Let that sink in...and while you're at it take a look at a good old-fashioned pin-point strategy mapping from 2 days ago. . . and a report from Jerod MacDonald-Evoy yesterday inserted farther down
A new group linked to conspiracy theorist and former Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell says it is raising money to fund the Arizona Senate’s so-called election audit. . .
Why did Sidney Powell establish the "Legal Defense Fund for the American Republic" as a 501(c) (4) nonprofit organization?
Grifters gonna grift.
A 501(c)(4) organization doesn’t have to disclose its donors and can engage in political activity, can be connected to super PACs and can accept unlimited donations from businesses. Basically, this is a slush fund for any future political ambitions she has.
Meet the man who established Sidney Powell's Kraken war chest: Great-great-great grandson of Dow Chemical founder has been banned from Twitter over far right and anti-trans posts
Robert Matheson is the person who set up Sidney Powell's Legal Defense Fund
His website RRMatheson.com says he 'works with Sidney Powell and the Legal Defense Fund for the American Republic to defend against election fraud'
Powell did not return to DailyMail.com's request for comment but she told The Daily Beast Matheson is no longer involved in the Legal Defense Fund
The war chest was put in place to try to overturn Joe Biden's presidential election win and declare Donald Trump the winner
Matheson's social media accounts are full of far-right posts including sharing #BanTheBurka comments and supporting conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer
In April, Matheson tweeted Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler writing: 'Transgender is a joke... Don't normalize sickness' and was banned from Twitter
He is a descendant of Herbert Henry Dow, founder of Dow Chemical Co
His grandmother was philanthropist and Dow heiress Ruth Buchanan who was a fixture on the Washington and Rhode Island social scene before her death
Wiley T. Buchanan Jr., his grandfather, was State Department protocol chief to Eisenhower and a relative of the 15th President James Buchanan
On Parler Matheson has shared and written several posts in support of Trump's election legal fight and pushing the president's unfounded claims of fraud
Strong magnitude 6 quake strikes in Antelope Valley near California-Nevada border, no significant damage reported
Fr, 9. Jul 2021, 07:26
07:26 AM | VON: EARTHQUAKEMONITOR
Locations of user reports feeling this morning's quake in California
Early morning on 8 July 2021, a strong magnitude 6.0 earthquake struck Little Antelope Valley, California at 3:49pm local time (July 8 at 22:49 UTC). The quake was registered at shallow depth of around 6 miles (9.8 kilometers) only. The epicenter was about 20 miles southwest of Smith Valley, NV. Perceived shaking for the quake was very strong near the epicenter and light shaking could be felt in up to hundreds of miles distance, including the SF Bay area and Las Vegas. Within minutes, hundreds of users sent reports of shaking to our monitoring service. So far, USGS has received more than 20,000 reports for this quake. There were no immediate reports of serious damage or injuries, fortunately. Near the epicenter, things fell off shelves, windows were broken, weak walls and some roofs were damaged. Rockfalls occurred on highways near mountain slopes, with rocks hitting cars. According to local news, people were not injured.
PLEASE NOTE:
> Initial report of magnitude 4.8 Initial calculations had indicated two earthquakes striking 25 seconds but 100 miles (161 kilometers) apart. After a review, USGS removed the magnitude 4.8 quake in Farmington, about five miles (8 km) southeast of Stockton. The uncertainty was caused by the remote location, which had fewer seismic instruments,
Austin Elliott, a USGS geologist, explained to ABC news: “The system underestimated the original magnitude of that event and estimated a location that was slightly off from the true location,” he said. As the seismic waves moved across the state, other stations misinterpreted them as a separate quake because ”they arrived at an unexpected time," Elliott said.
> Aftershocks Less than a minute later, a strong aftershock of magnitude 5.2 occurred in the area and nearly 100 smaller aftershocks occurred during the 8 hours since the quake, reaching magnitudes of up to 4.6. These will continue in the near future, but decrease with time. . .
Associated Press
6.0-magnitude quake rattles Northern California; no reports of damage
Quake centered near Nevada border felt as far away as San Francisco
A 5.9-magnitude earthquake struck south of Lake Tahoe, Calif., on Thursday afternoon.
Screenshot from USGS
SAN FRANCISCO — An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6.0 rattled the California-Nevada border Thursday afternoon, with people reporting feeling the shaking hundreds of miles away, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
. . .The earthquake struck at 3:49 p.m. in a region about 250 miles east of San Francisco and south of Lake Tahoe. Its epicenter was 4 miles west-southwest of Walker, a California town of fewer than 900 residents. It was followed by dozens of aftershocks, with at least a half-dozen of magnitude 4.0 or greater, the USGS said.
At one point, rockslides closed about 40 miles of the interstate, a major route through the northern Sierra Nevada, authorities said. Portions of the interstate were later reopened, but crews remained at the scene in case of aftershocks, according to the California Department of Transportation.
I hope readers of this blog are ready for a regular antidote
Karen Greenberg, The Age of Unaccountability
July 8, 2021
Only recently, more than 18 years after President George W. Bush launched the invasion of Iraq and quickly declared victory ("Mission accomplished!"), Joe Biden once again ordered U.S. air strikes, three of them, against Iranian-backed Iraqi militias in that country's borderlands with Syria. In the process, he reportedly killed several militiamen, but also possibly a child. And within 24 hours, at least one of those militias had responded by launching rocket attacks on a U.S. base in... no kidding... Syria! And so it goes, and has gone, in American war-making in the twenty-first century.
Of course, no one in official Washington refers to such acts as "war" any longer as that might bring Congress, the part of our government with the constitutional power to declare such a state, into play. In fact, as Karen Greenberg wrote recently at the American Prospect, "The refusal to distinguish war from hostilities overall has been a landmark piece of the war on terrorism architecture. It’s worth noting that the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force to counter those responsible for 9/11 does not use the word 'war' itself."
And keep in mind that, whatever U.S. troops may be doing in Syria, there are also 2,500 U.S. troops still in Iraq so many years later, though why (since the Iraqi parliament has demanded their departure) remains open to question. What generally doesn't remain open to question, at least in this country, is the power of an American president to order such strikes or similar drone assassination attacks launched -- as Donald Trump did against a key Iranian general at Baghdad International Airport in 2020 -- at any moment of his choosing. Biden and crew cited no particular authority for striking Syrian and Iraqi targets again, other than the right to self-defense under international law (in Iraq and Syria, no less!). They certainly didn't cite any congressional authorization. And the Iraqi government didn't authorize such attacks, instead protesting them vehemently.
But these days, in this country's somewhat dwindling but never-ending war on terror, one thing that never truly seems to be at stake is what Greenberg, a TomDispatch regular and author of the upcoming book Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump, sadly highlights today: accountability. Instead, it appears that an accountability crisis of the first order is coming home big time. That was obviously true in the Trump years when the president was quite literally accountable for nothing he did, no matter how damaging. Now, sadly enough, it seems to be spilling over into the Biden years as well. But let Greenberg tell you this sorry tale of a system that seems to become less accountable by the moment. Tom
America's Accountability Problem
Is Anyone Responsible Anymore?
By Karen Greenberg
America has an accountability problem. In fact, if the Covid-19 disaster, the January 6th Capitol attack, and the Trump years are any indication, the American lexicon has essentially dispensed with the term "accountability."
This should come as no surprise. After all, there's nothing particularly new about this. In the Bush years, those who created a system of indefinite offshore detention at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, those who implemented a CIA global torture program and the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance policy, not to mention those who purposely took us to war based on lies about nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, were neither dismissed, sanctioned, nor punished in any way for obvious violations of the law. Nor has Congress passed significant legislation of any kind to ensure that all-encompassing abuses like these will not happen again.
