Over the 12 years of this blogs life there have been few constants but since the introduction of DaMagnificent Seven Bloggers seeing Juliette “Baldilocks” Ochieng every Saturday night became a regular feature of the site.
And when Fausta Wertz ended up leaving due to illness Juliette started posting twice a week picking up Tuesday nights. She has brought plenty of traffice to the site and her pieces have been worth every penny I’ve paid her over the years.
However if you have been reading the blog this year you might have noticed that you’ve seen less and less than her. First her twice a week posts became once a week, then it became every other week it became once a week, then they were gone.
The good news it that it’s not due to illness, Juliette is feeling fine, nor is it a matter of a drop in quality. I’ve been delighted with her work and her opinions and insights for years and she is just as sharp as she has been since day one.
Alas the culprit here is the State of California or to be specific the AB5 law.
Under this law if a contractor produces beyond a particular amount of contract work said contractor must be hired as a full time employee subject to all the laws of a normal full time workers rather than as a contributor to a magazine or site.
And while I love her work I simply can’t justify such an expense which would be beyond what we bring in, furthermore if I ignore this law being in Massachusetts I might face a suit from California that would be even more expensive.
So until AB5 is repealed or January rolls around I’m afraid you won’t be seeing new posts authored by Baldilocks. But even more importantly this means Juliette will not be able to earn the money I would have paid her for those posts and the bonus I would give her every time she brought an Instalance to the site.
So while I’m always delighted when anyone hits DaTipJar I’d like to ask an odd favor.
If you have the time, the cash and the inclination consider heading over to her own site here and hit her tip jar to help make up for the dollars that she will not make from the 75 posts that she will not write on the site this year.
I would share excerpts from all of the most popular posts of mine from this blog, but Peter’s old site bought the farm in August. Therefore, I will share the most popular posts from that point in time to today.
However, I do have access to the posts from the dead site, so I’m going to re-post at least one from each month — January to August — at baldilocks. I will post those in full and they won’t necessarily be the ones which received the most traffic.
[President Trump] knows that the Democrats have been after him since he announced his candidacy; they pre-conjured a reason for his impeachment, for Heaven’s sake. Therefore, he is forcing an impeachment at the time of his choosing rather than theirs.
One of President Trump’s missions is to expose the various means which the political gangs have of enriching themselves on monies gotten from the pockets of the tax-payers. Ukraine seems to be both a means of thievery and a huge storage space for the loot.
In 2018, the Pentagon conducted an audit; it was the first time Department of Defense had ever done so since its 1947 creation, even though an annual audit for the Department has been legally required since 1990. The audit failed – an insufficient description.
The Pentagon cannot account for $21 trillion. TRILLION. Times 21.
What I love about Doris Miller’s existence is that the man was here for only a short time and was merely playing the cards that life dealt him when he performed the action that will long outlive him. When the challenge came, he stepped to it and met it — something intrinsic in heroes and heroism.
I wish I were surprised at how many people think that when the House votes on formal impeachment articles that the president must be removed from office right then and there, but I’m not. Even some of those who were around when it happened to President Clinton will not bother themselves to understand the process.
On January 1, 2020, it will severely limit all of my gigs. In short, California AB5 limits me to 35 pieces of freelance work per year for an individual recipient.
Speaker Pelosi is correct in observing that President Trump will have the distinction that only two other presidents have. But I bet he will also have the distinction of showing the entire world how crooked those who claim to lead us and represent us have been for decades. If he does that, he’ll be by himself in history.
…It’s likely because I was willing to write about Jeffrey Epstein while stuff like this was going on.
Amy Robach, ‘Good Morning America’ Co-Host and Breaking News Anchor at ABC, explains how a witness came forward years ago with information pertaining to Epstein, but Disney-owned ABC News refused to air the material for years. Robach vents her anger in a “hot mic” moment with an off-camera producer, explaining that ABC quashed the story in it’s early stages. “I’ve had this interview with Virginia Roberts (Now Virginia Guiffre) [alleged Epstein victim]. We would not put it on the air. Um, first of all, I was told “Who’s Jeffrey Epstein. No one knows who that is. This is a stupid story.” She continues, “The Palace found out that we had her whole allegations about Prince Andrew and threatened us a million different ways.” Robach goes on to express she believes that Epstein was killed in prison saying, “So do I think he was killed? 100% Yes, I do…He made his whole living blackmailing people… Yup, there were a lot of men in those planes. A lot of men who visited that Island, a lot of powerful men who came into that apartment.” Robach repeats a prophetic statement purportedly made by Attorney Brad Edwards “…[T]here will come a day when we will realize Jeffrey Epstein was the most prolific pedophile this country has ever known,” and Disgustedly Robach states “I had it all three years ago.”
That’s via James O’Keefe and Project Veritas who had hot mic info that was so explosive that he actually activated a “dead man’s switch” to make sure that this came out in the event of his death.
It was so big that for once the MSM didn’t ignore what he was saying. ABC responded thus:
ABC News executives say their journalists were simply not able to corroborate the details of the reporting sufficiently for broadcast. “We would never run away from that,” Chris Vlasto, head of investigations for ABC News, tells NPR. The network has filed approximately two dozen digital and broadcast stories on Epstein since early 2015, when ABC started talking to the accuser, Virginia Roberts Giuffre
For the sake of the few who might actually buy that argument let me remind you of something I wrote in 2014.
If there is one thing the media that loves to play the War on Women® card doesn’t want to touch it’s a story about people using their own private island to get laid that involves Bill Clinton. What could the media do if this story involving the former father of the year? They would call it old news, not relevant, dirty tricks from a salacious lawsuit that doesn’t even involve him and an attack on Hillary that crosses the line. In fact the left will deploy a plethora of adjectives to discourage further discussion of this story from antiquated to zany, but there is one adjective that could not come out of their mouth to dismiss this story: Unbelievable The last few years have proven that the left can convince a low information voter of a lot of things, but even the full power of the mainstream media and the strongest zealots from the War on Women® brigade would not be able to convince the American public that Bill Clinton would have no interest or business on a private island where orgies took place. That’s why you didn’t see this story in the news last month and why as the case moves forward you’ll not see it covered period.
as I was watching Jake Tapper on Monday discussing this and the security implication of blackmail for the husband of a top aide of Hillary Clinton my head started spinning. We are seriously talking about the security implication of Anthony Weiner due to his sexual peccadilloes when we are talking about letting Bill freaking Clinton back into the White House? I know the MSM is still trying to pretend that this is no big deal but I have two words to say to such people: Jeffrey Epstein
Along with some video from MSNBC at the time with this key exchange
Maybe it’s just me but given how often we see stuff at mediaite et al it seems rather unusual for a news network to make a copyright claim over a clip from a news story that used as “fair use” by another news organization. Could this suggest that NBC wants to keep this clip out of the public view because it might hurt Hillary?
I can see the NBC reaction now: Nonsense, we’re not censoring the clip at all. The seven minute clip IS available IF you
Go to the Morning Joe site
Hit search taking you to the MSNBC search engine
Search for Donald Trump
Narrow the field to Morning Joe
Narrow the field to May 16th 2016 and sit through all the videos till you find the right one.
And skip ahead to the 12 minute mark on that video.
If you do so you CAN find the clip
Incidentally the clip does not work from the MSNBC site anymore as but the Free Beason has since found another Youtube account with it that is no longer suppressed as the election is long over and the Epstein Story is now public knowledge.
Apparently they aren’t so worried about their copyright after all.
So when ABC tells you they didn’t have the story, look at the faces around that Morning Joe table who all knew what was being said and then try to make that case.
I suspect writing about this type of thing when everyone wanted it suppressed might have something to do with me not making it bigger in the business but then again if I was bigger and writing about it perhaps it might have lead to a sudden heart attack.
A few days ago I lead with a post about some apparent insanity in a school district in NH that I had seen at a site I frequent. Turns out the info in question was incorrect & I missed an email warning me of same so the post in question went up as scheduled.
When I saw the email I added an update as follows:
Update: Got a heads up that suggests there might be less to this than meets the eye, While that might be embarrassing for me it would be delightful as it would indicate that insanity does not reign at the school in question and that’s more important that a post getting hits. I don’t believe in pulling posts as it changes the record so for now I’m going to put the base post under a “more” tag until I get more data. For now we’ll wait and see and if a correction is warranted I’ll update the post with it.
Long story short the info was incorrect the author apologized to the people in question. I provided a 2nd update joining in said apology and rejoicing that the school in question was not in fact insane. As it’s likely who saw the 1st post but might never check it again a fresh post linking to the mea culpa was the proper and honorable thing to do which was the primary reason for this post.
Then it hit me. The reason why I wrote the base post was I don’t want public schools to be acting insane and the purpose of said post was to hold up a light to such behavior to stop this school & others from acting that way.
Thus when it turned out this school wasn’t doing so I was very happy regardless of any embarrassment from an erroneous post because my primary goal is schools not acting insane.
This is not the case with the Democrat/left media. Think about it for a second
The media/left went all in on the idea of a Supreme Court Nominee being a sexual predator, then the evidence showed the accusations were not credible
The media/left went all in on the idea that the President of the United State was colluding with Russia to steal an election, and even with an independent council, a staff full of partisans, the assistant AG working against the president it turned out their suspicions were unfounded.
The media/left went all in as various colleges being bastions of “rape culture with claims that as many as 25% of the women attending were assaulted but it turned out that the methodology of the studies and the definitions of assault were so stretched as to be meaningless.
The media/left went all in on various race hoaxes being furious that various individuals, some involving celebs, particularly at colleges were a bunch of racists and white supremacists, yet over and over these turned out to be hoaxes.
Now supposedly the left and media and the guests they brought in did this because they didn’t want a serial sexual predator on the supreme courts or a President conspiring with Russia, colleges being bastions of rape, gay black TV starts threatened with nooses or racist acts being committed all over the nation. That being the case all of these things turning out to be false should be cause for celebration for the left who can breathe a sigh of relief that none of these things that they considered beyond the pale had happened.
Yet instead their reaction has been at best been too ignore when such hoaxes are exposed as such or at worst to continue to insist they are true despite evidence to the contrary.
Now if you work under the assumption that the goal of the media/left is to prevent such behavior then you might be utterly confused at this reaction as it makes no logical sense.
However if you work from the assumption that the primary goal of the left/media is POWER and or WEALTH and that in search of said power & wealth the events and actions that they supposedly deplore are used to generate both the funds to gain them and the means to retain them, well it makes perfect sense.
To them the the only “crisis” in government is when they don’t control it and the only “abuse” of power is if it not in their hands. Work under that assumption and all the left/media does and you will never be shocked or surprised by anything they do ever again.
