Stilts and steroids

 You don't know the name Christopher Sign unless you live in Birmingham, Alabama (my sympathies), but you will.  Sign was the reporter who first revealed that Bill Clinton visited with Attorney General Loretta Lynch while both were becalmed in the Phoenix airport in 2016.  He even wrote a book about the far-from-secret meeting called Secret On the Tarmac.  And now he is dead by suicide, or as it's certainly being reported elsewhere on the web, KILLARY MURDERZ AGAIN LOCK HER UP!!1!   It's Vince Foster all over again, now with more Seth Rich.  Especially since he worked for Sinclair Broadcast Group.

For purposes of comparison it's helpful to have living witnesses to previous criminal presidencies, like John Dean.  CNN sought him out when the story broke about the Sessions-Whitaker-Barr Justice Department spying on reporters and members of Congress (Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell that we know of).  According to Dean, Nixon wanted the Mitchell DOJ to bring a criminal action against the leakers of the Pentagon Papers and was told to pound sand.  Dean calls the Trump gang  "Nixon on stilts and steroids."  Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner prefers "unabated crime wave as president."  They would probably agree that it's disingenuous of Joe Biden to talk up democracy and the rule of law at the G7 while his own Justice Department lets Trump remain at large, and even continues to defend him in the Jean Carroll defamation suit.  

Perhaps we need the other side of the story.  Perhaps we'll get it when Trump completes the mother of all memoirs or something.  Yes, he's writing and writing (he says) when not wandering around his golf property looking for wedding parties to crash.  Why so literate literary?  Gossip queen Mags Haberman says "Pence's book deal is said to have been grating on him."  Simon & Schuster is supposedly paying Mike Pence $4 million for his account of what it feels like to flee a lynch mob in the Capitol, and probably other things.  Yeah, that would grate, especially when you depend on the kindness of gullible strangers to keep the lights on:

"Life is unfair."  (Jimmy Carter)

Get out your shocked face -- an investigation by Huffpost has identified twelve participants in the January 6 coup attempt who have a history of violence against women.   ("Nancy?  Where are you, Nancy?")  I wonder if that includes Karol Chwiesiuk of the Chicago Police Department, who wore a CPD sweatshirt and sent selfies with messages like "Knocked out a commie last night" and "We inside the capitol."  His police career has been terminated.

State Representative Mike Nearman admitted some armed protesters to the Oregon state house in December and now the legislature has shown him the door with a vote of 59-1.  No one has ever been expelled from the state legislature before but these are not normal times.  Why are the January 6 seditionists still in Congress?  It's a mystery.