Missouri Gov Eric Greitens Is Fifty Shades Of Fucked
Consent, how does it work?
A peeping tom
Was Missouri Governor Eric Greitens inspired by those Fifty Shades of Diet S&M books? Is that where he got the idea to bind his naked ladyfriend to the pull-up machine with tape, blindfold her, and snap a picture? We have no idea, since we are elitist snobs who read only the finest Twitter literature all day. But if there is a scene where that billionaire dude takes a naked photo of his future wife and threatens to publicize it if she ever mentions his name, well, then we are feeling pretty good about our decision not to read those books. FIGHT US!
But back to Greitens, who was arrested yesterday and charged with felony invasion of privacy.
Greitens appears not to have been photographed while handcuffed. Guess he didn't consent to that. He made a serious face for that mugshot up there, before being released on his own recognizance. But now he's out and ready to tell the world about those mean Democrats and what they did to Eric Greitens, THE REAL VICTIM HERE.
One minute you're taking a naked blackmail photo of some lady who came over to bump uglies with you while your wife and kids were out, and the next minute some reckless liberal is trying to turn that into a crime! UNFAIR!
Greitens's lawyer released a statement promising to fight the charges.
And yesterday Dowd filed a Motion to Dismiss on the grounds that ERIC GREITENS IS NOT A PEEPING TOM. Seriously.
The law prohibits photographs or videotaping by third-parties who take photographs or videotapes in locations where a person is in a partial or full state of nudity and where the victim does not believe he or she is being viewed by another. The law, then, applies to situations such as voyeurs or peeping toms who take photographs in locations such as restrooms, tanning beds, locker rooms, changing rooms, and bedrooms. The law does not apply to the participants in sexual activity.
Now, if we are being honest, we kind of see his point. The statute explicitly refers to places where victims have a "reasonable expectation of privacy," which is probably not the case when they are extramaritally sexxxing some politician in his finished basement. Seems to us that she had reasonable expectation of not being photographed -- under Greitens's interpretation of the statute, it would be legal to take photos in the shower at the gym. But shame on the Missouri Legislature for being crappy drafters! Because Greitens's argument that the lady in question knew she was getting nekkid in front of him may well persuade a jury that he didn't violate the letter of the law.
The public is another matter. "She Knew She Was Naked, Even If She Didn't Know I Was Photographing Her" is a lousy campaign slogan. Also too, Greitens isn't denying that he violated the second part of the statute,
... and the person subsequently distributes the photograph or film to another or transmits the image contained in the photographor film in a manner that allows access to that image via a computer.
He isn't arguing that he didn't take the photo. And he isn't arguing that she consented to it, either. He's arguing that he didn't need her consent to take a naked picture because they were already having sex. WHICH IS FUCKING GROSS. And also a pretty clear sign that Greitens is more worried about staying out of jail than about staying in the Governor's mansion.
Have we mentioned that Missouri Republicans are very special? Greitens insists that he'll be fighting these scurrilous charges and has no intention of resigning, and members of the state GOP are still thinking about whether photographing a naked woman without her consent is bad or like really bad. Because they are good Christians representing the Party of Family Values. Amen.
[Motion to Dismiss / St Louis Post-Dispatch]
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Stormy Daniels Denies Denying Denial Of ... Oh Screw It, Just Read This
The stuff about Trump being deathly afraid of sharks has to be real. Give to the shark charity of your choice today!
Oh, she's a cagey one!
Stormy Daniels, the pornographic entertainment star who may or may not have gotten a great big pile of hush money after a 2006 affair with Donald Trump, appeared on the Jimmy Kimmel television program Tuesday night to dodge questions about the state of her union with Trump ("unremarkable"). Daniels appeared on the program shortly after her publicist released a statement re-denying that she'd ever had any relationship with Trump. That statement, attributed to Daniels, had her saying,
I am not denying this affair because I was paid 'hush money' as has been reported in overseas owned tabloids. I am denying this affair because it never happened.
While Daniels coyly avoided nearly every question about Trump, she was quite happy to indulge Kimmel's little game of CSI: Late Nite Host, where he pointed out that the signature on yesterday's statement didn't look at all like the signature on an earlier statement from her, or like her autograph on several photos. Kimmel pressed her on whether she'd signed the statement, but she equivocated: "I don't know, did I? That doesn’t look like my signature, does it?" She wouldn't quite commit to an answer when Kimmel asked if the statement was released without her approval (unless "Hmm" is an answer), but when Kimmel asked if she knew where the statement came from, she did say "I do not know where it came from."
Daniels also wouldn't directly comment on whether she'd signed any nondisclosure agreement in exchange for her silence just before the 2016 election, but she sure approved of Kimmel's logic game:
Kimmel: You can't say whether you have a nondisclosure agreement. But if you didn't have a nondisclosure agreement, you most certainly could say "I don't have a nondisclosure agreement." Yes?Daniels: "You're so smart, Jimmy."
Following the interview, an attorney for Daniels, Keith Davidson, insisted in an email to the Guardian that Daniels hadn't cast doubt on the denial, no way:
She was having fun on Kimmel and being her normal playful self [...]The signature is indeed hers as she signed the statement today in the presence of me and her manager, Gina Rodriguez.
So there.
The seeming denial of the denial (which was later denied) was the most direct answer in the interview, the rest of which involved Kimmel trying without success to get Daniels to confirm parts of that 2011 interview with In Touch magazine. Daniels agreed she'd at least given the interview, but hedged there too: "Not as it is written." She said she hadn't read a transcript of the interview released by the magazine, however, saying she was "too scared to look at it."Did Donald Trump actually say, while watching "Shark Week" in a hotel room, that he was terrified of sharks and hoped they'd all die? "Everybody loves Shark Week!" OK, fine, but that would be a weird thing for them to have made up. Is Donald Trump obsessed with and super scared of sharks? "Aren’t we all?" Very cagey. If Donald Trump didn't have a pathological hatred of the CIA (second only to his hatred of sharks), Stormy Daniels would make a good spy. She revealed no details about the presidential peen, thank Crom.
After Kimmel summarized most of the affair as described by the In Touch interview, the only detail Daniels commented on was Trump's supposedly asking her to autograph one of her DVDs: "I guess he does have good taste then." When Kimmel asked her if anything in the interview was true, she replied, "define 'true.'"
In a well-appointed house in Chappaqau, New York, a familiar male voice whistled and said, "Man, she's good!" After which another familiar voice, a woman's this time, said, "Shut up, Bill." In the distance, a dog barked.
Hackers Are Holding All The Voter Rolls In California Hostage
Empty your wallets or you'll never see your precious elections ever again.
On Friday, while the country was worked up in a frenzy over Republican tax fuckery, a cybersecurity firm announced that it had discovered a two databases containing a total of 19 million California voter records had been breached. Hackers had deleted the data, installing a note in its place that simply read, "your database is downloaded and backed up on our secure servers," with a ransom note for .2 bitcoin (at this moment, that's around $3,500).
One was a manually crafted set of voter registration data for a local district and the other appeared to contain the entire state of California with 19,264,123 records, all open for public access.
The stolen information contains just about everything an average 400lb. guy sitting in their parents basement would need to seriously screw with complete strangers. That's stuff like first, last, and middle names, birth dates, phone numbers, mailing addresses, party affiliation, and voting precincts. There were 18.2 million registered voters in California for the 2016 election, and some of the data stolen contained information from previous elections, so probably it's easier to just say that every registered voter in California is now fucked.
If you're freaking out about whether or not your personal information has been compromised, don't worry, Russia already hacked the election systems of 39 different states during the 2016 election. Earlier this year, some dingus contracted by the RNC to mine data on Republican voters exposed 200 million people in a breach that is as hilarious as it is terrifying; super nerds noted the sheer scale of stolen information could be used to "steal an election." Just to throw some salt on that open wound, the NSA's secret skunkworks lab was hacked and thieves ran off with seriously powerful Top Secret cyber weapons they've since been using to hold your banks, businesses, and grandmas hostage for bitcoin.
Over the summer, some white hat hackers showed just how easy it is to hack an electronic voting machine at DefCon, the biggest cyber security convention in the world. The hope was that by showing old farts that their blind faith in some fancy flavor-of-the-week tech firm can have very dire consequences without proper oversight and scrutiny.
The exhaustive pleading from the the good guy hacker community hasn't fallen on entirely deaf ears though. On Wednesday, Sen. Ron Wyden asked national security advisor HR McMaster to make securing our elections priority for the executive branch.
Congressional leadership conveniently chooses to believe that this is a states’ rights issue, even if it means leaving our national elections vulnerable to cyber attacks. As such, the executive branch must shoulder the burden of protecting federal elections from foreign cyberattacks.
Wyden plans to introduce legislation that would create a senior White House official for election cybersecurity, establish a working relationship between the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and DHS, make DHS designate political campaigns as critical infrastructure, and have the Secret Service include a cyber security detail in their mission to protect candidates. That's a serious step in the right direction, but remember most Congress creeps can't be bothered to program a VCR, let alone acknowledge Russian election fuckery, so his bill will likely end up in legislative purgatory.
Most stolen data eventually ends up on the Dark Net where it's sold anonymously in marketplaces to anyone with enough magical Internet money. Since some municipalities can't even afford to decent cybersecurity, it's toss up if legislators will make robust cybersecurity part of their election platforms in the coming years. In the interim period, as always, this is the part where some nerd breathlessly tells you to learn and practice basic cybersecurity.
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Kentucky Pastor Molester Lawmaker's Widow Vows To Finish Work Dead Husband Started
She seems terrible.
Dan Johnson, the Kentucky GOP state Rep. and pastor, was the subject of an extremely thorough, months-long investigation; he also committed suicide after it came out. We felt terrible about this, honestly; you never want someone to make himself dead right after you called him out as part of a human centipede. Having read the report in its entirety, we are feeling less terrible -- not because we ever take joy in someone taking his life, but because he seems to have been a mean, racist, grifty fraud, in addition to having allegedly molested his daughter's friend. Now his wife, Rebecca Johnson -- who told investigative reporters sniffing around her husband's church they "would have blood on their hands" if they investigated an elected state official -- wants to take over his state House seat for the 49th District. In a statement given to the AP the day after her husband posted a suicide note on Facebook and then shot himself on a bridge, "Rebecca Johnson referred to her husband's death as a 'high-tech lynching based on lies and half-truths.'"
First of all, I would like to respectfully request that white southerners stop using the word "lynching" -- especially when they believe they are the "victims." This was not mob violence perpetrated upon her husband outside of the law. It was two guys from Kentucky who were trying to figure out how a man in Bullitt County had used his "church" as both a place to hold political rallies and sell alcohol to drunken bikers (and minors) and managed to not only get away with that, but also get elected to the Kentucky General Assembly.
During the course of their investigation, these journalists learned that Dan Johnson, a man who posted terrible racist shit all over his Facebook feed during the 2016 election, had also paid a black woman who says she was sleeping with him back in 1985 to burn up his Cadillac for the insurance money.
These two journalists also learned that the first time Dan Johnson built a church in 2000 unironically called "Heart of Fire" it, too, mysteriously burned to the ground in a blaze that was ignited by some seriously flammable liquid that had been poured all over the hallway floor.
Although the investigation called the fire "suspect," a settlement was made and the church was rebuilt, with a side residence called "The Pope's House" -- because Dan Johnson called himself the Pope when he wasn't calling himself the Bishop. It was in this house in 2012 that Dan Johnson is accused of sexually assaulting Maranda Richmond when she was 17, like we talked about in our article right before he committed suicide. (That was admittedly a really weird feeling, to call a person out for filth and then have them die, but you should listen to the interview with Maranda Richmond that's included with the KyCIR story, and you may feel okay about what all we had to say. We do.)
The point is, this man, who also seems to have created a resume filled with a wildly invented personal history like "White House Chaplain to GHWB, W, and Bill," and something about working for the UN, and personally making the LA Riots safe, and he served at 9/11 as a pop-up morgue director who personally pulled all the bodies from the hands of first responders, has a wife named Rebecca and she wants to carry on this legacy.
Kentucky law decrees that vacancies in the Assembly due to the death of a representative are filled by special election. I imagine if this lady runs, it will be quite special indeed. After all the impossible to believe carrying-on in Alabama in the last few months, it's truly hard to even speculate what will happen next -- but I have a feeling we are gonna hear more on this story, and about Dan Johnson, no matter what.
Also, Mrs. Johnson, we are sorry for your loss.