A porn star has been filmed being annihilated during her debut MMA fight for Bellator in a humiliating first-round TKO.
Adult film actress Orion Starr – fighting under her real name Rebecca Bryggman – suffered defeat on her pro MMA debut as she took on the pounding fists of Elise Reed at Bellator 231.
US fighter Bryggman, 25, had returned to the cage having competed twice in the MMA amateur ranks under the Triton Fights banner.
She won on both occasions before being signed to Bellator.
But 25-year-old Starr was given a brutal welcome to the professional ranks as she was quickly chased around the cage by Reed.
Bryggman found herself pinned against the cage late in the opening round before taking on a flurry of punches.
Bryggman found herself pinned against the cage and losing all ability to defend herself.
After taking a flurry of punches to the face, the referee jumped in and waved off the bout.
Bryggman promotes herself as “your favourite pornstar MMA fighter”.
OK, so she lost the fight, not such a big deal. Somebody has to lose. It's hard to blame her for wanting to get out of herotherbusiness, but it might take more than just some scary looking tats to other MMA fighters.
Freshman Rep. Katie Hill is resigning from Congress after facing allegations of inappropriate sexual relationships with staffers in her office and on her congressional campaign, according to two Democratic sources.
“It is with a broken heart that today I announce my resignation from Congress. This is the hardest thing I have ever had to do, but I believe it is the best thing for my constituents, my community and our country,” Hill wrote in a letter announcing the news after it was first reported by POLITICO.
“This is what needs to happen so that the good people who supported me will no longer be subjected to the pain inflicted by my abusive husband and the brutality of hateful political operatives who seem to happily provide a platform to a monster who is driving a smear campaign built around cyber exploitation,” she added.
Hill did not specify a resignation date in her letter but multiple people with knowledge of her plans said she could step aside as soon as Nov. 1.
Got that? She’s the victim of a “smear campaign” by an “abusive husband” and “hateful political operatives,” and never mind her drunkenness, her mental illness or her sexual affairs with staffers both male and female. Her constitutional rights as a crazy alcoholic bisexual are being infringed! Now she has to quit her $174,000-a-year job as a member of Congress and go back to California to smoke her bong naked.
The bisexual congressional representative who enjoyed multi-partner naked office exploits with her bong-smoking staff has decided to resign from office.
Also, beware of anyone in DC selling cheap ‘slightly used’ congressional office furniture. Just sayin’.
It is California, so there is no reasonable hope of getting a good Congresscritter, so you might as well get a fun one.
A “high value ISIS target” believed to be Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been killed by U.S.-led forces in Idlib, Syria, a well-placed military source told Fox News on Saturday night.
The U.S. military cannot yet confirm the identity of the deceased target.
But at 9:23 p.m. Saturday, President Trump posted a Twitter message hinting at “very big” news.
Soon after, the White House issued a statement that major news would be announced from the White House at 9 a.m. Sunday.
Newsweek reported late Saturday that Baghdadi was killed during a special operations mission that President Trump approved about a week ago.
In September, an audio recording purportedly by Baghdadi included a call for members of the extremist group to use any means necessary to free Muslims who were being detained “by Crusaders and their Shiite followers.”
The U.S. had reportedly posted a bounty of $25 million for information leading to the capture of Baghdadi.
We got our money’s worth, apparently.
Update: @Newsweek can report Baghdadi’s two wives killed in operation. Children were not harmed. A small firefight broke out when U.S. Special Operations arrived. BaghdadI detonated a suicide vest when he could not escape. This article is updating. #Syriahttps://t.co/Fpr1dOSWBV
Trump confirms the suicide vest, and describes Al-Baghdadi as going out crying. No US soldiers killed or wounded, one dog hurt, and brought home alive.
Wanted to add: There is a claim by some Muslims that if there is a Caliph declared, then it is the duty of all Muslims to join it, including as jihadis.
This was a major part of ISIS' propaganda for recruitment, that the fact of a (claimed) Caliphate meant all Muslims were obligated to come fight for it.
But if there's no Caliph, there is no such obligation.
So al-Baghdadi had a tremendous value to the terrorist state as a cult figure. Again, one that is not replaced merely by advancing the next man up the chain.
I’m hearing somebody called Al-Baghdadi may have been killed tonight. My condolences to Ilhan Omar if this was one of her husbands or married boyfriend/campaign workers.
Powell was a federal prosecutor for ten years and she is bound to have connections inside of the Department of Justice. She has uncovered some pretty damning information to make the case that Flynn was ambushed by then FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe at the request of then FBI Director James Comey. She must have a high level source either inside the DOJ if she’s been able to obtain this kind of information. Questioned about this by Chaffetz, she of course, would not reveal her source.
“Andrew McCabe was offered a pre-indictment plea agreement and turned it down. So US attorney Durham has impaneled a grand jury...John Brennan and James Clapper should be put under oath and questioned too.” — @marklevinshow
LOL. Barack Obama is going to love this interview his former DIA James Clapper just gave to CNN about the Durham probe: “It’s frankly disconcerting to be investigated for having done... what we were told to do by the president of the United States.” https://t.co/peAoCvjWCg
. . . The president’s defense here is not that there was no quid pro quo. It is that the quid pro quo does not come close to an impeachable offense. I will address why in part two of this series.
New: Top Rs on 3 impeachment cmtes ask Schiff to set up testimony from whistleblower complaint sources: cmtes "ought to fully assess the sources and credibility of the employee"
Says failure to do so would be "evidence of your denial of fundamental fairness and due process." pic.twitter.com/ggqKtHDqAO
Adam Schiff isn't allowing Reps. to see the transcripts from this impeachment inquiry, but selectively leaks small portions to the press. This process should be transparent to the American people. It should be a fair process w/ clear rules, just like past impeachment inquiries. pic.twitter.com/Rg2AKtRHIM
"It wouldn’t matter who the Democrats nominated for 2020. They could run Bernie Sanders on a ticket with Elizabeth Warren and promise to make Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez secretary of the treasury and Ilhan Omar secretary of defense, and they’d still win. A significant portion of the Republican party would consider a Senate conviction of Trump a dastardly betrayal.... Trump himself isn’t going to get convicted by the Senate and say: 'Well, I’m a little disappointed, to be honest. But it was a close call, and Mike Pence is a great guy, and I’m just grateful I had the opportunity to serve in the White House for more than three years.' He won’t go away quietly to lick his wounds. He won’t delete his Twitter account. He won’t make it easy on anyone. He will vent his anger and resentment at every opportunity. It will be 'human scum' every single day. And it’s not as though the media are going to lose their interest in the most luridly telegenic politician that we’ve ever seen. The mainstream press would be delighted to see Trump destroyed, yet sad to bid him farewell. The obvious way to square the circle would be to continue to give Trump lavish coverage in his post-presidency. He’d be out of the White House but still driving screaming CNN chyrons every other hour."
Writes Rich Lowry in "The Problem with President Pence" (National Review).
Trump conducted a hostile takeover of the old GOP, which was in the business of losing slowly. Many of us won't be happy to go back. Power Line, Behold the Lord, Part 1
The Democrats have been talking about impeaching Donald Trump since before he took office. I think everyone understands that what is going on now is simply an attempt to overturn the 2016 presidential election, which the Democrats have always regarded as somehow illegitimate. This is the worst breach in our democratic traditions since the Democrats argued that the election of Abraham Lincoln was illegitimate in 1860.
More from Kim Strassel, who makes the point that the Democrats’ refusal to vote in favor of conducting an impeachment inquiry means that they are unmoored from any historical precedent: “Normally an authorization vote would be followed by official rules on how the inquiry would proceed. Under today’s process, Mr. Schiff gets to make up the rules as he goes along. Behold the Lord High Impeacher.”
Why Do Environmentalists Seem Determined To Torment, Rather Than Convince? "From plastic bag bans to plastic straw bans to bans on shampoo bottles in hotels to plastic water bottles in airports, California is adopting supposedly environmental policies that won't save the environment but will piss off residents."
Grocery shopping had never been one of my favorite activities, but it never used to be as cumbersome as it is now. I'd fill up the cart with food, wait in line at the check-out counter and kibitz with the cashier as the bagger loaded up—and double-bagged—my groceries. Now, the lines are much slower because bagging has become an ordeal thanks to the "Earth-protecting" plastic-bag ban the state had passed a few years ago.
Consider what happens now. Store employees can't simply place your food in the needed bags. They have to ask how many bags shoppers want to buy. "As many as needed," I always say, given that I don't really care if the $150 transaction costs another buck. It's basically just another tax we pay to live in a former paradise. But that's not how it works now. The employees dispense bags parsimoniously. Who can blame cashiers given the guff they might get if they sell someone an unnecessary bag?
Water bottle ban
This column was first published in the Orange County Register.
Bagging used to be an artform, where baggers carefully separated, say, the eggs from the bottle of Chivas Regal. Now they cram as much stuff as possible in a single bag. Heaven forbid you get stuck behind someone who pulls out a trove of bacteria-laden, reusable sacks. I put the new thick bags they sell right into the garbage, whereas I used to reuse the lightweight "single use" bags to pick up dog poo and line the bathroom waste baskets. Now I have to order those thinner ones online.
This has not improved the environment one iota, even though it has added to our daily annoyance. There always was plenty of evidence to debunk the push for the bag ban. Those bags comprised an infinitesimal portion of the waste stream.
But grocery stores supported it because, well, they can now charge for something they previously gave away. You can always count on a coalition of true believers and profit-seekers—the "Baptists and bootleggers" from Prohibition lore—to unite behind such edicts. And voters, who are easily swayed by uplifting ballot nonsense, rejected a referendum that would have overturned the ban. Those who promote these laws don't view shoppers' inconvenience as a downside. They often view it as a self-healing and education process.
"If we live in an environment that's wounded … it hurts us, chipping away at our health and creating injuries at a physical, psychological, and spiritual level," wrote Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Wangari Maathai in a 2011 Huffington Post column. "(I)f we help reclaim or save what is lost…the planet will help us in our self-healing and indeed survival."
Shampoo bottle ban
I'm not suggesting that California's progressive lawmakers sit around the campfire, venerating crystals and reading poetry about the wounded Earth. But they aren't doing much research before proposing an endless stream of these "let's annoy the public" proposals. They certainly aren't looking at cost-benefit analyses, either. For instance, Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed Assembly Bill 1162, which bans larger hotel operators from giving out those little, convenient bottles of shampoo, conditioner and hand lotion.
"The proliferation of plastic waste is having a devastating impact on our environment and overwhelming landfills," said Assemblyman Ash Kalra (D–San Jose), the bill's author. That may be true, but it has virtually nothing to do with hotel guests. "What activists fail to mention is that approximately 60 percent of plastic trash in the ocean comes from just five countries – China, Indonesia, The Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam—which have notoriously inefficient waste management systems," explained Billy Binion in Reason. "America, meanwhile, contributes less than 1 percent."
Plastic straw ban
It would be nice if, for a change, lawmakers who promote these ideas at least wrestled with such rebuttals or with the latest facts. Recycling, for instance, is a great idea—provided there's an actual market for the recyclables. But as the Orange County Register reported in May, a declining percentage of trash is recycled despite all the new recycling mandates the state keeps passing. The article's headline notes that, "Your recyclables are heading to the dump." I pondered that as I stood over a multi-bin recycling center at the airport trying to figure out which portion of my trash should go into which portion of the container.
But at least we can learn about our wastefulness in the process. Regarding shampoo bottles, Kalra argues the ban will "increase consumer awareness of our use of plastic." He essentially admits that a main reason for the law is what this skeptic argued above: to reform and educate us. The California Hotel and Lodging Association supports the measure, but that's not a surprise. Hotels will save money, while the rest of us bring along contraband bottles or use those big dispensers—and hope that no previous guest has tampered with them.
Earth to environmentalists: Improving the environment is a noble calling, but you'll have far more success incentivizing it rather than tormenting us.
If you're going to take someones freedom away, it's easier to do it in baby steps. It's like boiling a frog. They're constantly testing the limit of what we will tolerate before we rebel.
Earlier this week we joked that with PG&E now scrambling to enforce intentional blackouts every time there are powerful winds for fears the bankrupt company’s aged infrastructure could cause a new fire, “every time the wind blows California will become Venezuela.”
… PG&E warned it will shut off power again on Saturday to as many as 2.5 million people as violent winds batter the state, in what according to Bloomberg will be “California’s largest intentional blackout ever.”
According to a Friday statement, approximately 850,000 homes and businesses in Northern California, including much of the San Francisco Bay Area, may be impacted beginning Saturday evening. And with data models indicating the weather event could be the most powerful in California in decades, with widespread dry Northeast winds between 45-60 miles per hour (mph) and peak gusts of 60-70 mph in the higher elevations through Monday, large swaths of the region could be without power for days.
I heard from Ted yesterday that they expected to lose power again late today (in Murphys, California), and Georgia just talked to Mary in Eureka, and they're going to be shut off at 5 PM Pacific Time.
Here is a link to the planned blackout area. Note that it excludes San Francisco, Sacramento, Los Angeles and most other large cities.
Working by candelight at his desk, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a new law that bans electricity, propelling the state into a progressive futuristic paradise. Newsom said he got the idea while experiencing the latest round of rolling blackouts in the state. He decided to make the blackouts the law of the land.
"Other, backward states still use carbon-heavy electricity, gas for heating and cooking, and wasteful air conditioning," he said proudly as people applauded around him. "But not on my watch. California has progressed beyond these archaic concepts."
The law also bans vehicles, forcing pedestrians to use innovative new horse-driven carriages.
Next on the legislative docket? The elimination of water-wasting toilets, to be replaced by just going on the sidewalk. A pilot program in San Francisco has been very successful, according to the homeless population there.
To those of us who have been watching this spectacle from the beginning, this was inevitable. After all, where'd the Mueller/Russia probe come from in the first place? Since there was absolutely no there there, it makes no sense that it wasn't a fraud from the outset. Who started it? Who are the treasonous/seditious culprits who conspired to overthrow an election? Well, we should soon be finding out, although we can make some educated guesses.
But we do know absolutely who collaborated in the crime, who were the accessories to and in some cases the instigators of this most heinous plot in American history.... ... the mainstream media!
They were the more than willing conduits to lies leaked to them by a long list of truly dishonest, unpatriotic Americans - some inside our intelligence agencies and no doubt some foreigners as well.
Not surprising that Warner, who was secretly colluding with the bagman for Julian Assange, Christopher Steele, and the Russian foreign minister, doesn’t want DOJ getting to the bottom of what his foreign agent associates were up to in 2016. https://t.co/UbqhU3HzMP
Via Wombat's In The Mailbox: 10.25.19, Don Surber, has Twelve Facts About The IG Investigation "Second, we know Obama used American intelligence to spy on Donald Trump either out of pique over birtherism or more likely out of habit. I believe the latter because the spying on Donald Trump seemed so routine."
The Flynn prosecution has lifted the lid on corruption at the Department of Justice and the FBI that few could have imagined. The anti-Trump FBI conducted itself in a way we might associate with a totalitarian state, not the United States of America. For the most part, the people involved have been fired in disgrace. I am no expert in criminal law, but it seems that some of what happened here–for example, the falsification of the Form 302–must be a crime. If crimes were committed, they should be prosecuted. The prosecution of General Flynn should be dismissed, and those involved in it should be, if not prosecuted, censured.
If they could railroad a guy like Gen. Flynn, how many did they railroad whose cases will never see the light of day. Julie Kelly asks Who Will Fall First: Trump or the ‘Praetorian Guard’?
The race is on to see who will survive—the duly-elected president of the United States or a modern-day Praetorian Guard comprised of former law enforcement and intelligence officials tasked with taking down that president.
while at Am Spec (where I have unfortunately used up my free views for the month, however, by switching to another browser...) George Neumayr presents The Case for Indicting John Brennan "He was a fount of criminal leaks during Spygate."
Brennan has said that the widening probe “concerns” him. It should. He is guilty as hell. The news that his subordinates are lawyering up suggests that he is perhaps hoping that one of those saps takes the fall for him. But the fact remains that he conducted the briefing with Reid in the hopes of dirtying up Trump before election day.
Durham could also nail Brennan for perjury — his most obvious whopper being his denial before Congress of knowledge of the Hillary-financed Christopher Steele dossier. Reid had told Brennan about the Steele dossier in the summer of 2016. So, too, did Steele’s old colleagues in British intelligence, whose well-publicized role in feeding Brennan information about alleged Trump–Russia ties depended at least in part on Steele’s recycled yarns. Peter Strzok, to whom Brennan gave a special CIA award, would have also alerted him to Steele’s role in Crossfire Hurricane.
In essence, these rank-and-file FBI agents were asking Patrick Byrne to be a civilian handler of a Russian national, and instructing him to carry out a covert counterintelligence operation. The FBI agents were apologetic about asking a civilian to take on such a role. Conducting FISA-702(16)(17) database searches and electronic surveillance on U.S. persons who would meet with Butina would be justifiable and legal.
There’s a clear set of battle lines now evident amid the ongoing political and legal dynamic: Nadler, Pelosi, Lawfare and the Deep State media -VS- Durham, Barr, Trump and the MAGA movement.
Playing directly into this dynamic today Obama appointed Judge Beryl Howell has ruled (full pdf below) an impeachment by unilateral decree is constitutionally valid; and as an outcome House Judiciary Committee Jerry Nadler can have access to some of the Mueller grand jury material that was used as evidence in the “Mueller-Weissmann Report”.
It’s important to note Judge Howell granted access to only that grand jury material that was used in the Mueller Report, not a blanket authority to gain all witness testimony or grand jury material writ large. However, having said that, the most troubling part of the decision is the background construct of the Weissmann team’s original objective.
From the outset; from the moment they started; from day number one; Weissmann, Lawfare and crew (Mueller was a special counsel figurehead only) always intended for the grand jury material to be handed to Chairman Jerry Nadler for the specific purposes of writing articles of impeachment. This is absolutely critical to remember.
The originating goal was to use the special counsel investigation to assemble evidence of obstruction. Then to frame the assembly of all evidence toward the future goal of writing articles of impeachment. This was the sole purpose of their coordination with Lawfare.
House Democrats are grilling a stream of disgruntled career diplomats in a basement hearing room of the Capitol. The hearings are supposed to be secret, but — no surprise — Democrats leak snippets of the testimony daily. They're hoping it will add up to a case for impeaching President Donald Trump.
So far, all the testimony actually proves is that these State Department diplomats think they — not President Trump — ought to be running the nation's foreign policy.
. . .
William Taylor, acting Ukrainian ambassador who testified Tuesday, seethed with indignation that Trump went "outside regular State Department channels."
Trump's chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, described what's happening: "A group of mostly career bureaucrats" refuse to accept that "elections have consequences. And foreign policy is going to change from the Obama administration to the Trump administration."
The New York Times alleged in a false news article that “Ukraine Knew of Aid Freeze by August, Undermining Trump Defense.”
The Trump-Zelensky phone call was made the end of July. There goes another NYT lie.
The August info didn’t undermine anything. It backed up the President.
The NYT wrote, “In fact, word of the aid freeze had gotten to high-level Ukrainian officials by the first week in August, according to interviews and documents obtained by The New York Times.”
That is irrelevant since the call took place on July 25th.
For extra drama, maybe Bolton will finally reveal in that same issue that he’s the “Anonymous” who was working for the Resistance inside Trump’s administration the whole time.
And a boatload of random impeachment articles, which are largely irrelevant until more actually happens:
At the suggestion of Facebook, this week's Rule 5 lovely is Paige VanZant:
Paige Michelle Vanderford (née Sletten; born March 26, 1994), known professionally as Paige VanZant, is an American mixed martial artist, author, and model. VanZant is signed to the flyweight division of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Outside of mixed martial arts, she has appeared in the television series Dancing with the Stars and Chopped. As of October 21, 2019, she is #15 in the UFC women's flyweight rankings.
And that was a good day at work!
VanZant was born in Dundee, Oregon, and raised in Dayton, Oregon. Her parents owned a dance studio, and she was brought up dancing ballet, jazz, and hip hop for over 13 years. As a teen, she appeared in a mop commercial for Bissell. She was considered a tomboy while growing up, and loved the outdoors; her hobbies included riding dirt bikes and fishing.
After VanZant moved with her family to Sparks, Nevada, she was looking for a dance studio when she came across UFC veteran Ken Shamrock's gym, where she began training in boxing and other martial arts. After winning an amateur fight at age 18, VanZant made her professional MMA debut on June 30, 2012, at UWF's Tournament of Warriors finale against Jordan Nicole Gaza in Corpus Christi, Texas, winning by split decision. On September 22, 2012, she faced Amber Stautzenberger at Premier Fight Series 2 and won via unanimous decision.
VanZant typically attacks with aggressive grappling, then seeks to finish the fight with strikes. Her style includes ground-and-pound, dirty boxing, and a wide variety of clinch striking. While standing, she will often move the fight toward the fence and utilize knees, elbows, forearms, punches, and throws.
VanZant is noted for the constant pressure she applies while grappling. If an opponent escapes her clinch, she will usually look to close the distance again within moments. . . .
She credits her past experiences dancing with her ability to perform flexible and agile movements in her fights; she demonstrated this when she knocked out Bec Rawlings with a jumping switch kick which earned her a "Performance of the night" bonus.
In May 2018, VanZant confirmed that she recently had a breast augmentation, saying: "I'm a girl and always wanted my own boobs. They never came so I bought them."
Besides her admitted three-way “throuple” relationship with a female campaign staffer and her ex-husband, and the alleged affair with one of her male congressional staffers, now there are text messages indicating that Rep. Katie Hill (D-Calif.) may be suffering from bipolar disorder and exhibits symptoms of a chronic drinking problem:
In the four-part Vice documentary, “She’s Running,” which chronicled Rep. Katie Hill’s 2018 campaign, Hill and her staffers are often shown grabbing a drink, and the campaign headquarters featured an impressive “liquor” closet.
When Hill arrived in Washington, D.C., celebratory beverages continued to be a part of her life.
In text messages provided to RedState of conversations between Hill, her estranged husband, and their former throuple partner, by June 2019 all three were expressing concern about Hill’s drinking and its impact on her mental health and work performance.
During the last week of May, Hill was at home in the 25th District for Memorial Day events and visiting constituents before heading up to San Francisco to attend the California Democratic Party convention. Over the course of that week, Hill told Heslep and her female staffer that she wanted to end the throuple relationship to focus on “this important work” of impeaching President Trump.
At the convention, Hill was one of the main speakers and also had a big reason to celebrate – her friend Rusty Hicks was elected as party chair (after Eric Baumann was forced out amid sexual assault charges).
Kenny Heslep, Hill’s husband, didn’t accompany her to the convention, but the two were texting throughout the weekend. . . .
The next screenshot reveals that Hill didn’t return to her room until after 3:30 a.m., and she admitted to Heslep that she’s drunk. . . .
The Lydia to which Hill is referring is her psychiatrist. Heslep asks if Hill was talking to Lydia about the split-up. . . .
Hill tells Heslep that she doesn’t know where she’d been precisely, but in general to bars and a Mexican late night restaurant. She reiterates that she had been talking to Lydia “about drinking a lot.” . . .
On June 3rd, the female staffer confronted Rep. Hill about her drinking and reveals that Hill missed her flight and hid that fact from Kenny. . . .
Just a few days later – the day after her wedding anniversary – Hill missed another flight between Washington, D.C., and California, as a staffer named Cat told Hill’s throuple partner. Heslep asks, “Does anyone find it odd how many she’s been missing lately?” . . .
Read the whole thing, which is full of screen-caps of text messages verifying all of this. We are not supposed to “stigmatize” mental illness, but I think electing crazy people to Congress is not a good idea, especially when the kooks are bisexual alcoholics. But in a representative form of government, maybe lunatics in her California district decided they wanted one of their own to represent them Washington?
The drip, drip, drip of revelations in Rep. Katie Hill’s scandal continues, and I’m not going to show you all the photos of the bisexual California Democrat who was in a three-way “throuple” relationship with her ex-husband and a young female campaign aide. But if you don’t want to click through to the Daily Mail story, I’ll summarize by saying she’s got an Iron Cross tattoo in her groin area, and photos showing her naked butt were posted to a “wife-sharing” site. There are also more screen-caps of text messages, including one in which the campaign aide, Morgan Desjardins, declares she is still “in love” with the congresswoman. Also, Desjardins wasn’t Hill and her husband’s first three-way:
A former tenant of the estranged couple said Hill and Heslep, had a ‘sexual relationship’ with a 21-year-old woman in 2010, the same year they were married.
Michael Pace, a Los Angeles-based technology analyst, said he rented a room in the couple’s Santa Clarita ranch and ‘walked in on the three of them’ multiple times.
‘I can absolutely confirm stuff like this went on even back then,’ Pace told DailyMail.com.
‘I left the house after six months because of all the weird sexual stuff going on in the open.
‘I walked in on the three of them in some very weird situations a few times so I know there was a sexual relationship going on.’
How many times do I have to say it? Never trust a bisexual.
Well, maybe she just represents her district? It is California, after all.
Last fall, Jorge Bogantes Montero of the Anacostia Watershed Society helped to transfer tiny, hatchery-raised mussels into protective baskets in the Anacostia River. At the time, Montero said, he “didn’t have any expectations” that they would survive. But, under the careful watch of the watershed group and local school children who helped monitor their growth, nearly 92% of them did.
Now, the pilot project that started with 9,000 quarter-size mussels placed in a river no one was sure could sustain them has graduated to a much bigger one. In late September, the surviving mussels — some of which grew as much as 2 inches over the last year — were disseminated to several other locations in the river, from the marshes around Kingman Island to the faster-flowing waters near Yards Park.
Projects to circulate mussels through more of the Chesapeake Bay’s freshwater systems have been picking up steam as more people recognize the bivalves’ powerful water-filtering capacity.
Although most of the species used for restoration projects won’t show up on a local menu, they function like the Bay’s beloved oysters by providing food and filtration to local ecosystems.
“Mussels filter the water. They take nutrients and bacteria and sediment out,” said Jim Foster, president and CEO of the Anacostia Watershed Society. “We see this as an opportunity to help naturally clean up the river.”
Researchers know of eight mussel species that are native to the Anacostia. So far, they’ve had success promulgating three of them: Alewife floaters — which grew the fastest this past year — Eastern pondmussels and Eastern lampmussels.
Montero, a natural resources specialist with the watershed society, estimates the mussels already filtered more than 32 million gallons of water in their first year and said that more reaches of the river stand to benefit from their presence.
In August, the District of Columbia’s Department of Energy & Environment gave the organization a $400,000 grant to distribute another 35,000 mussels in the river and involve 400 District students in the process. DC Water also is contributing to the project.
“Let me say that cleaning up an urban river like the Anacostia River takes a lot of hands, a lot of partnerships,”
Tommy Wells, director of DOEE, said on a boat near Kenilworth Marsh, where a few hundred mussels were released that day despite a steady rain. “You can just look out on the river today and see that this is a river worth turning back into an asset for the people who live here — and for the generations to come.”
Mussels were far from the minds of advocates determined to improve the health of the Anacostia River until Montero started finding them in and around grass beds that his organization was helping to restore in 2015. The next year, a biologist from Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources helped them conduct a survey for mussels.
They found a couple of dozen, enough to form a baseline of the river’s health and sow the seeds of a new project.
A collection at the Smithsonian Institution suggests how much of the river’s mussel population has been lost. On display are the shells of mussels that were once abundant in a stretch of the river near Benning Road around the turn of the 20th century and into the 1950s. Last year’s pilot project was a first stab at reintroducing some of those species, and it seemed to work.
Jim Foster, president and CEO of the Anacostia Watershed Society, prepares to toss a pair of mussels into the Anacostia River near Kingman Marsh. (Whitney Pipkin)
“In the back of our minds, we were expecting more mortality — because it’s the Anacostia River — but that wasn’t the case,” said Montero, who reported just 8% of the mussels dying in the first year. “The food available in the water column is great, apparently. They’re not dying but growing.”
Montero has worked closely on the project with fish biologist Rachel Mair from the Harrison Lake National Fish Hatchery, located along the James River south of Richmond. The facility and others like it are spawning the next generation of mussel researchers and hundreds of thousands of mussels for rivers like the James and Anacostia.
The hatchery produces thousands of baby mussels each year and grows them until they’re more likely to survive in the wild. All three species in the Anacostia project rely on a host fish to complete their life cycle, so the propagation process is delicate.
With the DOEE funding, the watershed group plans to add two more species to the mix: the Eastern floater and Eastern elliptio. The latter seems to rely on the American eel to reproduce, and the hatchery is experimenting with in vitro fertilization techniques to promulgate it.
The Virginia hatchery grows the mussels by collecting females that already have larvae in their gills. The staff then extracts the larvae with a needle (to mimic a fish rubbing against it) or allows the mussel to release them.
Placed into tanks with their host fish, the larvae will attach to the fish before dropping off two to four weeks later to continue feeding and growing in a series of tanks.
Now that the Anacostia mussels have grown successfully in their protective baskets at eight sites along the river, the organization will test their ability to survive in wetlands and on the river bottom. Volunteers on Sept. 30 tossed hundreds of the adolescent mussels into semi-protected portions of Kenilworth Marsh, where Montero said wild mussels have been found before, “so we know it’s good habitat.”
By the end of October, Montero said, about 8,700 mussels would be spread to new locations in the river.
My problem with "solutions" like this one is that if the mussels were capable of thriving and reproducing in the Anacostia, they'd already be there. They live in adjacent waters (I found a bunch in the C&O Canal once). There is something lacking in the Anacostia which will not let them succeed in good numbers, probably a lack of suitable host fish, since adult mussels . Until that problem is solved, planted mussels are not likely to play a huge role in cleaning the River. But I might be surprised.
Some pretty big news in the "spygate" saga. The investigation into the origin of the Russiagate probe by Federal prosecutor John Durham has turned into a criminal probe, giving him the ability to issue subpoenas, and seat a grand jury and indict people. The news originates with the NYT, conveniently cited at MSN, Justice Dept. Is Said to Open Criminal Inquiry Into Its Own Russia Investigation
Justice Department officials have shifted an administrative review of the Russia investigation closely overseen by Attorney General William P. Barr to a criminal inquiry, according to two people familiar with the matter. The move gives the prosecutor running it, John H. Durham, the power to subpoena for witness testimony and documents, to convene a grand jury and to file criminal charges.
Suffice it to say NYT and other liberals are not happy about the prospect of being probed.
The opening of a criminal investigation is likely to raise alarms that Mr. Trump is using the Justice Department to go after his perceived enemies. Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director under whose watch agents opened the Russia inquiry, and has long assailed other top former law enforcement and intelligence officials as partisans who sought to block his election.
My initial question was/is: does this mean the *interviews* with John Brennan and James Clapper were predicated on a shift into a criminal investigation? If yes, is that reality the baseline for the New York Times changing the reporting?
Once upon a time the Times expressed concern with the government’s abuse of the awesome powers it wields in the name of national security. Now it occupies itself exclusively with the potential benefit exposure might have on the political fortunes of Bad Man Orange.
UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal also reports on the turn of Barr’s review into a criminal investigation here.
Durham’s interest apparently goes beyond the launch of Crossfire Hurricane to events that happened in early 2017. It’s not clear yet what that means but I wonder if he wants to ask Clapper and Brennan about the decision to brief Trump about the Steele dossier. The stated reason for the briefing was that the intel community knew the news media was on the verge of publishing some of the claims in the dossier. And yet, within days of the briefing, CNN had learned of it and made the briefing the news hook to publish a story about the dossier’s contents. As Mollie Hemingway asked two years ago “was the entire purpose of the meeting to produce the leak that the meeting happened?”
That seems far-fetched to a lot of people but I’m not sure why. Given John Brennan’s over-the-top hostility toward Trump, nothing would surprise me. Remember this is the guy who predicted all sorts of final indictments were coming that never came. He later apologized for that but there’s no doubt he’s very partisan and, I think it’s fair to conclude, always has been.
We’re going to go through the primary filing and four exhibits to the evidence Attorney Sidney Powell is delivering to Judge Emmet Sullivan which contain some explosive discoveries. Toplines including:
(1) Lisa Page edited the Flynn 302’s, then forgot when questioned by DOJ officials, then re-remembered when shown her texts. (2) The 302’s themselves were written with lies that do not match notes taken during the interview. (3) The felony leaker of the Flynn-Kislyak phone call is named (James Baker). (4) New texts from Page and Strzok that highlight the entrapment plan. (5) ODNI James Clapper telling WaPo reporter Ignatius to “take the kill shot on Flynn“. (6) The purposeful use of Judge Contreras to take the December 1st 2017 plea agreement; and much, much more. . . .
A letter from DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz provides both good news and bad news. The goods news is Horowitz letter says likely no need for a “classified version” which means AG Bill Barr likely declassifying a lot of it.
However, the bad news is on page #2 where Horowitz says the final draft assembly is still ongoing, and the “review phase” has not yet begun. Which means the report is not likely to be made public before Thanksgiving.
Adam Hickey, the deputy assistant attorney general for the DOJ’s National Security Division, made the comments while appearing on a panel before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday to discuss election security for the upcoming 2020 presidential election. President Trump has long said he believes in a conspiracy theory that posits without evidence CrowdStrike is owned by a wealthy Ukrainian and that a missing DNC server is hidden in Ukraine.
“Looking back at the FBI’s activities investigating the 2016 election, it has been reported that the FBI never obtained the original servers from the Democratic National Committee that had allegedly been hacked by Russia, instead relying upon imaged copies,” Arizona Republican Debbie Lesko asked. “First of all, is that correct?”
Hickey replied that federal investigators were able to obtain evidence on Russian interference, noting that “it’s pretty common for us to work with a security vendor in connection with an investigation of a computer intrusion,” a reference to CrowdStrike.
CrowdStrike, a large California-based cybersecurity firm that was co-founded by a Russia-born U.S. citizen and is used by both Republicans and Democrats, examined the DNC’s systems in 2016 and concluded that Russian state actors were responsible for months of cyber intrusions. The DNC did not provide the FBI with access to its servers, but CrowdStrike did provide the bureau with forensic copies.
Work with does not necessarily mean take their draft testimony at face value.
This has been the cycle since the beginning of Schiff’s Star Chamber: The worst possible testimony is leaked out of context, and it sounds awful — at least until we get the other side of the story, where we inevitably learn that this whole thing is going nowhere, that all the evidence points to there being no quid pro quo, to us learning how Schiff is badgering witnesses to say what he wants.
So we are currently enjoying a remarkable time in history where congressional Democrats are looking to overturn a presidential election using secret testimony backed by selective leaks, and the national media are colluding with them as if this is all normal and okay.
"... since Tuesday, when State Department envoy to Ukraine William Taylor testified to the House Intelligence Committee. The problem with this narrative is that all we have to rely on is Mr. Taylor's opening statement and leaks from Democrats. What we don't know is how Mr. Taylor responded to questions, or what he knew first-hand versus what he concluded on his own, because like all impeachment witnesses he testified in secret. Chairman Adam Schiff, with the approval of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, refuses to release any witness transcripts.... House Republicans staged a protest at the House Intelligence hearing room on Wednesday to demand an open process, and it was a PR stunt. But they are right about the disgrace of this closed-door impeachment. This isn't routine oversight of a bad presidential decision or reckless judgment. The self-described goal of Mr. Schiff's hearings is to impeach and remove from office a President elected by 63 million Americans. This requires more transparency and public scrutiny than Mr. Schiff's unprecedented process of secret testimony, followed by selective leaks to the friendly media to put everything in the most anti-Trump light, in order to sway public opinion."
Sondland testified last week that he knew Giuliani had conditioned a coveted White House invite for Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, on such investigations. But he said he did not know whether the White House had also made security assistance contingent on Zelensky’s committing to launch the probes.
Taylor, the senior U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, contradicted Sondland’s account Tuesday. In prepared remarks delivered to congressional investigators, Taylor wrote that Sondland not only knew of such a quid pro quo, but also had communicated the threat to Ukraine.
Taylor said he understood that on Sept. 1, Sondland warned Zelensky aide Andrey Yermak that the security assistance “would not come” unless Zelensky committed to pursuing the investigation into Burisma, which could have damaged Joe Biden, a top 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful.
Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko told Hill.TV's John Solomon in an interview that aired Wednesday that U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch gave him a do not prosecute list during their first meeting.
“Unfortunately, from the first meeting with the U.S. ambassador in Kiev, [Yovanovitch] gave me a list of people whom we should not prosecute,” Lutsenko, who took his post in 2016, told Hill.TV last week.
“My response of that is it is inadmissible. Nobody in this country, neither our president nor our parliament nor our ambassador, will stop me from prosecuting whether there is a crime,” he continued.
Stop us if you’ve heard this before, although perhaps not from NBC News. The Obama administration sends Joe Biden to a foreign country to press for corruption reform and prosecution. One of the obvious targets for that reform then hires an American lawyer to “advise” on his operations, and the lawyer just so happens to have the same last name as the Vice President.
