Well now we have leverage with the Republican party to rebuild it in the likeness of Truck Nutz. The Paultards, meanwhile, have nothing. [Rebuild The Party]
In July of 2016, DNC Voter Expansion Data Director Seth Rich was murdered in what police believe was a robbery gone wrong. Since then, Fox News, Newt Gingrich, Roger Stone, and varied and sundry internet morons have insisted that he was actually murdered on orders from Hillary Clinton or someone working on her behalf because he was the one who sent all of the DNC emails to Wikileaks. This theory was helped along in no small part by Wikileaks' Julian Assange, who offered a reward for finding Rich's killer(s) and repeatedly strongly hinted that Rich -- and not anyone from Russia, as cybersecurity experts determined back in 2016 -- was indeed his source. It's been a weird (and cruel, and sadistic) ride, especially for Rich's parents who would really, really like it if people would stop pushing this bullshit.
And if we lived in saner times, said bullshit would have ended yesterday when the Mueller Report confirmed that Rich could not possibly have been the source for the email leaks on account of him having been dead for four days before Assange received the DNC leaks. Not to mention the fact that Assange continued communication with his source for quite some time after Rich was dead. Given that this communication was done through a computer, rather than through a Ouija board, it is fair to assume that Rich was not leaking information from beyond the grave.
Well, goddamn it, a wonderful person we'd never heard of until last night is dead. Lyra McKee was 29, an investigative journalist who specialized in looking at the legacy of "the Troubles" in Northern Ireland. She was murdered by someone shooting at police during rioting in Derry, or perhaps Londonderry, depending on who you want to piss off by using either name for the city. The rioting broke out after police "started carrying out searches in the area because of concerns that militant republicans were storing firearms and explosives" in advance of attacks planned to mark the anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising. Police are blaming the violence and McKee's death on the "New Irish Republican Army," a radical republican group formed a few years ago from several smaller groups. Despite the name, the group has no ties to the old Provisional Irish Republican Army, which renounced violence and disarmed in 2005 following the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which was supposed to have brought peace to Northern Ireland, and kind of did, at least much of the time.
McKee is being remembered by colleagues and readers as a promising journalist who was expected to go far. A year ago, McKee signed a two-book deal with Faber & Faber; the first of the books, The Lost Boys, an investigation of eight young men who disappeared in Belfast during the Troubles in the '60s and '70s, will be published next year. A 2016 Forbes profile said "McKee's passion is to dig into topics that others don't care about." For instance, CNN reports, McKee spent five years investigating a story about the only rape crisis center in Northern Ireland and its long struggle to regain funding after the government eliminated it.
