Texas Republican Congresscreep Blake Farenthold said he would repay the $84,000 he owes us that he spent paying off a victim of his haute couture artisan creepiness.



He said he would and everybody heard it.

Now he looking for a way to cha-cha out of it. He claims to be waiting for some proposed ethics bill to pass congress. The bill has nothing to do with his theft of our money or his promise to repay it. He’s just being creepy.

I do not for the life of me understand why he’s still in congress and Al Franken isn’t. Farenthold has been accused of far, far worse.

You can hound him in the comment sections of his Facebook page. Snark at him on Twitter. Call his office on Corpus at 361-884-2222. You want your money back.

Amanda Carpenter, a former communications director for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), has had enough of the Trump White House:

Former Vice President Joe Biden suggested President Donald Trump may be compromised by Russia and its president.

Biden sat down Thursday for an interview with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, who asked the former vice president why Trump was “so reluctant to take on Vladimir Putin.”

“Look, you know, I want to give every American, including the president, the benefit of the doubt, but I can’t fathom any reason other than he is concerned of what Putin might say or do, or what information he may or may not have,” Biden said.

He then warned the Trump administration was not doing enough to stop the Russian from interfering with the next election.

“But look, unrelated to the whole issue of whether or not there’s collusion, separate and apart from all that, it’s necessary for us to stem this problem,” he said. “It’s necessary for us to corral the Russians.”

White supremacists are radicalizing alt-right extremists and using the internet to recruit them, giving them a far larger audience than available to ISIS recruiters.

And they are killing people.

Alt-Right killers are responsible for at least 43 deaths and 60 injuries, with 13 alt-right related fatal episodes according to new research.

According to new research by The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), “there have been at least 13 alt-right related fatal episodes, leaving 43 dead. And more than 60 injured in these incidents (see list). Nine of the 12 incidents counted here occurred in 2017 alone, making last year the most violent year for the movement.”

They explain that the alt-right consists of “vicious trolls, racist activists, and bitter misogynists.”

Radicalization has been used so often with ISIS types of groups to describe the radicalization of young Muslim men through the propaganda of ISIS but white supremacists who are using the same techniques to radicalize young white men have had the added benefit of larger social media platforms allowing them to flourish.

The perpetrators were all male and mostly under the age of 30 with the average age of the alt-right killer being 26. SPLC notes, “While some certainly displayed signs of mental illness, all share a history of consuming and/or participating in the type of far-right ecosystem that defines the alt-right.”

There is just one problem: The entire Fox News story is a fraud.

It’s simply not a plausible interpretation of the September 2, 2016 text exchange that Obama was seeking a briefing on the Clinton email investigation.

FBI Director James Comey closed the Clinton email investigation on July 5, 2016. It was not reopened until October. The same trove of text messages released Tuesday reveals that the FBI did not even become aware of additional emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop until September 28, 2016.

Fox News suggests the texts were referring to talking points regarding the Clinton email case. But those talking points, according to documents released by the Senate, were completed in June. That makes sense because they were prepared in advance of Comey’s announcement in July.

So what was Obama interested in? Most likely, he wanted information about the counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia, which was active on September 2, 2016. Obama has publicly said that he confronted Putin about election interference a few days later at the Group of 20 meeting in China, telling the Russian leader to “cut it out.”

“t has to be about the Russia probe,” former Department of Justice official Matthew Miller told ThinkProgress in reference to the September 2, 2016 texts.

As part of the celebration of winning the World Series, the Astros plan to visit the White House on March 12 and be honored by President Donald Trump as a team. They won't be joined by Carlos Beltran.

"No, I'm not gonna go. Honestly, I'm not going. I'm going to stay with my family," the retired Beltran told reporters Tuesday in Manhattan, where he was honored at the annual Thurman Munson Award dinner. "I'm going to be here in New York City."

Beltran said his decision to skip the White House visit had nothing to do with Trump, but the Puerto Rican-born player said he was disappointed in the government's response to hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico.