Short lived...

Michael Avenatti, a presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, is in hot water after being hit with an avalanche of legal, political, financial, and personal troubles, raising questions whether this is the beginning of the end for the firebrand lawyer who gained celebrity status [CNN- MSNBC] thanks to his opposition to President Trump.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley announced on Thursday that Avenatti and his client Julie Swetnick, who claimed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh engaged in sexual misconduct, were referred for criminal investigation for an alleged “conspiracy” to provide false statements to Congress.

He was arrested in New York City on charges of trying to extort up to $25 million from Nike by threatening to publicize claims that company employees authorized payments to the families of top high school basketball players.

Avenatti also was separately charged in a second federal case in Los Angeles with embezzling a client's money "in order to pay his own expenses and debts" and those of his law firm and coffee company, and of "defrauding a bank in Mississippi," prosecutors said.

The famously aggressive litigator gained widespread notoriety in the past year for representing porn star Stormy Daniels in lawsuits against President Donald Trump. That was short lived.

Despair...

The Democrats should've seen the Avenatti flameout coming a mile away.

A guy who tried to cheat his law partner, in  millions in fees, evicted from his own offices, and was willing to cast his lot with a sad cause like Stormy Daniels'.

A guy who stooped even lower to peddle Julie Swetnick's false and frankly defamatory claims against Kavanaugh.

Avenatti was an arrest waiting to happen. Last month Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley made a criminal referral to both Avenatti and Julie Swetnick for making false statements to Congress.

For months, a Clinton alum has been shuttling the lawyer Avenatti from Democratic Party event to Democratic Party event all over the country in order to familiarize with the whole process of running for the presidency.

The Democrats had high hopes for anyone who appears on CNN.  They didn't know their gamble would have taken them to the bottomless chasm of despair. 

Missing...

Bill de Blasio's wife Chirlane McCray cannot explain where $850million given to the mental health program she champions has gone, according to reports. 

In the three years it has been running, organizers at ThriveNYC have largely failed to keep records of the initiative's achievements - and data that has been collected shows it lagging well behind targets. 

Despite that, the program has been granted an even bigger budget going forward and is now on track to spend $1billion over five years. 

One, from City Hall, showed $594million in spending, but a second, from the Independent Budget Office, showed $816milion.

Speaking to the Post, Queens Councilman Robert Holden told the New York Post: 'I like the fact that money is going toward mental health, but when they say we're seeing a benefit in all areas, I take exception to that, because I don't see it everywhere. I'm not sure anybody does.'

As the mayor said " The money is in the wrong hands." 

Cost...

As he nears his 80th birthday, Tom Brokaw is still managing his cancer pain — while experimenting with new treatment methods.       The NBC News senior correspondent, 79, was diagnosed with incurable multiple myeloma, a rare type of cancer that causes bone pain. After his diagnosis in August 2013, he started treatment at the Mayo Clinic and announced in December 2014 that he was in remission.

An extraordinary amount of progress has been made with drugs and treatment. We haven’t gotten the cost thing worked out yet,” he said. At one point, I counted up the price and it was something like $10,000 a day, you know, that I was spending on drugs. I have the blessing of having a great program through first RCA, then GE, and now Comcast. So the checks that I write for pharmacy are very, very small. And it makes — every time I do that, it makes me aware of the people who are not in the same position that I am, and how I think about them.”

Let us make cost reduction a key to solve the healthcare crisis.  Just a thought..

Rolls...

A Chinese student who was attacked with a stun gun and kidnapped in Canada has been found unharmed, police said. 

Lu and a female friend were exiting his car in an underground parking lot in the Ontario city of Markham when four masked men grabbed him, police said. One was carrying a taser, and used it on Lu as he attempted to resist. Lu's friend was unharmed.

Surveillance footage showed men wearing bulky black jackets with their faces covered grabbing Lu and bundling him into a black minivan with stolen plates. It was later found abandoned in nearby Toronto.

CNN affiliate reported that in 2017, at least three Chinese international students were targeted by scammers who attempted to extort money from their families back in China.

CTV News, a CNN affiliate, said Lu drove expensive luxury cars, including a Lamborghini and a Rolls Royce.

Any Day Now...

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into an alleged conspiracy between candidate Donald Trump and Russia has ende, after spending almost two years and nearly $40 million.  Mueller has determined that no one in “the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”.

One of the tactics Russia used was to hack into computer operations and obtain emails from members of the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign.  It appears that they stolen from either organization a database of DNC opposition research on then-candidate Trump. Also the way Bernie Sanders was treated by the NDC and finally the cheating of the debate questionnaire that is to Hillary's team. 

The looser in this story ending is the Media who filled the air with planned non sense knowing that they are after the ratings regardless.

Clank...

It wasn't important for anybody that Muller's report would come as it did. The Democrats never thought it would come any other way.  

But as long as the liberal Media is loosing ground with this president than the previous,  we will stay in this non sense politics for a long time. In any other job, these folks would have been fired long time ago. But this is the business of news, possible news, fake news, analysis, leaks... 

WAAA...

The Media's devastation. 

While Muller didn't speak during the 19 months investigation, CNN and others filled their airways with made up stories of what Mr. Muller is looking for, who is he looking at, what would he be doing next till "he is knocking on the White House Door". 

Nothing happened except they filled the air with Non Sense as they always do. The issue here is we have to follow the money when it comes to the Media, just follow the money.

Russ...

Post Reality...

Post-truth politics (also called post-reality politics)^[2] is a political culture in which debate is framed largely by appeals to emotion disconnected from the details of policy, and by the repeated assertion of talking points to which factual rebuttals are ignored. 

Post-truth differs from traditional contesting and falsifying of facts by relegating facts and expert opinions to be of secondary importance relative to appeal to emotion. While this has been described as a contemporary problem, some observers have described it as a long-standing part of political life that was less notable before the advent of the Internet and related social changes.

As of 2018, political commentators have identified post-truth politics as ascendant in many nations, notably the United States, India, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Brazil, among others. As with other areas of debate, this is being driven by a combination of the 24-hour news cycle, false balance in news reporting, and the increasing ubiquity of social media.

In 2016, post-truth was chosen as the Oxford Dictionaries' Word of the Year^[9] due to its prevalence in the context of that year's Brexit referendum and media coverage of the U.S. presidential election.