Dr. Flowers @AlliFlowers@talkedabout.social

GOP Senator Eric Schmitt thought he had former special counsel Jack Smith against the ropes when he suggested that Smith attended a basketball game in Atlanta in 2024 — and may have taken the chance to meet up with prosecutor Fani Willis, who was also working on a case against Trump. A puzzled Smith denied having been to the Atlanta Hawks game, at which point Schmitt flashed up a board with text messages that supposedly referenced it. Schmitt went on to accuse Smith of perjury and called him a "villain" and "dirtbag." Later, it emerged that Schmitt had confused the Atlanta Hawks and the Iowa Hawkeyes — the college team that Smith had indeed watched in 2024 in Maryland. Here's the full story from @TheHill.

https://flip.it/AILMBT

#USPolitics #GOP #JackSmith

BREAKING: Eleventh Circuit denies Trump and lawyers’ request to stay the sanctions order in Trump v. IRS pending Trump and lawyers’ appeal of the sanctions order.

Notably, the panel is unanimous and included a Trump appointee (Newsom).

Background: https://www.lawdork.com/p/trump-irs-sanctions-settlement-order

⚠️🇺🇦Russian terrorists bomb National Academy of Sciences building in central Kyiv (more) https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/russian-drone-strikes-national-academy-of-1790599070.html #Ukraine #Press #Kyiv #Odesa #Lviv #Kharkiv #Kherson #Berlin #Brussels #France #Germany #UK #US #PACE #CoE #Paris #London #Media #News #Headlines #russiaUkraineWar
#12yrInvasionOfUkraine

Donald Trump is losing the people who regularly sit in the front row at his rallies. https://trib.al/bKXHNCA

I did not have this find on my bingo card for the year...

...Deep in a cave in Tennessee, thousands of feet underground, as I rounded a bend of the river passage leading a group of biology students and recent graduates in a bioinventory of the cave....I stopped suddenly and definitely swore a little "WTF is that?! GAR!?"

Yes my friends, a friggin' Gar, about four feet long, just swimming in one of the pools.

Not a single person I know of has ever seen this in a cave before. Critters from the surface do get washed in at times, and this cave has connection to surface water. However, the creeks above it are not really Gar habitat, so even us biologists are at a bit of a loss.

Well, not the property manager, who promptly said "wow, he was only this big *mimes a few inches with his fingers* when I put him in there!" (sarcasm, in case you cannot tell!)

So...enjoy a big gar, with a human for scale.

Fun fact: it would follow the light from our headlamps around, like a little kitten following a feather toy, but it declined to follow out of the pool it is comfy in

Boost if this made you smile today!

(ETA: Please don't at me to yell at me about not "saving" it, or ignoring that fish have feelings, or anything along those lines. Floods wash things into caves. Critters explore where maybe they shouldn't. There's a song in the Lion King about it. Sometimes we can rescue things out of caves that belong on the surface, but often we cannot, and for millions of years these accidentals feed the ecosystem, and support many of the other creatures that call this cave home. If you struggle with this concept: Think of it as colonization gone array so the locals win in the end.)

#fish #gar #monster #cave #caves #caving #biology #nature #shock #river #ecosystem #Mesozoic #ancient #history

A decade ago, @CNN's Daniel Dale (then with the Toronto Star) started fact-checking Trump. He thought it would be a "quick little side project." Here are the 15 things he's learned, first of which is that Trump is the biggest liar of all. "I’ve heard people dismiss Trump’s mendacity with a shrugging 'they all lie,' but we are witnessing a rare, very possibly once-in-a-lifetime political liar."

https://flip.it/-.XjEm

#TrumpAdministration #DonaldTrump #FactChecks

I have a question. How do you scam money signing up for a health insurance plan that you pay for and then don't use? Can a reporter please ask this?

Video: https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3mwgtjx6fhr2e

In the same way Trump's insistence on making the Bunker-Ballroom a fire trap (with no ladies rooms) gives us an excuse to tear it down and rebuild it, Kash's refusal to protect the FBI from serious compromise gives us an excuse to just replace all the current people with the people he fired.

Embarrassing Breach at F.B.I. ...

As Trump’s fury at news organizations grows after he loses in court, the writer of a piece on Trump’s shrinking stature explains how the media can collectively resist his abuses of power. https://trib.al/FOEaea7