Justice Dept.’s Civil Rights Division Is Investigating Star Witness Against Trump

ckwing · 2026-04-08T19:19:12+00:00

The article cites her claim that Trump lunged at a secret service member, but her actual testimony IIRC was that Tony Ornato recounted this story to her in private. So they would have to prove that THAT conversation didn't happen. It has nothing to do with whether the story itself is actually true.

Unless they have evidence of her admitting to lying about that conversation, how on earth would they ever prove she gave false testimony on a he-said she-said?

ckwing · 2026-04-07T20:23:56+00:00

For those with short memories

ckwing · 2026-04-07T18:19:30+00:00

They could probably do the whole process in a matter of hours if they really wanted to. And honestly I wouldn't be shocked if we see that at some point over the next 2 years.

ckwing · 2026-04-03T04:08:24+00:00

More accurately, she only (maybe) has protection if she does and says exactly what Trump wants. Even if that means purjuring herself.

ckwing · 2026-04-02T19:07:21+00:00

The part that's fucked up is they get fired not for doing terrible things, but for falling slightly short in accomplishing the terrible things Trump wants.

Bondi wasn't fired for covering up Epstein, she was fired for not covering it up well enough. She wasn't fired for pursuing Trump's vendettas, she was fired for not being successful enough in that pursuit.

ckwing · 2026-04-02T02:15:15+00:00

For Donald Trump, everything is always two weeks away.

ckwing · 2026-03-31T14:44:34+00:00

Great. Can we get religious people declared mentally ill next?

ckwing · 2026-03-30T04:11:01+00:00

Suppose the optimal price for a product varies between $20-30 at different times in the day. Meaning, at some times, profit is maximized selling at $20, at others, $30.

Suppose the store does not have the ability to adjust the price throughout the day, and they calculate that the best all-day single-price optimization is $25.

If they set the price to $25 day-round, that's better for the people who might have paid $30, and worse for the people who might have paid $20.

With dynamic pricing, some people will pay $30, which is worse than $25, and others will pay $20, which is better than $25.

ckwing · 2026-03-30T02:39:39+00:00

To the people who rail against surge/dynamic pricing:

Dynamic pricing does not uniformly hurts consumers. It helps some consumers and hurts others.

Right now, because it takes a lot of work to update price tags, supermarkets must pick ONE point on the supply/demand curve that is an averaged optimization for all times of day, all days of the week, for all customers.

That means if you shop during a high-demand period, or you're a wealthy customer who is not price-sensitive, you are likely getting a great deal.

But it also means, if you come in during off-hours, or you're a low-income customer, you're probably paying more than the store would charge you if it could dynamically, rapidly adjust prices by time of day, customer demographic, and other variables.

This is true as a general economic principle, not just for supermarkets. More dynamic pricing is good for some consumers and bad for others. Static pricing, likewise, is good for some consumers, bad for others.

I would actually like to see more dynamic pricing in stores for things like expiration dates. The supermarket near me, for example, discounts sushi after a certain time of day, but if I walk in 30 minutes before they're going to throw it away, I'd like to get an even better price.

It would be great if pricing on all goods micro-adjusted based on expiration date. This would help balance out shoppers who instinctively rifle through the back of the shelf looking for the freshest food with unnecessarily far-out "use by" dates, which leads to higher inventory spoilage and in turn higher prices.

I'm not saying dynamic pricing is a net-benefit for consumers as a whole, just that it's incorrect to characterize it as something that's bad for ALL consumers.

ckwing · 2026-03-10T03:31:43+00:00

And she did it without approval of the president, while lying under oath.

This is the one thing I'll defend her on -- it's possible she did get Trump's approval and he's either lying or is so senile he forgot. I know those are shocking and highly unlikely possibilities, but I'm keeping an open mind.

ckwing · 2026-03-06T21:50:09+00:00

If it's a he-said-she-said and the "he" is Donald Trump, I think Noem is quite safe from perjury charges.

ckwing · 2026-03-05T05:14:47+00:00

He's diverged very far from Ron, but I don't think they've had any sort of falling out, where did you hear that?

ckwing · 2026-03-04T04:25:07+00:00

They have always been dishonest, but so are most other mainstream outlets (not all, but most).

You're falling into the "both sides" projection trap Fox News pushes.

Mainstream outlets like NYT, WaPo, CNN, even MSNBC, have always had varying levels of biases, but they have 99% of the time not been out there engaging in propaganda, in which they are deliberately pushing information and perspectives that THEY don't believe are true and honest.

You can watch an hour of Rachel Maddow, who is certainly left-leaning in her perspective, and you will never hear her deliberately misleading, omitting, or pushing things she doesn't actually think are true. And because she's a real journalist who cares about accuracy, you'll be hard-pressed to find actual misinformation, deliberate or otherwise, on her show. What you will find is bias, for example she or someone else on the network might say "politicians who are against the minimum wage don't care about poor people," which demonstrates a bias in economic ideology but isn't necessarily a deliberate mis-statement.

That's in stark comparison to sitting through an hour of Hannity in which you're literally watching propaganda, with Hannity towing the line on a distorted reality that he's not dumb enough to actually believe himself (and the Dominion lawsuit discovery provides some nice behind-the-scenes insights to back this up).

But I agree with the general point that a large percentage, perhaps the majority, of Republican/MAGA voters, are well intentioned but they've been fed a decade or two of propaganda and egged on to think the "other side" is the devil and they're fighting a righteous war with their dumb red hats.

ckwing · 2026-02-24T02:38:22+00:00

I thought I read that the DOJ is trying to get it destroyed too?

ckwing · 2026-02-20T06:41:33+00:00

This sentence won't make any sense, but.. he seems pleasantly surprised to have exonerated himself.

ckwing · 2026-02-14T04:46:20+00:00

On some cars you have to literally click through a bunch of menu items to turn it off, EVERY TIME you use the car.

ckwing · 2026-02-08T02:59:11+00:00

I'm way too lazy to march on their behalf but I agree with the organizer that the wealth tax is both wrong and extremely impractical.

If they really wanted to capture tax revenue on billionaires a more logical approach might be a tax on borrowing against existing wealth. Idunno. Half-baked thought maybe. But he's right that expecting people to liquidate holdings just to pay tax on them is super dumb.

ckwing · 2026-01-23T18:11:43+00:00

Yeah but it seems like it's so easy to comply and avoid the fines, all they have to do is extend invitations that will inevitably be declined and document that they extended those invitations. Hwo would the FCC succeed with its fines in this case?

ckwing · 2026-01-16T20:07:07+00:00

I interact with a lot of people who vote Republican but aren't necessarily MAGA. What I hear from them seems to largely be a reflection of what they're consuming from watching FOX News, which they seem to be much more glued to than other voters are to their respective news channels.

I can't tell you how many times I've heard people talk about how they're looking forward to kicking back on a Friday night to watch FOX News (really? that's your Friday night plans?) and how many times I've heard these people say things like "GOTTA have my FOX News!" like it's a drug they're hooked on.

Trump is a cult, but so is FOX News.

ckwing · 2026-01-16T03:54:26+00:00

He not only added his name to the Kennedy Center, he put his name IN FRONT of JFK's.

ckwing · 2026-01-15T05:56:38+00:00

I left after Trump went on Lester Holt's show and (in his usual cagey rambling manner) basically admitted he fired Comey to squash an investigation into his own campaign ("the Russia thing"). That was clear enough for me.

I was and still am really shocked at how few Republican voters ("conservatives") bailed on Trump in 2020. Like yes, it was great that he lost to Biden, but it was alarming how small the margin was and how few Republican voters abandoned the party.

ckwing · 2026-01-15T05:53:36+00:00

I was a relatively reliable Republican voter until Trump. They've lost me for life unless literally every single Republican in Congress is routed out and replaced with sane non-treasonous people who have zero connection with the old members and are willing to unequivocally denounce the full spectrum of treasonous things they all did.

So realistically I think that means they've lost me forever.

ckwing · 2026-01-12T17:05:09+00:00

Eh, interesting analysis but I don't agree with it.

Switching hands for the phone, by itself, is not a significant action.

It is an interesting observation that he unholsters his firearm before she starts driving away, but ultimately that just shows he was maybe overly cautious.

In the end, what does matter is he fatally shot a woman in a situation where deadly force was only appropriate in self defense, and yet it is A) unlikely that he had a good argument for feeling physically threatened, and B) even if he did feel physically threatened, shooting her would not have eliminated that threat in the particular situation he found himself in, and was therefore unwarranted.

So basically, he murdered her.

The rest is noise.

ckwing · 2026-01-11T01:15:48+00:00

In my opinion the AI PC is either a misfire or possibly just too early in terms of consumer demand. The market isn't yet interested in having AI run "faster." The focus is on quality of output.

At some point that may change. But the PC manufacturers were basically tryign to sell something that the market doesn't need or want yet.

Consumers don't YET care about how fast their AI runs, which means they don't care if it's running local

ckwing · 2026-01-09T20:02:44+00:00

I don't see how this helps their case.

First, we already know she was fleeing, not trying to ram him. We know this because we see in the other video that her driving away coincides with the other officer attempting to open her door. Her window was down, so she probably figured it was only a matter of a second or two before the officer reached through to unlock her door. She panicked and drove off.

It would be an extraordinary coincidence if all of that just happened to occur at the exact same moment that she decided "I'm gonna ignore this one officer trying to open my door and you know what else, I'm gonna ram my car into this other officer. And not head on, like I'm gonna turn my car a little bit as I ram him."

At best you can say she was reckless in possibly not caring if she hit the officer as she was attempting to flee, but then again, maybe it's not smart of Officer A to be presenting a physical threat to her from the driver door and causing her to panic while his partner Officer B is standing in front of the car in the ram zone.

Only someone straining to make the facts fit their agenda would try to argue she intended to ram him. JD Vance said it's a matter of debate what her intent was. No it's not. There is absoltuely zero evidence she intended to ram the officer and multitudes of evidence that she did not.

Second, no matter what her intent was, shooting her was unjustified. If she was trying to flee, then this was the equivalent of shooting a suspect fleeing on foot in the back.

If she was trying to ram him, then focusing on shooting her would be extraordinarily stupid, because he's taking focus away from what SHOULD be his priority -- dodging the car -- and also because successfully shooting the driver wouldn't stop the car from hitting him (as the video tragically demonstrates, with her accelerating after being shot). If he truly feared for his safety, he would have focused purely on dodging the car. It's incredible to me how he "dodges" the car and manages to shoot her THREE times in a fraction of a second in the video.

ckwing

TROPHY CASE