JustOneMinute

Welcome To Portland

Welcome to Portland, and be sure to drive your Clown Car:

An ‘Army’ of Volunteer Sleuths Are Out Hunting for Your Stolen Car

In Portland, Ore., vehicle thefts have soared, and the police say they are focused on other crimes. Now victims are helping each other track down their own cars.

The police force was cut back as part of the 'defunding the police' brain wave. Now homicides are setting new records and tracking stolen cars is a reduced priority.

Fortunately, a Facebook group has sprung into the breach. Srsly.

Sunday Evening

I'm waiting for the Yankees to close this up... they are trailing 6-5 in the 8th.

Jan 6 Hearings - Mission Accomplished?

The WSJ editors tell us what they think the Jan 6 hearings accomplished:

The House Jan. 6 committee voted 9-0 on Thursday to subpoena former President Trump, but the clock is ticking. If Republicans take the House, they’ll shut down the inquiry posthaste in early January. If he wants to avoid the hot seat, Mr. Trump only needs to find a way to resist the subpoena until then.

...

Getting direct evidence of Mr. Trump’s action—and inaction—was always going to be a challenge. There is no evidence so far that Mr. Trump was communicating or coordinating with the Proud Boys or other nefarious elements in the runup to Jan. 6. On Thursday the committee played video of foolish talk by Roger Stone, another Trump flunkie who also took the Fifth. “I say f— the voting, let’s get right to the violence,” Mr. Stone said on Nov. 2, which was the day before the election.

What the committee has accomplished, however, is to cement the facts surrounding Mr. Trump’s recklessness after Nov. 3 and his dereliction of duty on Jan. 6. The Justice Department and Mr. Trump’s own campaign repeatedly told him that his fraud claims were without basis. Whether it was willful blindness or an intentional strategy, he kept repeating them.

...

Committee members said Thursday they will write a report summarizing their findings. Transcripts of the testimony ought to be released at the same time, so that posterity can see what Mr. Cipollone and others said in full. Ditto for the documents gathered. The committee’s credibility has suffered without GOP cross-examination of the witnesses. And the way that the committee selectively leaked Ginni Thomas’s text messages was outrageous, and appeared to be an effort to discredit her husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

The Jan. 6 committee probably won’t get Mr. Trump under oath, but the evidence of his bad behavior is now so convincing that political accountability hardly requires it.

 

It Begins!

We'll see how far the best hitter in baseball can carry the Yankees. If he gets the chance.

In other match-up news, here is the showdown we wanted - orcas versus great whites! Bet orcas.

Drone and helicopter footage captured off the coast of South Africa provides what scientists say is the first direct proof that orcas are capable of hunting and killing one of the world’s largest sea predators: the great white shark.\

A study published this week in the journal Ecology details a more than hour-long pursuit of a number of white sharks by a pod of killer whales off Mossel Bay, a harbor town in South Africa’s Western Cape province. At least two white sharks were killed over a 71-minute period in May, the researchers said.

“This behavior has never been witnessed in detail before, and certainly never from the air,” the study’s lead author, Alison Towner, a shark biologist at Marine Dynamics Academy in Gansbaai, South Africa, said in a statement.

The footage could help explain the disappearance of great white sharks off the coast of South Africa in recent years, a decline that scientists and government officials had long suspected was due to killer whales, rather than illegal hunting or overfishing.

 

Meanwhile, Back In Ukraine...

The Russian Army continues to under-perform. I would think that with autumn upon us and and winter approaching that Major Mud and General Snow will stall any further Ukranian offensives. OTOH, the Russians probably have a brutal logistics challenge in front of them - this war is taking longer than planned and their transportation lines keeping getting, well, re-organized as they fall back.