Denver is the first city in the U.S. to effectively legitimize psilocybin mushrooms. By a slim 2,000 vote margin, voters yesterday passed Ordinance 301:

A "yes" vote was a vote in favor of making the adult possession and use of psilocybin mushrooms the lowest law enforcement priority in Denver and prohibiting the city from spending resources on enforcing related penalties.

[More...]

I'm a loser
And I'm not what I appear to be

The New York Times has obtained information from Donald Trump's tax returns for 1985 to 1994 (not the returns themselves) and matched them up against an open database maintained by the IRS. The amounts he claimed as business losses are gargantuan by any standard.

The numbers show that in 1985, Mr. Trump reported losses of $46.1 million from his core businesses — largely casinos, hotels and retail space in apartment buildings. They continued to lose money every year, totaling $1.17 billion in losses for the decade.

In fact, year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer, The Times found when it compared his results with detailed information the I.R.S. compiles on an annual sampling of high-income earners. His core business losses in 1990 and 1991 — more than $250 million each year — were more than double those of the nearest taxpayers in the I.R.S. information for those years.

Over all, Mr. Trump lost so much money that he was able to avoid paying income taxes for eight of the 10 years.

[More....]

Donald Trump has pardoned Michael Behanna, a former Army Lt. in Iraq from Oklahoma, who in 2009 was convicted by a military court of killing Ali Mansur Mohamed, an Iraqi citizen he suspected of being an al Qaida terrorist. Behanna was sentenced to 25 years but released on parole in 2014.

The story of his case is here.

Behanna comes from an influential, politically connected family in Oklahoma: [More...]

I absolutely thought today was Mother's Day and put up an open thread called "Mother's Day Open Thread". Then I texted the TL kids to tell them I was on my way, and they responded, "Where are you going, Mothers Day is next week". So now I'm all tressed up (hair fixed up and dressed, not to be confused with "dressed up" )and no place to go. I guess I'll just read the news and check out places to to visit in Colombia, Ecuador, Costa Rica and Mexico.

It's still time for a new open thread, all topics welcome.

Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen is scheduled to surrender Monday to the federal prison complex at Otisville, NY. Like all Otisville inmates, he will first be evaluated at the medium security prison. When his eval is over, he will walk up the road to satellite prison camp, (a minimum security facility with communal dorm rooms instead of cells that is more like an army barracks than a prison.) According to the Bureau of Prison's Statistical page, today there are 113 inmates at the camp. (Fill in the blanks with "Northeast Region" and "New York" and "Otisville").

Here is an account written by an attorney and friend of mine of his first days at Otisville (published in Chicken Soup for the Soul), and an extremely irreverent but sometimes funny and occasionally insightful blog (if you can get past the deprecating language the Jewish author, a former attorney and Otisville inmate named Lawrence Dressler, uses for his fellow Jews and others which he thinks is funny)about life at Otisville. (He was there for mortgage fraud). Here's his latest post about Michael Cohen.

Mike "the Situation" Sorrentino from the Jersey Shore reality TV show is serving a short sentence at Otisville right now for a tax offense. So is Billy McFarlan of the infamous "Freye Festival". Most but not all of the 113 camp inmates are Jewish and sentenced for white collar or drug offenses. Sorrentino and McFarlan are exceptions.

I highly doubt Cohen will have a problem with other inmates because he cooperated with Mueller. He'll have lots of company on that front. Also, he didn't get a cooperation reduction in the NY case for which he's going top jail. The government wrote in its sentencing brief: [More...]

Sometimes it's good just to sleep, read and think about other things rather than dwell on all that's going down the drain under the present toxic administration.

ISIS Leader al Baghadadi has stepped out for the first time in five years. He's gotten a makeover -- instead of looking like a religious figure, he now looks like a military commander. His message appears designed to let us all know he's alive and although conceding ISIS has lost its physical territory (and the state it was creating as a Caliphate), and they got badly trounced at their last battle in Baghdouz, ISIS is regrouping as a global insurgency right now (no need to conquer big swaths of land and instill governing forces like before). He praised the Sri Lanka bombings and mentioned factions in Mali and Africa that had recently aligned with ISIS. He also mentioned new groups joining with them in Khorassan. Probably his most telling line was that Allah commanded them to make jihad, but did not command they acheive victory. In other words, he's telling his supporters to be prepared to die, as they will fight until the resurrection. [More...]

The first Democratic debates will be held over two days in June -- who's in and who's out? The NY Times has a graphic that's easy to read and informative.

The basic rules to qualify:

A candidate either has to receive donations from 65,000 people (including 200 donors apiece in 20 states) or has to register 1 percent support in three polls. Only polls from a preset list of organizations are accepted, and candidates cannot count two polls from the same pollster in the same place.

Right now, 17 of the 20 contenders would qualify. I have never heard of 8 of them. One seems to be buying his way in with a process that's not illegal: he's offering $1,000 a month for 12 months to an ordinary Iowan who agrees to media coverage. Is that why he has over 100,000 unique donors? Who would want a venture capitalist as President? (Answer: Not me).

Here's the point: [More...]

Shelley M. Richmond Joseph, a state district court judge in Mass. has been indicted for obstruction of justice and related charges for assisting an undocumented defendant with an ICE detainer to leave the courthouse.

I haven't had time to read the Indictment yet but it is available here.

Joe Biden is officially running for President.

Yesterday I tuned into MSNBC on the radio while driving for quite some time. They were playing snippets of Democratic candidates taking questions at town halls. When I tuned in, I didn't know whose voice it was at first, but based on the accent, after about 1 minute, I realized it was Bernie Sanders. Not surprisingly, I agreed with every position he mentioned on issues -- mostly human rights. My positive reaction faded a minute later (as did that of the live audience which audibly reacted, and it didn't sound positive) when he started talking about how he was always at the forefront of the fight for racial equality and marched with Dr. MLK in 1963. If he would just find a way to tout his own horn without claiming to be the first to take every progressive position (or, as in 2016, that he's leading a revolution.)

Sanders did say if he isn't the nominee, he will do everything he can to fight for the Democratic nominee because Trump is so dangerous.

I do not think Biden or Sanders can beat Trump. Is there a Sanders clone out there who is 30 years younger without baggage?

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

Joe Biden has apparently pushed his announcement he's running for president until Thursday. The theme of his campaign is "the battle for the soul of America". Terrible. It's both ghoulish and religious. (A battle for the American Dream would be much better.)[More...]

Citizens of the Ukraine have elected a comedian with no political experience as their president.

Ukraine entered uncharted political waters on Monday after near final results showed a comedian with no political experience and few detailed policies had dramatically upended the status quo and won the country’s presidential election by a landslide.

His name is Volodymyr Zelenskiy. He is 37 years old. No one knows what he stands for other than pledging to preserve "Ukrainian identity".

Zelenkiy is most famous for having played a President on TV. (No, I didn't make this post up.) It seems the vote was more a protest against his opponent than a vote for Zelenskiy.

Rudy Guiliani has been acting like he has a few screws loose for a few years now. The only art he seems to have mastered is the art of speaking out of both sides of his mouth.

Nowhere is this more apparent than his remarks Sunday that there's nothing wrong with campaign officials accepting information from foreign nations. He even had the audacity to ponder aloud that maybe the hacking of DNC emails was a good thing because it alerted the country to Hillary's true nature.

Don't get sucked in. He's mimicking Donald Trump by trying to divert your attention from polls showing that Trump's approval ratings have sunk to their lowest level yet in the wake of the Mueller report.

And 68 percent said they were more likely to believe that the president or one of his cronies broke the law.

Donald Trump's most absurd claims come when he's about to face bad press -- it's his go-to diversion tactic. Rudy is just mimicking him.

There are 12 to 14 other federal and state criminal referrals from Mueller's office to other agencies who are considering whether Donald Trump, his children and others in his circle committed crimes. Some Dems are itching to start impeachment proceedings now. Diversion and distraction through outrageous comments is the new Trump game plan. I'm not playing Rudy's word games.