Thursday evening news mishmash

Good evening, patriots! A little bit of a catch-up on the news on this fine autumn dusk.

Michael Bloomberg jumps in

News just broke that former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg is going to file paperwork to enter the Alabama Democratic presidential primary.

Now, I know what you're thinking: Thank God that the underrepresented billionaire class is getting into the race!

I mean, really, Tom Steyer just isn't enough to represent America's six hundred and seven billionaires. And after Starbucks founder Howard Schultz decided to leave the field, the country cried out for another old white man valued at north of $50 billion dollars to represent Real American Values™. Bloomberg discerned a restless nation turning its eyes, and, unlike Joe DiMaggio, he would not be absent from the lists.

All kidding aside, at least Bloomberg has actual experience in government, unlike the current occupant of the White House in 2015. He's had to balance budgets. He's had to cut political deals. He's had to press the flesh. This escapade will go nowhere, but it's far less ludicrous than Steyer or Donald Trump or Schultz or, once upon a time, H. Ross Perot. And maybe when he polls at 1% or 2%, he'll decide that he can do better by taking advantage of Citizens United and pour money into Democratic coffers. Hopefully his brother-from-another-mother Steyer will realize this as well.

Welcome aboard, Mike! And maybe take a look at this helpful site put out by Elizabeth Warren.

A Pence aide did what now?

Much like no one expects the Spanish Inquisition, no one expects an aide to Trump toady and supposed vice president Mike Pence to do the honorable thing. According to CNN:

An aide to Vice President Mike Pence who listened to the call between President Donald Trump and the Ukrainian President told impeachment inquiry investigators on Thursday that she found the conversation to be unusual because it was political in nature, according to two sources familiar with the testimony.

Jennifer Williams, an aide in the vice president's office and a long time State Department staffer, said the phone call did not have the normal tone of a diplomatic call. Williams did not raise concerns about the call with her superiors.

She was asked by lawmakers in her closed-door deposition what Pence knows and she testified that she never heard him mention anything about investigations of the 2016 election, Burisma -- the Ukrainian natural gas company on whose board Joe Biden's son Hunter sat -- or the Bidens. She did not know of any request from Trump to Pence to bring up investigations during a meeting the vice president had in Warsaw with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on September 1.

Now, Williams is a Pence aide. But, more importantly, she's also a long-time State Department staffer. She's one of those pernicious deep staters who seems to think that fealty to the Constitution supersedes loyalty to the current party in power. When the history of this time is written, the civil service, which was turned into a professional, non-partisan organization after the corruption of the Republican regimes post-Civil War, will rightly be regarded as guarantors of the Republic. While John Bolton plays cute games with his testimony, people who could lose careers and everything for which they have worked are stepping up to speak truth to corruption. To them we and our posterity owe an unrepayable debt.

Fascists are scum, example #1,521,745

I can't even be cute with this, but this story is indicative of what we're fighting to preserve: liberal democracy. From the BBC:

An 89-year-old Holocaust survivor in Italy has been assigned police guards for protection after receiving hundreds of threats on social media.

Liliana Segre, who was sent to the notorious Auschwitz death camp at 13, has been subjected to a barrage of anti-Semitic messages in recent days.

It comes after Ms Segre, an Italian life senator, called for parliament to establish a committee to combat hate.

The motion passed despite a lack of support by Italy's right-wing parties.

Members of the nationalist League party, led by Matteo Salvini, the centre-right Forza Italia and the far-right Brothers of Italy all abstained from the vote in Milan last week.

The motion called for the establishment of an extraordinary commission in Italy to combat all forms of racism, anti-Semitism, incitement to hatred and violence on ethnic and religious grounds.

Let me be clear: the lickspittles to a failed, horrific ideology are not fit to shine the shoes of Nonna Segre. She has done more in her life to advance justice and decency than they could ever conceive.

Do not think for a moment that we're not in a war. We are. It's a war for liberal, democratic, humane values, against people who, like the Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four, care only for power for power's sake. They have no principles, no policy; they merely want to be at the top and crush their enemies.

Nonna Segre has survived the worst that the Nazis could throw at her. Matteo Salvini is a pissant in comparison.

That's all she wrote, folks. See you on the flip.