Tracker

It seems to me that the last and only credible presidential candidate the GOP has would be Mitt Romney, but his self-preservation instinct is strong enough to keep him out of that roiling disaster that is unfolding within that party.

'It's bigger than money': Key witness teases explosive revelations in Manhattan's Donald Trump probe Jennifer Weisselberg, a key witness in the Manhattan District Attorney’s "hush money" case against Donald Trump, says there's something different about the investigation that's "bigger than any taxes, paper, insurance, banks…it's bigger than money." In an exclusive, The Daily Beast reports it spoke with Weisselberg, who is "a one-time Trump family confidant embroiled in a bitter divorce," and currently the wife of longtime Trump CFO Allen Weisselberg. Asked about the investigation outside the DA's office at 12:30 p.m., [Jennifer] Weisselberg told The Daily Beast that 'something has changed and it's up-leveled. It's bigger than any taxes, paper, insurance, banks, insurance… it's bigger than money," she told The Daily Beast. Jennifer Weisselberg is testifying before the grand jury today, as is former and longtime Trump attorney Michael Cohen. Calling them "problematic" witnesses, The Daily Beast drops a second bombshell, reporting that Trump could be indicted in "days. The decision by prosecutors to put them on the stand behind closed doors—something they've avoided doing for years in previous iterations of this investigation—indicates that Trump could be criminally indicted in the coming days, according to two people close to the investigation." Prosecutors giving Trump the opportunity to testify, which he has now declined, is another indication the investigation is coming to a close. "Typically, an indictment comes just days later." In the summer of 2021, before the current District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, had shuttered the case against Trump, Jennifer Wiesselberg told journalist Charles M. Blow that the case was wide-reaching, and even included the Wollman Rink in Manhattan's Central Park, which Trump rebuilt. https://www.alternet.org/its-bigger-than-money-manhattan/

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/vern-white-nsicop-china-poilievre-1.6774671

Yet another example of the implosion and decline of the the American would-be empire.

Soooo....we won't need to hold fund-raising raffles for him for a while longer.

Or Bruno.

Sorry- cannot recall but will look for that tomorrow.

I suspect that Calgarians feel that they are so much on a different level that they have outgrown the CFL.

Life in Belarus apartments is ....... convenient.

There is a real fear that the jurors may face threats and/or attacks from rabid Trump supporters- the plaintiff, a psychologist, has already received death threats.- thus the anonymous jurors,

From Wine Country To London, Bank's Failure Shakes Worldwide NEW YORK (AP) — It was called Silicon Valley Bank, but its collapse is causing shockwaves around the world. From winemakers in California to startups across the Atlantic Ocean, companies are scrambling to figure out how to manage their finances after their bank suddenly shut down Friday. The meltdown means distress not only for businesses but also for all their workers whose paychecks may get tied up in the chaos. California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Saturday that he’s talking with the White House to help “stabilize the situation as quickly as possible, to protect jobs, people’s livelihoods, and the entire innovation ecosystem that has served as a tent pole for our economy.” U.S. customers with less than $250,000 in the bank can count on insurance provided by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Regulators are trying to find a buyer for the bank in hopes customers with more than that can be made whole. That includes customers like Circle, a big player in the cryptocurrency industry. It said it has about $3.3 billion of the roughly $40 billion in reserves for its USDC coin at SVB. That caused USD Coin’s value, which tries to stay firmly at $1, to briefly plunge below 87 cents Saturday. It later rose back above 97 cents, according to CoinDesk. Across the Atlantic, startup companies woke up Saturday to find SVB’s U.K. business will stop making payments or accepting deposits. The Bank of England said late Friday that it will put Silicon Valley Bank UK in its insolvency procedure, which will pay out eligible depositors up to 170,000 British pounds ($204,544) for joint accounts “as quickly as possible.” “We know that there are a large number of startups and investors in the ecosystem who have significant exposure to SVB UK and will be very concerned,” Dom Hallas, executive director of Coadec, which represents British startups, said on Twitter. He cited “concern and panic.” The Bank of England said SVB UK’s assets would be sold to pay creditors. It’s not just startups feeling the pain. The bank’s collapse is having an effect on another important California industry: fine wines. It’s been an influential lender to vineyards since the 1990s. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/silicon-valley-bank-collapse_n_640cfebee4b0d15457b63f29

The S & L debacle which was a direct result of Reagan de-regulating the near-banks in the US is a compelling example of this.

Donald Trump may face an anonymous jury in rape defamation suit An anonymous jury may hear writer E. Jean Carroll's upcoming rape defamation suit against Donald Trump, a judge in the case indicated Saturday. Carroll, a former columnist for Elle magazine, has accused Trump of raping her in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store in the late 1990s. She sued him for defamation after he derided her claims, said she was not his "type," and that her accusation was politically motivated. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan issued an order Saturday asking Trump and Carroll to respond by March 17 if either side has any objections to using an anonymous jury, Bloomberg reported. Kaplan didn't explain why he might opt for an anonymous jury. But jurors could be targets of threats in the politically charged case. Anonymous juries have been used in the past to protect jurors' safety in cases involving organized crimes and terrorists. Kaplan ruled Friday that Trump's controversial hot-mic comments to an Access Hollywood host in 2005 will be allowed at the trial. Trump boasted then about "grabbing" women without their consent, saying he could get away with it because he was famous. https://www.alternet.org/Bank/trump-anonymous-jury-defamation-case/

There is a multi-party committee overseeing CSIS and national security and Poilievre has been called out by a Conservative MP who sits on that committee. The gist of what was said is that every member of that committee has had full updates and disclosures but are sworn to secrecy to protect sources and the degree of awareness that CSIS has about any meddling by foreign governments and actors in Canadian political affairs. Poilievre has carte blanche to huff and puff knowing full well that the government and committee cannot speak candidly on these matters.

We lost Bud Grant today.

Relatives of the mobilized sent a letter to Putin complaining that some of the mobilized have symptoms of "Pathogenic lymphocytic Venezuelan encephalomyelitis". A disease transmitted mainly by rats.

To Save Physics, Experts Suggest We Need to Assume The Future Can Affect The Past In 2022, the physics Nobel prize was awarded for experimental work showing that the quantum world must break some of our fundamental intuitions about how the Universe works. Many look at those experiments and conclude that they challenge "locality" – the intuition that distant objects need a physical mediator to interact. And indeed, a mysterious connection between distant particles would be one way to explain these experimental results. Others instead think the experiments challenge "realism" – the intuition that there's an objective state of affairs underlying our experience. After all, the experiments are only difficult to explain if our measurements are thought to correspond to something real. Either way, many physicists agree about what's been called "the death by experiment" of local realism. But what if both of these intuitions can be saved, at the expense of a third? A growing group of experts think that we should abandon instead the assumption that present actions can't affect past events. Called "retrocausality", this option claims to rescue both locality and realism. https://www.sciencealert.com/to-save-physics-experts-suggest-we-need-to-assume-the-future-can-affect-the-past

Many people recall only the accusation but not the retraction or correction.

The named "sources" of this woman are probably no less credible than most, if not all of alternate Fox sources.