U.S. Rep. Ralph Norman is facing pressure to resign from Democrats in his South Carolina congressional district after a string of text messages revealed the Rock Hill Republican called for a military takeover in order to keep then-President Donald Trump in power after his 2020 election defeat.

In response to this report in the Post and Currier, as well as to the White House comment, Bates has issued a statement:

You wanna talk “disgusting“? Disgusting is the president of the United States choosing a day sacred to people like me, people unafraid to stand up for the right of all Americans to arm themselves with Bushmaster Model XM15-E2S rifles, on which to attack my patriotism.

It will be my pleasure, as leader of the South Carolina Milisha, to blast the brains of the entire Eggzecutive Branch to a pulp. Just watch me.

‘A former Harvard admissions officer told a federal jury on Friday that the school’s ex-fencing coach, Peter Brand, “made the difference” in the admissions outcomes of a wealthy Maryland businessman’s two sons.

Brand, who was fired by Harvard in 2019, is facing trial alongside telecommunications executive Jie “Jack” Zhao for allegedly accepting more than $1.5 million in bribes to get Zhao’s sons into Harvard College as fencing recruits.

Prosecutors say Brand accepted an array of kickbacks from Zhao in exchange for getting his sons into Harvard. As part of the alleged scheme, Zhao purchased Brand’s home at a premium, made college tuition payments for Brand’s son, and covered the cost of Brand’s new sports car…

Jurors … heard on Friday from a Needham town employee who raised alarm when Zhao purchased Brand’s 1,364-square-foot home for almost twice its assessed value.

Chip Davis, the city’s former chief assessor, said the sale price was “very surprising.”

“Even if there’s a 5-10 percent change” between the assessed price and the sale price, “we go and inspect,” he said. “This was dramatically higher than that.”

After the sale, Davis said, he knocked on the door of Brand’s home for an in-person inspection. He found that the house’s condition suggested its value was “pretty close” to the 2015 assessed value of $549,300 — rather than the sale price of $989,500…

In his May 2016 notes, Davis was perplexed by the sale price, according to an exhibit shown to jurors Friday.

“Sold to buyer from Virginia for 990k??? Place is vintage 1960s in bad shape???” Davis wrote. “Makes no sense.”

In fall 2017, Zhao sold the home for $665,000, taking a 32 percent loss on the transaction. Davis returned for another visit triggered by the sale price. “Makes no sense,” he wrote again in his notes…

Zhao’s attorney suggested Zhao may not have known how to assess the house’s worth and noted property values in Needham change year to year.’

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,

Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,

With a cargo of ivory,

And apes and peacocks,

Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

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

Bags of cash from Qataris in cool new flats,

Flying home to Skoufa Street in sunny Kolonak,

With a cargo from Emirates,

With a cargo for real estate.

Toasting secret lobbying with sweet white wine.

Would it be possible to ride AF One to GA Saturday? I’d only need a ride down since I’d stay there longer. 

Gohmert to Meadows.

Background on Gohmert.

A reposting from 2016 in his memory (some links have expired):

Many big-time university coaches are variants of Donald Trump…

… but the one who comes closest to the original is Washington State University’s Mike Leach, a man who arrives at each new job trailing a longer and longer shitstream.

Variant doesn’t quite say it, actually. Leach

keeps a framed, autographed picture of Trump on the wall in his office in Pullman, Wash.

Leach has learned everything he knows from Trump: hit back hard; sue the shit out of everyone; discover conspiracies everywhere.

Leach’s latest is a perennial favorite: a media conspiracy. Some of his lads were allegedly involved in a fight at a recent party, and there are reports that one of them broke a fellow student’s jaw. Badly. He did it by kicking him repeatedly in said jaw while the student was unconscious on the floor.

Asked about it, Leach said it was all lies, all a media conspiracy.

When given the chance to correct any facts about the situation that he alleges the media got wrong, Leach said there were “too many to address…”

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

See, this is what UD loves about Trump and Trump wannabes like Leach. They really don’t give a shit. They’ll just go out there and say anything… make a hail mary pass… kick the ball down the field see where that sucker ends up… The President was born in Kenya. I won’t tell you the facts about a situation whose facts I don’t know because there are too many facts that I know. Just go there. Just do it. Just brazen that fucker out. It’s an amazing spectacle, and Donald Trump is here to prove that it can take you far.

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

Trump has done fairly well with high-profile, unconventional college coaches. But his past two big endorsements — Bobby Knight and … Leach, were fired for, respectively, putting their hands on a student, and making a player stand in a shed.

Bates can’t keep his gun in his panties, and is always waving it around, loaded, especially at the ladies.

He thinks his most favorite thing – martial law, which includes lots of guns to wave at women!!! – is spelled marshall rather than martial, and that’s because Bates is soooooooooper stooooooooooopid and now everyone’s laughing at him.

But that part of this story is, you know, okay. You get what you vote for, and folks in parts of SC like stupid people, and that’s democracy, and democracy is a beautiful thing, and UD will defend it as long as she draws run-on sentences.

Howsomever. Bates’s breathless excitement as he demands from Mark Meadows and the president a military takeover of the United States in the wake of Trump’s defeat is not quite as okay as the right of stupid people to be represented by stupid people:

[W]e are at a point of no return in saving our Republic !! Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall Law!! PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO!!

Bates’s misspellings and errors and exclamations and caps and all tell you he is really excited, really agitated, really in need of calming himself down by exposing his loaded gun to groups of women, or, lacking that, leading a military coup against the United States.

Is Rep. Bates a threat to our country? He will be until we can find some way of dealing with his shpilkes, his inability to calm himself down in the matter of guns. I see two possible ways to go.

1.  Cyproterone Acetate is a chemical castrator whose tranquillizing effect is well-known.

2. A more unorthodox approach would involve penectomy followed by surgical attachment of an NAA Mini-Revolver or other appropriately portioned piece.

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

Whoa. Now they’re talking about suhdishun.

Gevalt, the entire American media apparatus is after us today all cuz Mr Bigtime University Coach couldn’t keep his hands off his ex-wife or his girlfriend or his kid or whatever. And we’re Texas, Austin! We consider ourselves a respectable academic institution! Highest paid person around here, eyes of the world on you, and you do this?

We did hesitate to hire you when we found out Bobby Knight was your mentor; but we decided to overlook this. Mistake.

Now it’s gonna cost us a shitload of money/legal crap to break your contract, and the bad publicity is already a bitch.

Here’s hoping you’re revving your Jesus tears for the camera; it ain’t much, but it might work.

Eva Kaili seems to have been associated in some way with artificial intelligence at Stanford; but she has been made to disappear.

As you know if you read this blog, UD believes true sex equality will only occur when women are seen to be every bit as crude and larcenous as men. Women’s liberation involves solving the SEN problem, in which women continue to be regarded as Sentimental, Ethical, and Nurturing, instead of cold, amoral, and give-a-shit. So long as all of our high-profile money criminals, the people with the balls to steal and hold gobs of the world’s assets, are male, we are never going to admit women to the real world; they may aspire to be the stupid semi-aware Wife Of (Kay Corleone!), but their names will never appear on the manifests of mega-yachts.

We thus need many more very high-profile women thieves, devil-may-care, hugely bribable scum with absolutely no moral compass, so that our reductive view of women as moral maternals too nice to rule the world comes crashing down.

This is why Eva Kaili – a European Parliament Vice-President, no less! – looms so large in the history of female empowerment. While the amount of money she is reported to have taken through bribes is disappointingly small (in the high hundreds of thousands of dollars; but UD hopes this is a preliminary figure, and will in time rise), it is nonetheless a respectable starter sum. Women are just beginning to find their feet global-robbery-wise, and we can expect other women to learn from Kaili’s technique (get an important bribable position; accept bribes; be a farcically obscene hypocrite, busybusybusy making the world a better place, while robbing it blind) and from her mistakes (don’t leave bags of money all over your house; don’t, in a panic, give your father bags of money and put him on a train whose passengers include cops pursuing him).

Hark, hark! Jeff Clark, at prison’s gate sings, 

And Eastman ‘gins likewise;

Trump’s team now waters at those springs 

Where Stephen Bannon lies. 

Where Rudy Giuliani is, 

 And Meadows, sweets, doth lie:

Arise, arise.

Openly carried assault rifles have become an all too common feature of political events around the country and are having a chilling effect on the exercise of political speech… [We must address] the armed intimidation that has become commonplace in public places and the gun culture that makes it possible… [An] obsession with “tactical culture” and rifles like the AR-15 [is] a fringe movement among the 81 million American gun owners, but it is one of several alarming trends that have coincided with the increase in political violence in this country, along with the spread of far-right extremist groups, an explosion of anti-government sentiment and the embrace of deranged conspiracy theories by many Republican politicians.

You just crossed over into… The Twilight Zone…

Two days before [a] symposium [about Adrian Vermeule’s ideas] was set to begin, my phone pinged with a message from [Mario] Fiandeiro informing me that my credentials had been revoked and the symposium closed to all press. (As far as I could tell, I was the only member of the media who was actually planning to attend, and Fiandeiro wouldn’t tell me who didn’t want me there.) My frustrated appeals to Fiandeiro and the higher-ups at the Federalist Society — which touts an open press policy on its website — failed…

… [Vermeule’s] arguments read an awful lot like a defense of a pseudo-constitutional dictatorship, or at the very least as a plausible legal justification for a right-wing coup. Vermeule doesn’t go to great lengths to obscure this conclusion. At the end of the section on subsidiary, he cites the Catholic theologian Johannes Messner to argue that in some cases, a limited form of dictatorship may “be compatible with the principle of subsidiary.”

Maybe there’s a more charitable way to read these passages so that they don’t lead to such a startling conclusion. But if there is, I certainly didn’t hear it in Cambridge.

NEEneeneenee NEEneeneenee NEEneeneenee NEEneeneenee

Who knew?

More on the often cynical, high-risk business of honorary degrees here.

Good cover.

Trustee, NYU. But… when your trustees include Maria Bartiromo, I guess you’re past caring.

Pray tell me, Sir, whose dog are youss?”