During a 1992 state dinner, President George H. W. Bush, ill with the flu, lost his lunch in the lap of the Japanese prime minister. Bush's faux pas led the Japanese to coin a slang word, bushusuru, which translates as "to do the Bush thing," and means "to vomit."

With an increasing number of US states and countries around the world relaxing their laws on medical and recreational marijuana, the need to rigorously study the biological effects of smoking weed becomes ever more pressing. Many of these trials and experiments are conducted on lab rats, the latest of which has revealed that the rodents tend to become too lazy to bother with difficult cognitive tests when they are stoned.

While America's political kingmakers inject their millions into high-profile presidential and congressional contests, Democratic mega-donor George Soros has directed his wealth into an under-the-radar 2016 campaign to advance one of the progressive movement's core goals -- reshaping the American justice system.

The billionaire financier has channeled more than $3 million into seven local district-attorney campaigns in six states over the past year -- a sum that exceeds the total spent on the 2016 presidential campaign by all but a handful of rival super-donors.

His money has supported African-American and Hispanic candidates for these powerful local roles, all of whom ran on platforms sharing major goals of Soros', like reducing racial disparities in sentencing and directing some drug offenders to diversion programs instead of to trial. It is by far the most tangible action in a progressive push to find, prepare and finance criminal justice reform-oriented candidates for jobs that have been held by longtime incumbents and serve as pipelines to the federal courts -- and it has inspired fury among opponents angry about the outside influence in local elections.

If interested yu can read the book here at Google books

Or you can read about it here in this LATimes review

Let me assure you that Curt Gentry is no Kitty Kelley. His goal, which he achieves, is not to sift through a life hunting only for what titillates, but to write a rounded biography, cradle to grave. It just so happens that Hoover's cradle and grave were in Washington, D.C. He was a home-town boy, and there wasn't much to say about him before he went to the Justice Department--unless you want to talk about his success as a high school cadet captain, or his speed as a delivery boy, or the boil that disfigured his nose--and there wasn't anything to say about his life after he left the Justice Department, because he died there. The FBI was his life. What he did there, Gentry writes, was done partly as a super patriot, but also simply in defense of his hometown, to protect it from the evil world outside as he envisioned it.

It is a strange and truly frightening read.  Reassuring in a way in this time of insane politics to know our country has survived insane megalomaniacs before.  And "insane" is an overused word.  Hoover was insane.  And the really scary part is that everyone knew it AT THE TIME.

I got hooked on reading this in a funny way.  I was surfing the interwebs and I came across the strange story of Bert Horgson.  It is the strangest and most frightening abuse of power I have ever heard of.   It doesn't sound possible.  Really.  Just not possible in anything but the fevered imagination of a fiction writer.   But by all accounts it's true.   That story, which as the LATimes blurb says, is not at all the focus of the book but more of an aside that just gets a few paragraphs, is what hooked me into reading the rest.    And as unbelievable as it is it pales compared to the really evil and dangerous stuff this man - who to this day has name on the FBI building in DC - did.  Here is Burts story in a nutshell-

The diary purports that from at least the mid-1930s onward, Hoover would require selected agents to take on special undercover assignments, often lasting for years, as women or drag queens in high heels and skirts. Sources speculate that Hoover, unable to dress openly as a woman, forced some of his underlings to take up his habit so he'd feel more normal. He reportedly enjoyed training these agents himself, selecting their outfits, applying makeup and fixing hairdos. Most men hated these assignments and many were threatened with firing or even jail time for their cooperation.

The diary recounts at least one case in the 1950s in which Hoover had the mother of an agent jailed on trumped-up charges to keep him on duty as a red-headed, high-heeled gun moll. Perhaps the weirdest case is that of 24-year-old Bert Horgson, a six-foot Swede who left his family and girlfriend in Minnesota in 1935 to fight Nazi spies with the FBI. Once Hoover caught sight of him, however, the slim, blue-eyed Horgson was instead given a different assignment -- and spent the remainder of his career in dresses and high-heeled pumps as Hoover's "special agent."

The diary recounts how Hoover kept Horgson from quitting by alternating promises of reassignment with intimidation of both Horgson and his family. Hoover even went so far as to have Horgson's legal identity changed from male to female -- making it illegal for him to dress as a man for most of the 30s, 40s and 50s -- and had agents make sure he complied. Even Hoover's death in 1972 brought Horgson no reprieve. In a final bizarre ploy from beyond the grave, Hoover left orders that the 60-year-old FBI man was to be confined to a special high-security nursing home as a national security risk.

Horgson found himself forced to remain "Bettina Horgson" until his death 29 years later. Horgson died in 2001 at the age of 89 in a government nursing home in Washington, D.C. One government source says, "this is one of the strangest, and most flagrant abuses of power I've ever heard of."

"Mr. Avery is requesting, and is willing to pay for, the most comprehensive, thorough, and advanced forensic testing ever requested by a criminal defendant in the State of Wisconsin,"

Zellner also wants to use newly developed radiocarbon tests to determine whether the samples of Avery's blood found in Halbach's car came from a fresh wound or from a sample taken years earlier. (A key theory of Avery supporters is that the blood in Halbach's car was planted using a sample taken when Avery was wrongly imprisoned for a 1985 rape.

"Oftentimes people want athletes to take a stand," Smith said. "But when they do, it's like, `Hey, y'all, shut up. Sit down.'

The excessive donations clearly highlight just how devoted some of Sanders' fans were to his presidential bid. But they also point to flaws in how the Sanders campaign managed and communicated with his most passionate supporters. Many of his donors were simply unaware of the federal limits, or if they were aware, they assumed the Sanders campaign would prevent them from contributing too much. It didn't. The Sanders website made it incredibly easy to send money online with just a few clicks, but it made little effort to track how much its supporters were giving or inform them of the cap. (This lack of oversight also led to one donor being able to buy more than $10,000 worth of Sanders merchandise and selling it online, as I reported last week.)

SNIP

As I wrote in May, the fact that Sanders had so many excess donations is in part due to a compliance system that was designed with more professional, big-money campaigns in mind. Experienced fund-raisers and donors "max out" by writing one or two large checks for $2,700 for the primary and general elections, and those big donations are easy for campaigns to track and report. But when the average donation is just $27 and the campaigns try to hit up their supporters again and again, the process for reporting it all becomes much more complicated.

The FEC requires that campaigns send refunds for any donation in excess of the legal limit within 60 days, and according to its federal filings, the Sanders campaign has issued more than $5 million in refunds. But several of the largest "over donors" to Sanders said they never received checks the campaign reported that it sent to them late in the spring, in some cases for several thousand dollars. "Are you kidding me? I barely even received a thank you from the campaign," said Annamarie Weaver of Chicago when I informed her that, according to records on the FEC website, the Sanders campaign had issued her a refund of $3,617 on May 1 and another one for $500 on May 31. "That's complete bull$hit."

Republican nominee Donald Trump has placed immigration at the core of his presidential campaign. He has claimed that undocumented immigrants are "taking our jobs" and "taking our money," pledged to deport them en masse, and vowed to build a wall on the Mexican border. At one point he demanded a ban on Muslims entering the country. Speaking to supporters in Iowa on Saturday, Trump said he would crack down on visitors to the United States who overstay their visas and declared that when any American citizen "loses their job to an illegal immigrant, the rights of that American citizen have been violated." And he is scheduled to give a major address on immigration in Arizona on Wednesday night.

But the mogul's New York modeling agency, Trump Model Management, has profited from using foreign models who came to the United States on tourist visas that did not permit them to work here, according to three former Trump models, all noncitizens, who shared their stories with Mother Jones. Financial and immigration records included in a recent lawsuit filed by a fourth former Trump model show that she, too, worked for Trump's agency in the United States without a proper visa.

MOTHER JONES

I loved all of it.  And I don't want to say to much because this is really one where you do not want to know what's coming.  I'd love to chat about the ending but that's not possible without major spoilers.  If you have problems with the ending read this and the other review it links to but not before seeing it.