The numbers of robocalls grew an estimated 325 percent in 2018 to 85 billion spam calls, 26.3 billion of which were in America. The FCC itself recently cited a study saying half of all calls made to American cell phones this year will be spam. Put me on permanent silent mode, people.

Wait, hold on, not so fast, says Republican FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly.

“Repeat after me,” O’Rielly said on Thursday. “‘Robocall’ is not a bad word.”

O’Rielly spoke to an audience of debt collectors at ACA International. Debt collectors are one of the country’s most zealous users of robocalls, a tool they deploy to hound people in debt about their bills.

WTF

Students find loophole

Dr. Monique Tello was attending a medical conference last fall when a speaker on social media suggested the physicians search themselves on Google. Why not, thought Tello, an internist at Massachusetts General Hospital.

She was stunned by what she found.

More than 100 negative one-star reviews and derogatory comments had been posted about her on popular physician rating websites.

“Ignorant, and could care less about her patients,’’ she recalled one poster writing.

“Danger,’’ another warned.

Tello soon discovered these comments were not from people who had been her patients, she said, but instead from anti-vaccine activists. The reviews on the websites Vitals and Healthgrades began pouring in last August, soon after Tello wrote pro-vaccine commentary on another doctor’s Instagram account.

Someday, in the perfect future I imagine, we'll stop allowing unverified online reviews.

Commander In Cheat:

Sean Illing
Trump claims to have won at least 20 club championships at his golf courses. What is a club championship? And how many of those has he actually won?

Rick Reilly
Once a year, every country club has a club championship for the best players. It lasts two or three days, and it’s a big thing if you win it. The best player I know of at this level won eight of these club championships — that’s the most I’ve ever heard of.

Trump’s going around telling people he has won 20. But that’s 100 percent a lie. I actually played with him once, and he told me how he does it: Whenever he opens a new golf course, because he owns 14 and operates another five, he plays the first club champion by himself and declares that the club championship and puts his name on the wall.

But it’s usually just him and Melania in the cart and nobody else. He just makes it up.

It gets worse from there.

Before taking your submarine underwater, be sure to close all the doors.

A judge has set a $1 million bond for an Ohio man accused of raping a now-pregnant 11-year-old girl.

...

Ohio’s new “heartbeat bill” means that the 11-year-old girl will be forced to carry the child to birth, regardless of the fact that she was raped.

...

Brothers complete ‘rude trip' of UK:

The places the brothers visited, from north to south: Bellenden Gardens, Cumwhinton, Cocklakes Cotehill, Cockermouth, Clithero, Fanny Street, Slack Bottom Road, Upperthong, Penistone, Butthole Lane, Willey, Titty Ho, Bell End, The Knob, Lower Swell, Old Sodbury, Butcombe, Shaftesbury, Shitterton, Sandyballs, Pound Bottom landfill, Cocking, Lickfold, S. Harting, Wilsford Cum Lake, Fingringhoe, Slutshole Lane, Feltwell, Fanny Hands Lane, Scunthorpe, Rimswell, Wetwang, Coxhoe and back to Bellenden Gardens.

I guess the Twatts, being on islands, were too far.

Mueller report, p370: "The President’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests."

There are a lot of crimes with names of the form "Attempted xxx". And if you or I attempted them, we'd be in jail.

I guess it pays to have the GOP Senate as your legal defense team.

According to WGFL, it was early Sunday morning when Clarese Gainey said she heard a noise outside her Gainesville apartment. She told police she peeked out her window to see a large man pulling on her car door handle and knocking on the window while only wearing his boxers.

"So I grabbed my bat and I braced myself, I eased the door open. I tucked that bat and hit him upside the head. I said 'PIYAH' and he said 'OWW,'” Gainey said.