I wonder where else Dennis Hastert drove the GMC Yukon that he had at taxpayer's expense per the "Former Speaker Statute."
Did he drive it when he went to withdraw $50,000 from Castle Bank, or maybe he rode the Yukon to the Menards parking lot - to pay for his victim's silence?
I bet there's a way we could get an answer for that one...
Since we know the dates of the withdrawals, that would help fill in some of the gaps that allowed this case to be dismissed beforehand.
Using gov't property to commit a crime is bad, right?
And crazy that the $1.7M he paid out to Individual A is just a little less than the ~$2M he billed the government for - quite a bit of which was passed to his friends.
I really think that somebody needs to be asking questions about this.
Don't you?
I'm still trying to figure out what's up with this case, given the proximity in time to the other charges being filed a month later - Was it an attempt to fish out info about the other investigation? Weird.
I have an idea for two companion small-screen shows - a miniseries (ie 5 episodes), and a serialized "reality" show/documentary (essentially participant ethnography) but I haven't dipped my toe in the waters of the "entertainment" world before.
What's first? Script? Storyboard?
And, to be clear, these are all socially relevant topics, and a way to humanize those who have been otherized for the past 5 years. And would be controversial - but with unparallelled impact in compensating for issues where most white people lack empathy.
Actually - the series concept has potential to be repeated over multiple series with different narrative themes.
Think of something like Chernobyl meets The Road meets Zombieland (ok, maybe The Stand meets Ionesco, but nowhere near as far as Zombie Strippers took Rhinoceros).
It's time to start passing gun legislation that defines who can be members of regulated militiae, and what types of weaponry those members can access.
The bill of rights uses "the people" as a collective noun & uses "person" to reference individual rights ∴ "the people" can legislate it.
TATFU: there can't be a blanket ban on all weapons.
You can restrict who has access to them to ensure they're used in the public interest.
And _The People_ can demand mental health checks to weed out sociopaths + predators who shouldn't possess weapons to determine fitness to belong, & ongoing community service + training as part of being a member of a 'well-regulated' militia that serves the public interest...
I totally respect what @nguyen_amanda and @kimmythepooh have been sharing on the media in recent days, and while they're addressing fetishization, they're skipping the CORE issue in the ATL shootings:
the women shot were "masseuses" like Epstein's victims were masseuses.
And I understand discussing fetishization, but not explicitly discussing sex trafficking ignores what is perhaps the single most important element in the rampant objectification of AAPI women: they've been commodified.
And when the bodies of AAPI women, or women with brown skin are sold at discount rates along the interstate, they're viewed by those consuming the flesh as little more than the cheap disposable crap imported from Chinese factories.
Gen X, particularly the Oregon Trail µgen, was the first generation to come of age with access to personal computers.
Exposure to this metaphor in interaction design innumerable times before getting laid -> we've internalized and identified with its utility.
Do Not Go Forward.
So, aside from the visual representation of the "Cancel" button literally BEING the name of the generation, we're a generation that has been been bred to (or driven to) adopt cynicism and an innate distrust of imposed authority.
And, until now, apathy.
You see, we're also the generation who was first raised on artificial sweeteners, milk & soda in plastic bottles - not glass, mono & diglycerides, PUFAs,
and the first generation to see an explosion in the number of children born on on the Autism spectrum.
Last year, someone turned the HBO series "Euphoria" on, and I was seriously disgusted within 30min by the graphic sexual interaction that was portrayed as between underage characters:
not b/c it corrupts teens, but b/c it's a thinly veiled replacement for child porn for adults.
I don't know if #BombayBegums has the same degree of fictional exploitation of underage characters as Euphoria did, but there's a reason that it's against the law for actors in porn to pretend to be under 18 -
because it normalizes the desire to rape children.
Discussion is fine. Making out? Whatever.
But if there's full frontal "child" nudity or simulated sex w/ underage characters, any other sexual content that might stimulate arousal _below_ the waist, seriously.