Last Call For Another #MeToo Moment, Con't

The awful part (besides the violence towards women here) is that nobody should be shocked by Michael Avenatti's behavior and arrest.

Michael Avenatti, the outspoken attorney who represents porn star Stormy Daniels in her legal battles against President Donald Trump, was arrested on suspicion of domestic violence in Los Angeles, police said.

The alleged incident occurred Tuesday and a report was taken, police said.

Avenatti was arrested Wednesday by officers with the West Los Angeles station.

The oldest of sins, Avenatti apparently beat his wife and the charges are felony-level domestic violence, in California that usually means with a weapon, unacceptable in any fashion.

Hopefully this is the last we hear from him other than sentencing.

And if you thought for a moment that he was going to "save" the Dems in 2020, reexamine your biases and get your crap together, he was a grifter from square one.

That Little Domestic Terroism Problem Of Ours, Con't

White supremacist and self-proclaimed Nazi Jeffrey Clark was arrested on gun charges only after his family basically told the FBI that he was planning to kill people.

Jeffrey Clark, the 30-year-old man federal agents arrested here Friday after he called the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting a “dry run” and his relatives worried he might try to launch a race war, wasn’t shy about being a neo-Nazi.

In April 2017, when someone asked Clark at a White House rally organized by “alt-right” coiner Richard Spencer whether he considered himself a fascist, he said no ― he considered himself a Nazi. Antifa activists photographed him at the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. He has posed for pictures in front of Nazi symbols and holding Nazi memorabilia.

On Gab, the favored social network of racists and anti-Semites, Clark had the username @PureWhiteEvil and called himself “DC Bowl Gang,” a reference to Dylann Roof, the bowl-cut racist who murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.

Many alt-right white supremacists worship Roof, and Clark used an image of the killer and balaclava-clad gunmen as the header for his Gab page. His pinned image was an altered still from the video game “Doom” that depicted Roof executing black people in a church.

This April, Clark threatened a HuffPost reporter, warning that the reporter would be going “feet first into a woodchipper.” The reporter told police about the threat in August. They did nothing at the time. In late October, D.C. police did come to Clark’s house in the Bloomingdale neighborhood after the death by suicide of his brother, Edward, but did not arrest him.

Clark told family members he had been “friended” on Gab by Robert Bowers, the man charged with murdering 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on Oct. 27. Clark, court documents said, told family members the victims “deserved it.” He wrote on Gab that the attack was a “dry run for things to come” and that “the fucking kikes that got shot by the hero #RobertBowers were all active supporters of pedophilia … and every last one of them deserved exactly what happened to them and so much worse,” according to court documents. Pedophilia-centric conspiracy theories are popular among members of the far-right; in 2016, a North Carolina man armed with a rifle drove to a Washington, D.C., pizza place he falsely believed was the center of a vast pedophilia ring. No one was injured in the shooting.

It wasn’t until November, after Clark’s own family contacted law enforcement, that the FBI finally found the allegedly illegal weapons that have him facing gun charges. Court documents, as well as photos and videos obtained by HuffPost, suggest Clark’s late brother, Edward Clark, shared a similar ideology. That both men were able to spew neo-Nazi rhetoric, amass an arsenal of weapons, and openly threaten journalists and critics for months without consequence shows just how much freedom far-right extremists have to operate in the U.S. — and how far their behavior has to escalate before law enforcement takes it seriously.

Despite months, if not years of active threats towards people in public and online, Clark was only arrested and his threat was only taken seriously when his family ratted out his illegal weapon collection.  It had to get that far before Clark was considered a threat.

The fact that Clark could have easily used legal and obtainable weapons to slaughter dozens doesn't seem to have registered with anyone.

As with any terrorist, we should be asking where, who, and how behind Clark's radicalization, but of course the answer is America's law enforcement, America's military, and America's executive branch, and we can't take too close of a look at any of that.

The First Lady's Last Nerve

Turns out that First Lady Melania Trump is just as venal, vindictive, and mean as her husband, she just has slightly better impulse control.

A feud with the first lady's office is expected to cost a senior national security adviser her job after she sparred with East Wing staff and other key members of the Trump administration. 

The dispute spilled into public view in extraordinary fashion on Tuesday when the first lady's office released a statement calling for deputy national security adviser Mira Ricardel's ouster as reports surfaced that President Donald Trump would fire the official. 

A White House official confirmed to CNN that Trump has told people that Ricardel will be fired. But the official said she has been given some time to clear out her desk. It was not immediately clear when she would officially make her exit. 

"It is the position of the Office of the First Lady that (Ricardel) no longer deserves the honor of serving in this White House," the first lady's communications director Stephanie Grisham said in a statement on Tuesday. 

The statement amounted to a stunning public rebuke by a first lady of a senior official serving in her husband's administration. It came after reports surfaced earlier Tuesday indicating Ricardel would be pushed out of her post after less than seven months on the job. 

Neither Ricardel nor spokespeople for the National Security Council responded to CNN requests for comment. 

Ricardel was one of John Bolton's Mustache's sidekicks on Trump's National Security Council.  The fight apparently started when Ricardel's staff accompanied Melania Trump's staff on her utter failure of a goodwill trip to Africa last month, and quickly devolved into an episode of House of Cards.

Not that I'm sad to see of the Mustache's minions get the boot, but Bolton will just replace Ricardel with somebody worse.  The bigger problem is apparently DOnald Trump is willing to fire anyone to keep his wife happy.  I'm trying to recall Michelle Obama being this much of a Disney villain, and of course she isn't and never was.  Lord knows if she had publicly hung up a head on her mantle like this, official Washington would have gone bonkers calling her names.

I don't expect anyone to do the same to Melania Trump.  At least, not to her face.

Methinks Ricardel won't be Melania's last head on a pike, either.  I wonder how much exposure she has to the whole Mueller probe.

We'll see.

StupidiNews!

• A former US Navy captain has plead guilty to criminal conflict of interest charges in connection with the massive "Fat Leonard" bribery scandal, he faces up to five years in prison.
• A federal judge will hear Wednesday CNN's lawsuit against the Trump regime for violating Jim Acosta's First Amendment press freedom rights when the White House pulled his press pass.
• Phermaceutical gian Pfizer has lost its $5 billion patent case in the UK on its pain drug Lyrica, Britain's high court has ruled that the drug's secondary patent as a pain treatment is invalid.
• It's May's way or the highway as UK's Prime Minister Theresa May is asking all cabinet members to back her Brexit plan or resign in protest.
• A California man has plead guilty to causing the death of a Wichita man by "swatting", calling in a false law enforcement threat over a spat over video games.