no place of refuge, no spiritual safe space from which to gain perspective, no God to turn to. Many have responded to the collapse of meaning in dark times by simply and logically numbing themselves to death, extinguishing existential pain through ever-stronger painkillers that ultimately kill the pain of life itself.

Yes, many Evangelicals are among the holiest and most quietly devoted people out there. Some have bravely resisted the cult. But their leaders have turned Christianity into a political and social identity, not a lived faith, and much of their flock — a staggering 81 percent voted for Trump — has signed on. They have tribalized a religion explicitly built by Jesus as anti-tribal. They have turned to idols — including their blasphemous belief in America as God’s chosen country. They have embraced wealth and nationalism as core goods, two ideas utterly anathema to Christ. They are indifferent to the destruction of the creation they say they believe God made. And because their faith is unmoored but their religious impulse is strong, they seek a replacement for religion. This is why they could suddenly rally to a cult called Trump. He may be the least Christian person in America, but his persona met the religious need their own faiths had ceased to provide. The terrible truth of the last three years is that the fresh appeal of a leader-cult has overwhelmed the fading truths of Christianity.

This is why they are so hard to reach or to persuade and why nothing that Trump does or could do changes their minds. You cannot argue logically with a religion — which is why you cannot really argue with social-justice activists either. And what’s interesting is how support for Trump is greater among those who do not regularly attend church than among those who do.

Meet the RIP Bullet: The Deadliest Ammo on Planet Earth?

Found when searching for "planet nine".

Trump's "Fixer" Michael Cohen is going to prison for the crimes he committed at the direction of "Individual 1."

Who could Indivdual 1 be, I wonder.

On approximately June 16, 2015, Individual-1, for whom Cohen worked at the time, began an ultimately successful campaign for President of the United States.

Federal Prosecutors ‘Concluded that President of the United States Committed a Felony'

But now we’re seeing that in a court filing for the first time, which, as some legal observers have noted with varying emphasis on the fact, means federal prosecutors have concluded that Trump directed someone to commit a crime, which is a crime. Put another way, SDNY prosecutors believe the president directed and coordinated felonies.

And finally, some info about the lies Manafort told that lead to the destruction of his plea deal came out.

Chihuahuas aren't really dogs, of course. Dogs are pretty smart in general, and chihuahuas are just plain stupid.

Anyway, after reading that chihuahuas are good for people with asthma, I decided to get one for the wife, many years ago. The creatures aren't very durable, and the wife wore that one out. But, the presence of the chihuahua really does seem to help with her asthma. The always present inhaler has pretty much disappeared from her life. There's one laying around, but she almost never needs it, and when she does need it, she has to search for it.

But, back the the stupid creatures - I usually address the chihuahuas as "Stupid". "You want out, Stupid?" A normal dog will spring into springy mode immediately, bouncing up and down in front of the door, waiting for you to catch up to him. The chihuahua, instead, looks at you blankly, mulling the concept of "outside" for awhile. Sometime later, sometimes even on the same day, the creature decides, "Yes, outside!" then starts jumping up and down.

So, the wife heard me telling her pet, one more time, that he was dumb as a rock. "Why do you say he's stupid?" "Because he's dumber than a rock, of course." "Well, you're going to give the dog a complex!" "He already has a complexion - kinda black with a red tint, which is why you named him Cocoa." "Well, stop calling him stupid!"

Hmmmm. I snatched the animal up, walked through the door, attached his tie-out lead, and put him down. Then, I walked around the yard picking up several rocks. I didn't even pick and choose for smart looking rocks, I did my best to just pick them at random. I carried the rocks inside, and arranged them on the floor. The wife is looking at me weird, but she often does that, I paid her no mind. After awhile, I brought the animal back inside, and carried him to where the rocks sat in a semicircle. The wife followed me into the living room, and watched while I administered an intelligence test to the animal and the minerals.

Sample question found on Youtube for intelligence tests for rocks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pH2P3qQYUFc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qw1BmB5ALHo

The chihuahua scored behind six rocks, and ahead of four other rocks, "proving" that a chihuahua is truly "dumb as a box of rocks".

Be warned - testing the IQ's of rocks can be time consuming, and tedious. You must be prepared to wait for the rocks, and you must be able to "interpret" the rock's answers. Which is only fair, because you also have to "interpret" the chihuahua's answers. If you've ever been employed as an historical site "interpreter", you'll be well prepared for this endeavor.

I wish there were a real dog that were purported to be "good for asthma". Why not a border collie? Or, and Irish setter? *sigh*

Festive Satanic statue added to Illinois statehouse

A satanic group has added its own statue to a series of displays in the government building of the US state of Illinois to mark the festive season.

Placed between a Christmas tree and a menorah, the four-foot sculpture depicts a snake coiled around an outstretched arm holding an apple.

It's the first display sponsored by the Chicago chapter of the Temple of Satan.

The state government said the temple had the same right as other religious groups to have a display.

"Under the Constitution, the First Amendment, people have a right to express their feelings, their thoughts," Dave Druker, spokesman for the Illinois secretary of state, told the State Journal-Register. "This recognises that."

The move has been criticised on social media by Illinois Family Action, an anti-abortion pressure group.

Thank you Satan, very cool.

See also: Netflix and Satanic Temple settle £38m lawsuit over Sabrina remake

Yes, I just assumed your species. Suck it, furries.

Look, guys, I know everyone likes telling me off but there's only so much time in the day and believe it or not I do have things I enjoy doing that don't involve schooling noobs. When you dump dozens of replies on me while I'm out, the chances of me reading them, much less replying to them all before bedtime, drastically decrease. Y'all do what you gotta do but don't go expecting me to spend my whiskey in front of the TV time explaining why you're a dumbass.

A second woman has come forward claiming that a Bladen County, N.C., electioneer paid her to collect absentee ballots for last month's midterm elections.

Cheryl Kinlaw told WSOCTV, a local news station in Charlotte, N.C., that Leslie McCrae Dowless Jr. paid her $100 to collect ballots in their district, adding that Dowless “has been doing it for years."

Kinlaw said that she never mailed the ballots she collected and that she instead handed them over to Dowless. She said she was unaware that what she was doing was illegal.

Dowless has been named twice in sworn affidavits as someone who worked for Republican candidate Mark Harris's campaign as an independent contractor and has been at the center of an investigation into the results of the election in North Carolina's 9th District.

In November, Democrat Dan McCready conceded to Harris in their House race when he was down by approximately 700 votes.

But the elections board decided not to certify the results, citing “claims of irregularities and fraudulent activities related to absentee by-mail voting.”

WSOCTV reported that it has discovered what appears to be a targeted effort to illegally pick up ballots in Bladen County.

Second woman says she was paid to collect absentee ballots in North Carolina House race

UPDATE:

Over a thousand absentee ballots possibly destroyed in controversial North Carolina House race: report