A top of the line $50,000+ SUV! Once again, mes petites, you must admit that there’s something pretty great about a country where even our serial public shitters can afford to drive the biggest and the best.

From her years of covering university and non-university fraud stories, UD has learned a few things.

1. Everyone steals. (No, no, no, I know that not EVERYONE steals. But if you take the long view, it sure as hell looks as though almost everyone, at some time or another, in some denomination or other, steals.)
2. When lusty lifelong larcenists get caught, they suddenly turn out to be harboring hundreds of one hundred percent debilitating physical and mental illnesses.

UD gets that this is a legal strategy – he was too crazy to know what he was doing while he spent twenty years stealing from institutions in the subtlest, most brilliantly devious and undetectable ways – ways that fooled even the best auditors. His lifelong depression and anxiety made it impossible for him to truly enjoy the robust beach vacations he took at the expensive condo he bought with purloined funds; he could barely turn the wheel of the Lexus SUV he got with his booty. He is a broken man, in short, and an hour in a lockup will bring on a fatal flare of his heart attack issues.

UD saw the most brazen use of he’s half dead and prison will kill him in the Greek university system, quite possibly the world’s most disgusting. From one of many such stories:

[In the matter of the] enormous, long-running theft of funds by the leadership of Panteion University:

The thieving rector, Emilios Metaxopoulous, is already out of prison, a few months into his 25-year sentence. No doubt a fine Greek surgeon (“A U.K. court on Wednesday jailed a former executive of medical-goods supplier DePuy International Ltd., a unit of Johnson & Johnson, for channeling £4.5 million ($7 million) in bribes to Greek surgeons…. [Greek surgeons’] demands for bribes have put operations out of reach for some Greeks. Stents for heart operations, for example, cost up to five times as much in Greece as in Germany…”) was found to attest to his deathly illness.

The vice-rector, serving a 16-year sentence, preceded the rector out of prison, for he also has a deathly illness. The vice-rector seems to have been in jail for twenty minutes or so.

More recently, a Florida man who spent decades stealing hundreds of thousands from the United Way looked like this in court:

[Guy Thompson] became emotional at times, such as when the mental health counselor who performed his forensic mental health evaluation, John Bingham, discussed how Thompson suffered from major depressive disorder stemming from family troubles in his childhood and a pressure to provide in adulthood for his family members, who were “big spenders.”

Bingham testified that Thompson was “very upset and remorseful of the whole situation” and “very upset with himself for having engaged in that behavior.” 

He also said Thompson had depression and anxiety for nearly his entire life, and had indicated he might have a mild neurological impairment. 

[Thompson’s attorney] told the court that since Thompson was arrested and charged, he has been diagnosed with early onset dementia, has had a pacemaker installed, has hypertension and has been seen by numerous doctors and specialists.

Sing it!

I am the very model of a medical catastrophe.

Inside of all my organs there’s a heightened state of atrophy…

UD once sat on a committee, at George Washington University, with a colleague from psychiatry who, whenever it was his turn to talk, mainly recited his cv. I got this award; I’m noted around the world for that… We all stared at each other and shifted uncomfortably when he spoke…

Regan Books published this man’s masterwork, Bush on the Couch, an idiotic psychoanalysis of George W Bush (UD, a deep-blue democrat, has nothing good to say about that president, but knows a hatchet job when she sees one). Discerning readers from Fidel Castro to some LaRouchie loved the book and it’s become an instant classic among people who couldn’t give a shit about the Goldwater Rule (you’re not supposed to psychoanalyze people you’ve never even met, let alone exchanged two words with). In her naivete, UD thought she’d seen the end of this hugely embarrassing genre.

Now another president UD can’t stand – the current one – is on the receiving end of a far more insidious psychiatrists’ campaign, one that – as Jeffrey Lieberman points out – does significant damage to a discipline whose scientific status – with people like UD‘s colleague around – is already mighty shaky. Led by Yale’s Bandy X. Lee, a bunch of psychiatrists published a … multivariate? … psychoanalysis of Trump, with Lee insisting he’s so nuts he has to be butterfly netted or the world will come to an end. As Andrew O’Hehir puts it, in Lee’s “strand of the multiverse, Trump is heading for a catastrophic health crisis or … an involuntary psychiatric hospitalization, and we won’t have to worry about defeating him in the November election because he’ll be dead or on a ventilator or shouting at the walls in a padded room.”

Amy Barnhorst, a UC Davis psychiatrist who works with people who really do need involuntary psychiatric holds, comments:

I think it’s a really bad way to go. It’s not just inappropriate and would be really ineffective, but I think it’s very damaging to our profession and the patients we take care of to suggest something like that.

A mental health hold is a very delicate tool that we use for people who very badly need treatment but aren’t able to accept that treatment. It’s not something that should be thrown around as a punishment for your enemies.

… Surgeons don’t go around lopping off the feet of their enemy in order to debilitate them. We shouldn’t go around applying mental health holds to people we don’t like in order to debilitate them.

A writer at WBUR, a person with mental health problems, amplifies her point:

Lee’s comments are … disturbing because they paint with such a broad brush. Like Trump’s insults being parroted by his followers in everyday conversation, it is easy to take Lee’s words and swing them in any direction, not just at Trump.

What is astonishing is the degree to which we embrace this kind of [thing]. We seem unable to accept the idea that the president’s behavior is not abnormal even if it is abhorrent.

Indeed, Lee does seem rather in the line of the notorious Soviet psychiatric establishment, swinging damaging charges of mental illness in any direction.

And there’s some sort of mondo bizarro logic in her having now swung directly into the tortured path of none other than Alan Dershowitz. Dershowitz has sent a formal complaint to Yale about her, because she called him nuts too. In response to Dersh, she’s gone full Joan of Arc and I tell you, mes petites! It’s a mad mad mad mad world.

… Trubu Show.

[Joe] Lockhart … said Trump should add Michael Avenatti to a defense team of Rudy Giuliani and Alan Dershowitz for the “Three Stooges defense.”

… United States; and he wants to leave Sarah.

This concludes the family values portion of your broadcast.

Les Wexner claims he was ripped off; but a lot of people want to know why he never pressed charges against a guy who stole $46 million from him.

Maybe it didn’t ultimately seem like all that much money to the man who introduced a twelve and a half million dollar bra to the lingerie market.

At the very bottom of yesterday’s filing of a protective order, Team Epstein’s Martin Weinberg signs his name like a second grader (see page ten). This isn’t Martin G. Weinberg, mature self-mythologized counselor, Mr Superlitigator who looks down at you with Olympian pity; this is

MAWNEBERG, boy in short pants still sweating over his cursive M.

*******************

But of course that probably ain’t his signature. In the status-crazed world of the courts, you need to signal that you’re far too busy – and far too contemptuous of the other side – and far too supplied with assistants – to take time out for something as pedestrian as a signature. This kiddie-scrawl is the work of some squirrely little summer intern.

The federal government has sued a Tennessee state legislator and a bunch of doctors and executives for fraud — specifically, for mandating urine tests for everyone who ever walked into their, yeah, pain management clinics, and then just storing what they dubbed ‘liquid gold’ somewhere and rarely bothering with it.

One whistleblower … said [company] executives once took him on a tour of the lab, during which [the whistleblower] commented on the “overpowering and unpleasant smell of urine.”

“To me, it smells like money,” an executive responded…

“It’s not like he’s an out-of-control rapist,” [one of Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyers told the judge on Monday].

Hell freezes over.

… whether you like it or not, at the 40 x 80 American flag out on Interstate 77! It’s there to sell RVs at Gander RVs in Statesville NC and it’s WAYYY beyond that town’s limits on stuff you can fly to attract attention to yourself.

Like all hucksters appealing to patriotism with grotesque flags or to piety with ten ton crosses, Mr RV says shit no the entryway to Statesville will remain a mega-kitsch Betsy Ross and anyone who says boo hates this country. I’m a big fat patriot taking up a lot of space to sell big fat gas guzzlers and y’all just try to shut me down.

Bout time Mr RV got introduced to the concept of law, huh?

Jane Buckingham built a career as a parenting and lifestyle guru, giving advice to young people and women about raising a family, building a career and even how to survive “sticky situations.”

But on Friday afternoon, Buckingham, author and CEO of the youth marketing company Trendera, became one of three new parents to plead guilty in the nation’s largest-ever college admissions scandal. 

Make it TWICE as big, man.

How did it train them to do that?

You jest cain’t keep a good ol’ boy on script.

His mentor, Jesse Helms, would be proud.