Thursday Morning Tab Clearing

AI may be good for some comedy:

Meanwhile, it is being alleged that the companies involved in AI are hiding huge amounts of debt in the same way that Enron did.

It’s an extremely costly undertaking built on seemingly bottomless hype — and a mountain of debt. As Japanese financial newspaper Nikkei Asia found in a recent investigation, just five US tech giants — Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle — are hiding an estimated $1.65 trillion in debt that doesn’t appear on balance sheets. That’s even more than the $1.35 trillion in debt the five companies officially reported in their financial data for the most recent quarter.

Meta alone has amassed around $420 billion in off-balance-sheet debt, according to Nikkei, highlighting how precarious the AI industry’s steep investment in AI has become, and inspiring comparisons to energy company Enron, which collapsed in spectacular fashion in 2001 because of similar debts hidden behind shell companies. Like Enron, they’re using special purpose vehicles, or off-balance sheet arrangements such as legally distinct subsidiaries, as a way to make their financial reporting look healthier than it actually is — often a glaring sign that something is deeply amiss behind the scenes.

We'll see if our largely corporate-owned media covers this. It's probably a good bet that you won't see a mention of it on CBS or in the WaPo. When the AI bubble bursts, it could be bad.

Elsewhere, Julie DiCarlo, a reporter, posted this:

It's funny how many men come into my mentions to "protect women's sports" but have zero other posts talking about women's sports, or even women, in any kind of meaningful or supportive way.

— Julie DiCaro (@juliedicaro.bsky.social) July 29, 2026 at 8:58 PM

She is exactly right. Trump and the rest of his ilk have done nothing to support women's sports, other than requiring genital checks. They've been ramming through anti-abortion laws that have essentially required doctors to let women having problem pregancies die. And they haven't scrapped Blanche's nomination because of his active role in hiding All Things Epstein.

Another J6 Scumbag

He got tripped up by a DNA test.

A U.S. Capitol riot defendant who was accused of firing a gun into the air while among the mob on Capitol grounds on January 6, 2021, now faces charges of sexual assault and kidnapping in Utah.

Prosecutors allege John Banuelos, 40, attacked a woman in the Salt Lake City area in 2018, three years prior to his alleged involvement in the Capitol siege, according to court filings obtained by CBS News.

A DNA test conducted in August linked Banuelos to the 2018 sex assault, prosecutors allege in a charging document filed in Utah.

State charges, so the Great Orange Pedo can't pardon him for doing a crime said GOP would approve of.

Shoulda Left Him to Rot In Romania, Donnie-Boy

Andrew Tate’s girlfriend, Bri Stern, accused him of nearly choking her unconscious during a violent sexual encounter, TMZ reported Wednesday.

Sources with direct knowledge told TMZ that Stern filed a sexual assault report claiming Tate attacked her March 11 at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Stern alleged Tate began choking her while they were having sex, but got too rough. She claimed she begged him to stop, but he allegedly continued, and the more she struggled, the more violent he became, TMZ reported. Stern reported feeling that everything became fuzzy, like she was fading into unconsciousness, and the alleged encounter only stopped when Tate was finished having sex, according to TMZ.

It looks as though if it had taken him longer to "finish", he would have killed her.

This rapist, remember, is a guy that the Felon^37 used his leverage to get back to the US so that Tate could evade charges for rape and human trafficking in Europe. Tate's crimes are the COFF's crimes, by proxy. For you can bet heavily that he would see nothing wrong with doing what Take did (allegedly).

Trump is Pro-Child Rape, As One Might Expect

The Trump administration has urged Romanian authorities to lift travel restrictions on influencer Andrew Tate and his brother, Tristan Tate, as they await trial on charges including human trafficking, sexual misconduct, and money laundering, according to a report by the Financial Times.

The 37-year-old is currently under house arrest in Romania and is awaiting trial on human trafficking charges. His brother, 36, and two Romanian women are also awaiting trial.

Interesting how the Mango Mussolini is standing up for a couple of clowns who are accussed of human trafficking, which, coincidentally, is one of the very crimes that he accuses mogrants of perpetuating.

Funny Thing, That

Dolt-47 has been executing on his promise to protect women by nominating rapists and abusers to his cabinet.

So he can keep a close eye on them? Pick up some pointers?

To the Women Who Voted For Trump-- Toyota!

Your body, my choice. Forever.

— Nicholas J. Fuentes (@NickJFuentes) November 6, 2024

You asked for it, you got it!

But I do get it, part of it. There are women who hate other women. They would rather see a misogynistic racist get ahead than a woman, and that goes double if she's a minority. Matters not to them if the price of stomping on another woman is letting men like Fuentes trample their autonomy. Fuentes is the sort of troll who wants to repeal the 19th Amendment, the Equal Opportunity Credit Act and the Married Women's Property Acts.

But hey, personal autonomy is a small price to pay for being able to shiv another woman in the back, amirite?

A Use for the Kola Borehole

The Kola superdeep borehole was a Soviet/Russian research project. Hole SG-3 reached a depth of 40,000+ feet.

It is still not deep enough to dump Randall Terry into.

Sexism, You Betcha

Imagine that Kamala Harris had five children by three husbands and that one of those kids was born two months before the wedding. You can bet the farm that the Republicans would be making massive amounts of hay over her supposed immorality and loose standards. Bible Mike and the rest of the Christan Taliban would be bleating about that every three hours on Fox News.

But that is exactly what Donald Trump did: Five kids by three wives and one of them was born two months before the wedding.

The self-styled party of morality doesn't give a shit about that. Because it's OK if you're a Republican.

(Yes, I made this point eight years ago. It's still valid.)

Betcher Ass the Christian Taliban (and the COFF) Want to Bring This Back

"The American Plan", in which women could be arrested and held without charges for no good goddamned reason at all.

It was another idea of the Wilson administration. Wilson was probably the most bigoted American president in between Andrew Jackson and Richard Nixon. He only approved of white Southerners and their genteel/subservient women.

But you know, don't you, that the Christofascists want to bring it back.

Baby Bobby Kennedy is a Real Creep

According to Vanity Fair’s reporting (which has not been verified by MSNBC), a woman named Eliza Cooney, who had been hired to babysit Kennedy’s children in 1998 when she was 23, alleged that he groped her or behaved inappropriately toward her on three occasions. Cooney told the publication that she wrote about the first incident in her diary at the time and that she had confided in her mother in 2017 during the height of the #MeToo movement. She said she had also told several of her friends about Kennedy’s alleged behavior last year, after he announced his run for president.

Kennedy did not respond to NBC News’ request for comment on the allegations. But asked about the assault allegations in an interview on “Breaking Points,” a YouTube show, he said he would not respond to the details, adding that he had a “rambunctious youth.” (Kennedy was in his 40s when the incidents are alleged to have occurred.)

“Listen, I’ve said this from the beginning: I am not a church boy,” he told the interviewer Tuesday. “I had a very, very rambunctious youth. I said in my announcement speech that I — I have so many skeletons in my closet that if they all vote, I could run for king of the world.”

Really? Being in one's 40s is being a youth? His goddamned uncle was president in his 40s. His dad was a United States Senator in his 40s. Baby Bobby was molesting his kid's sitter.

He and Dolt-45 should get along famously, they're both creeps who molest women.

Who Gives A Fuck About This Clown?

The commencement speaker at Kansas’ Benedictine College, a private Catholic liberal arts school, congratulated the women receiving degrees — and said most of them were probably more excited about getting married and having children.

Harrison Butker, the kicker for the Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs, is getting attention for those and other comments last weekend in which he said some Catholic leaders were “pushing dangerous gender ideologies onto the youth of America.”

Really, who gives a fuck about this guy? His job is kicking a football, a job that doesn't exactly require much more than a room-temperature IQ. But this crap is getting a lot of minutes on the news shows, because reasons.

Less important to those morons on the teevee are the various wars going on that threaten to suck in the rest of the world.

GOP Gets What They Want (and They Ain't Happy).

Arizona will soon join 14 other states that have banned abortion at all stages of pregnancy after a state Supreme Court ruling Tuesday found that officials may enforce an 1864 law criminalizing all abortions except when a woman’s life is at stake.
...
The law provides no exceptions for rape or incest.

Right. A law that was enacted a half-century before Arizona became a state, when the primary occupations of Arizonans were cowboy, gambler, gunfighter and whore, is given credence?

Republicans, who formerly praised the law, are now running from it. Because they know that, other than the batshit-crazy Christian Talibanistas, a majority of voters favor keeping abortion legal. Even the looniest person in Arizona politics can read the signs.

In a sign of Republicans’ political bind, even Kari Lake, a staunch Trump ally and abortion opponent who is running for Senate in Arizona, said the total abortion ban “is out of step with Arizonans.” It’s a shift from two years ago when Lake praised the 1864 law.

Yeah, because now, Ms. QAnon has seen that a majority of people don't like her party's position and, in an election where it is on the ballot, will turn out. Which may happen in Florida and Arizona, among other states.

Acting the Ass in Court is Expensive

E. Jean Carroll's attorney thinks that the TOFF showing his ass in court was probably worth about ten million more in the verdict.

If he wants to appeal the verdict, he has to either find a bonding company willing to write an appeal bond for him or he has to deposit $83.3 million with the clerk of the court.

Women: Republican Men Value Your Fetus Over You

The Texas supreme court on Monday overturned a lower court’s ruling that would have allowed a pregnant woman to get an emergency abortion under the medical exception for the state’s near-total abortion ban, granting a petition by Republican attorney general Ken Paxton.

And there it is. If your doctor thinks that you need an abortion to protect your health and/or to preserve your fertility, the men in the Cult of the Fetus will demand the right to sit in judgment of you. In essence, unless you can prove to those men that you're going to die, no abortion for you. Even if your doctor says you're going to die, if the judges in the State Fetal Review Court disagree, anyone who helps you will run the risk of going to prison.

Someone who is good with graphic design should remake the Texas state seal to show a fetus in the center.

Remember the official motto of Texas: Once Yer Born, Yer On Yer Own, Kid.

What Took Her So Long?

The Texas woman who sued the state for an abortion after receiving a lethal fetal diagnosis has now fled Texas in order to obtain the procedure, the Center for Reproductive Rights announced in a statement Monday.

The woman, Kate Cox, a 31-year-old mother of two from Dallas, sued Texas last week. While a lower-court judge ruled to allow Cox to receive an abortion, the Texas state supreme court on Friday paused that ruling. In her lawsuit, Cox said that continuing the pregnancy could threaten her life and future fertility.

Texas's Official Incel, Ken Paxton, likely threw himself to the floor, had a fit and chewed on the carpet when he heard the news.

Ms. Cox would do well to never return to Baja Oklahoma.

No Wonder the TOFF Administration Loved This Guy

In 2013, Joseph Roberts was accused of verbal and online sexual harassment and suspended from Savannah State University. He claimed he was suspended from school and "denied due process."

Five years later, he'd go on to share his story with Betsy DeVos, then former President Donald Trump's Secretary of Education, as an advocate for men who were wrongfully accused of sexual misconduct on college campuses.
...
More than a decade later, Roberts, 42, was arrested on Sept. 7 in a separate incident for the gruesome death of his girlfriend, Rachel Imani Buckner, a recent law school grad whose dismembered body was discovered wrapped in plastic with duct tape along the shore in California's Alameda County.

Member of the Federalist Society, on his local county's GOP central committee, and now denied bail and residing in the county jail, charged with chopping up his girlfriend.

The TOFF Keeps Losing in Court

Over forty million in legal costs doesn't seem to be buying him very much.

A federal judge tossed out former President Donald Trump’s countersuit against the writer who won a sex abuse lawsuit against him, ruling Monday that Trump can’t claim she defamed him by continuing to say she was not only sexually abused but raped.

Maybe he should ask his lawyers for a frequent loser's discount.

Yet Another Loss for the TOFF

A jury found Donald Trump liable Tuesday for sexually abusing advice columnist E. Jean Carroll in 1996, awarding her $5 million in a judgment that could haunt the former president as he campaigns to regain the White House.

The verdict adds to Trump’s legal woes and offers vindication to Carroll, whose allegations had been mocked and dismissed by Trump for years. She nodded as the verdict was announced in a federal courtroom in New York City just a few hours after deliberations had begun She hugged supporters and smiled through tears.

Jurors also found Trump liable for defaming Carroll after she made her allegations public. Trump chose not to attend the civil trial and was absent when the verdict was read.

I've implied before that my belief is that his lawyer's trial strategy was dictated by the TOFF. Hammering the living shit out of an accuser in a sexual misconduct/rape trial doesn't play well these days.

The jury was out for about three hours. That suggests to me that it wasn't even a close matter in their eyes.

On to Georgia.

The Dumbest Executives on Earth Work for Fox News Corp.Prove Me Wrong.

Text messages that helped lead Fox News to part ways with star host Tucker Carlson included one in which he declared that Trump supporters beating a protester was “not how white men fight,” according to The New York Times.

The text was one of a trove of messages from Carlson and other Fox News hosts uncovered in a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against the network for airing false allegations that the company’s machines were used to steal the 2020 election from former President Donald Trump.

it took until that email came out that it dawned in the consciousness of those idiots that their star loudmouth was a misogynistic and racist troll who dabbled in conspiracy theories and that maybe, just maybe, he did believe some of the shit he spewed five nights a week? What the fuck, they never watched his show? they never saw the work of any of the comedians who mocked him? Instead of watching what aired on their cable channel, were they spending their nights doing cocaine with Spawn of DJT?

As for the rest of us: After the stuff that has come out as a result of DVS's lawsuit, anyone who doesn't realize that Fox is not a news channel, that all it does is feed propaganda and pablum to its core vewers, who are too addled/programmed to handle the truth, is either willfully blind or has had several lobotomies with both electrodes and ice-picks.

Tacopina Knows He's Screwed the Pooch; Grumpy Trumpy Felon Ed.

Former President Donald Trump's lawyer Joseph Tacopina has requested a mistrial in the E. Jean Carroll rape case, accusing the judge of acting unfairly in favor of Carroll.

My guess is that Tacopina filed the motion because his client told him to. Whining about people being so, so unfair to him is a hallmark of the World's Oldest Toddler.

If not that, it could be because Tacopina may believe that his overly aggressive cross-examination of Carroll isn't playing well. That might have worked fifty years ago, but times have changed.