Heavens! What a Week!

The week in review ... and what a week it's been!

This week has been chock-a-block, hasn't it?

Between the 5-day search for a teeny tiny submersible near the wreck of the Titanic to a couple IRS whistleblowers punching a hole in the SS I'm Proud of My Son, this week has been a busy one.

Will Hurd must be pouring a big old glass of whisky and muttering, "I picked the wrong week to launch my clownish presidential campaign."

Heck, even Donald Trump wasn't able to suck all of the oxygen out of the news cycle like he usually does.

The Titanic Tour

This week's saga of the OceanGate Titan is an example of why "Titanic" became synonymous with "humongous disaster."

Five men set off on Sunday to take a lookie-loo around the wreck of the Titanic aboard a wee submersible, and less than two hours after its launch, the support ship lost communications with the vessel.

The rest of the week was spent with the Coast Guard searching the area while the media covered the lost sub the way CNN covered the Malaysian Airlines flight that disappeared in 2014.

Twitter went insane this week over the OceanGate Titan. Then again, it's Twitter, so perhaps I should say "went insaner."

Day after day, the media would keep us abreast on how much of the 96 hours of oxygen remained for the five men aboard, tracking each hour gone with the same intensity they showed in tracking COVID deaths.

Then on Thursday, we learned that the amount of oxygen was irrelevant since all five men had been dead since Sunday.

The Coast Guard announced on Thursday that it had found debris from the Titan about 1,600 feet from the Titanic. The tiny vessel suffered a "catastrophic implosion," according to Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger.

The Associated Press reported that after the Titan went missing on Sunday, the US Navy went back and analyzed acoustic data and found an anomaly that was "consistent with an implosion or explosion" around the area where the Titan was believed to have been operating at about the time the support ship lost contact with the sub.

According to a senior Navy official who spoke to the AP, the data was passed on to the Coast Guard which decided to continue the search since the Navy could not definitively say that the anomaly had anything to do with the Titan.

And because Twitter is insane, this realization that the Navy told the Coast Guard of the implosion was instantly framed by the usual suspects as "President Biden hid from the country for nearly a week that the Titan was destroyed."

But when someone's entire raison d'être is to peddle conspiracy theories for social media engagement, this sort of framing shouldn't come as a surprise.

Lost in the ridiculous pantomime is the fact that five men died in a tragic accident.

Kari Lake's No Good Very Bad Week

Speaking of tragic accidents.

Earlier in the week, we learned that failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake has been "practically living" at Mar-a-Lago. And the week wrapped up with the news that the guy who has been repeatedly defamed by Lake has finally had enough.

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican, filed legal papers on Thursday suing Lake, her campaign, and her PAC for defamation.

About damn time.

Filed with the Maricopa County Superior Court, the lawsuit centers on two false claims Lake repeatedly made about Richer in regard to the 2022 Midterm elections – claims Lake continued to repeat long after a judge determined that her allegations were without merit, according to Tucson.com.

Lake has repeatedly accused Richer of deliberately printing ballots of the wrong size and even that he inserted over 300,000 phony early ballots into the tabulators, claims which a Maricopa County Superior Court Judge concluded were based on "conjecture" and "speculation."

And even after the judge ruled against her, Lake continued blathering on, accusing Richer.

The lawsuit includes all of the times Lake repeated the lies on social media and in podcast appearances after the judge's decision, with some of the examples from as recently as last month.

The lawsuit also alleges that Lake used her attacks against Richer as a way to raise money off of the rubes.

Well, the lawsuit doesn't call them rubes. That's me.

Naturally, Kari wasted no time playing the victim, rushing to Twitter to claim that the "jackass" Richer is targeting her because he "wants to silence us."

No, honey. He just wants you to stop defaming him and siccing your lunatic fans on him and his family.

And because the little grifter was born without the gene that allows someone to detect danger, Kari Lake finds a way in her tweet to once again suggest that Richer is one of those "who orchestrated the wide-spread fraud."

Like every annoying Liberal White Woman who never shuts the hell up, Lake also vowed that she would never be silenced.

I'll say what I always say when one of these harridans vows not to be silenced.

Keep talking, honey. I hope you never shut up.

Russian Revolution 2?

On Friday, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the ugly bald guy who runs Russia's mercenary fighters the Wagner Group, took his 25,000 men and marched out of Ukraine back into Russia to punish the Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.

Prigozhin has accused Shoigu and the Chief of the General Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov of deliberately attacking his mercenaries in Ukraine with helicopter gunships, rockets, and artillery.

On Saturday, Prigozhin claimed that he and his forces had reached the city of Rostov and commandeered the Russian Army headquarters, taking control of the facilities and the airfield, according to the Associated Press.

Needless to say, Vladimir Putin is not pleased.

In an address on Saturday, Putin described the uprising as a "stab in the back," "treason," and "betrayal," and vowed that those who "prepared the rebellion will suffer inevitable punishment."

Since the news hit on Friday, all of the people on Twitter who became experts in tiny submersibles are now experts in Russian internal politics.

I myself am not an expert. So I won't presume to suggest that I have some insight into how this "march on Moscow" is going to go.

On the surface, any open conflict between hardline crazies like Prigozhin and hardline Putin people certainly will lend to the belief that Russian support for Putin may be on the verge of collapsing. But given how everyone else, including the bloodthirsty leader of the Chechen fighters in Ukraine, is lining up to support Putin, I wouldn't hold my breath.

The fact is, Prigozhin wants to defeat Ukraine just as much as Putin does. So if this does amount to some kind of coup, Ukraine might find itself flopping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

In the short-term, however, Prigozhin taking his fighters out of Ukraine might be helpful since the Wagner Group has been doing a lot of the bloodiest and most brutal fighting, particularly around Bakhmut.

Again, these are the musings of someone who is not well-versed in Russian politics, and I could just be talking out of my ass.

I think the best thing is to just wait for the situation to unfold.

Slow-Walking for Hunter

At the start of the week, we learned that Joe Biden's crack-smoking son Hunter had reached a deal with federal prosecutors that will keep him out of prison.

The years-long probe into Hunter's financial dealings has resulted (so far) in him pleading guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges for paying his 2017 and 2018 taxes late while agreeing to acknowledge the facts in the federal gun charge in exchange for something called "Pretrial Diversion."

Boy, was the media thrilled!

Finally! Hunter Biden won't be hanging over his father like the Sword of Damocles! The president is in the clear!

But then the other shoe dropped.

Back in April, an attorney for an IRS criminal investigator-turned-whistleblower wrote a letter to Congressional leaders informing them that Hunter Biden was getting "preferential treatment" in the Justice Department's investigation into his financial dealings.

And on Thursday, the House Ways and Means Committee voted to publicly release the testimony from this whistleblower, along with a second IRS whistleblower, who outlined point-by-point all of the ways the investigation was being slow-walked and obstructed by the Justice Department.

Unsurprisingly, every Democrat on the committee voted against releasing the testimony. And once you read the transcripts and affidavits for yourself, you can understand why.

Hunter's dirty business dealings are still hanging like a Sword of Damocles over Joe Biden's head.

And as I always do, I would urge you to read the documents for yourself. The links to all five can be found HERE.

The most explosive revelation came from the testimony of IRS criminal investigator Gary Shapley.

In his testimony, Shapley read the complete transcript from a WhatsApp message Hunter Biden sent to Chinese businessman Henry Zhao on July 30, 2017.

Here's the text:

"I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight. And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father." [bold emphasis Dianny's]

Whelp, so much for Biden's repeated mantra, "I have never spoken to my son about his business."

This certainly explains why the Democrats on the committee didn't want this going public.

Shapley lays out all of the times the Justice Department, particularly Assistant US Attorney Leslie Wolf in Delaware, cock-blocked or undermined the investigation. They even gave Hunter's lawyer a heads-up when the IRS was preparing a search warrant on Hunter's storage facility.

I mean, come on!

Much of Shapley's testimony is corroborated in the testimony of the second IRS whistleblower, whose name is being withheld.

Shapley also noted that the FBI had confirmed the veracity of Hunter's abandoned laptop in 2019, nearly a year before a bunch of former intel officials wrote a letter claiming that the laptop had the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation operation.

So while the week started out great for Team Biden, it ended with poor, over-her-head Karine Jean-Pierre fending off questions about Joe Biden's involvement in Hunter's dirty foreign deals:

The statement to which Jean-Pierre was referring is from White House Counsel's Office spokesman Ian Sams.

Sams released a slithery statement asserting that Joe Biden was never in business with his son.

Yes, well, nobody on the planet has ever accused Joe Biden of being Hunter's business partner. It isn't as if we believe the two of them set up a firm called "Pay-for-Play Partners LLC" or "Bribery Are Us."

That's not the point.

The point is that throughout the 2020 presidential election and even afterward, Joe Biden repeatedly insisted that he never discussed any of Hunter's foreign business deals with his son.

Based on that WhatsApp message, Biden's assertion is obviously a lie.

If Hunter wasn't bullshitting in that July 2017 message, his father was sitting right there in the room with him waiting on a call from Henry Zhao. If and when the call came in, did old Joe plug his fingers in his ears and hum "Hail to the Chief" to keep from hearing the conversation? Not on the likely.

And who is Henry Zhao?

Well, he is a Chinese communist official whose investment firm is linked to the Chinese energy company CEFC.

According to New York Times reporter Kenneth Vogel, less than two weeks after Hunter sent that WhatsApp message, a subsidiary of CEFC sent two payments to bank accounts linked to the president's son that totaled over $5 million.

The Hunter Biden saga is far from over. It's only getting worse.

Earlier this month, we learned that a confidential human source in Ukraine had evidence that then-Vice President Joe Biden was involved in a bribery scheme with an executive from Burisma Holdings. Burisma wanted Biden to pressure the Ukrainian government into firing Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor investigating Burisma. In exchange, Burisma would pay Hunter and Joe $5 million each.

The prosecutor was fired.

Hell, in 2018, Biden even bragged about getting Shokin fired.

When you couple the bribery scheme with the whistleblower revelations, the White House's only hope is that the corporate media will continue to provide cover fire for the hapless Joe by ignoring the scandal.

But if this Hunter scandal keeps getting bigger, I'm thinking even Biden's most ardent defenders in the media will find it hard to ignore it.

Anyroad.

I think I hit some of the bigger stories from this week. Though, I've probably forgotten something.

Now I think I better go rest my Lupus-swollen joints. I hate humidity.

Happy weekend, everyone!

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