Category Archives: current events

The law seems to require Aileen Cannon to fuck off

The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals found that Judge for life Aileen Cannon had no jurisdiction to interfere on behalf of Donald Trump in Trump v. United States. Trump v. USA was the legally incoherent lawsuit Trump brought to stop the Department of Justice from conducting their criminal investigation of his illegal retention of presidential records and his obstruction of the investigation. Trump has since been indicted for those crimes. Cannon is the judge assigned to make all rulings in the case the United States v. Donald Trump, in which her benefactor stands accused of unlawful retention of government documents and obstruction of justice..

The unanimous Eleventh Circuit panel ruling overturned all of Cannon’s baseless partisan decisions in Trump v. U.S. They reprimanded her for abusing her discretion, first in not dismissing the case, and then by making findings with no basis in law (and with no jurisdiction to rule on any of it in the first place) and ordered her to dismiss the case she should never have stuck her loyal partisan nose into.

If that does not amount to reasonable questions about her ability to judge the case impartially, the case she already made rulings to delay and suppress evidence in, nothing does.

As to her legal credentials for serving as judge in this historic case, well… Being nominated for that lifetime appointment used to include relevant experience and a proven track record, outside of fidelity to Federalist Society doctrine. Aileen Cannon has had virtually no relevant legal experience and no track record to speak of. The perfect candidate for Trumpie!

Diane Feinstein, at a very diminished 89

The New York Times headline:

Feinstein, Back in the Senate, Relies Heavily on Staff to Function

The California Democrat is surrounded by a large retinue of aides at all times, who tell her how and when to vote, explain what is going on when she is confused, and shield her from the press and public.

Mmm, not quite ideal in a closely divided Senate, if you hear what I’m sayin’.

The Grey Lady continues:

All senators rely heavily on staff. But for years, Ms. Feinstein’s memory problems have meant that she has needed far more support than other senators. Briefing her on the news of the day requires longer sessions and more background information.

At times she has expressed confusion about the basics of how the Senate functions. When Vice President Kamala Harris was presiding over the chamber last year in one of many instances in which she was called upon to cast a tiebreaking vote, Ms. Feinstein expressed confusion, according to a person who witnessed the scene, asking her colleagues, “What is she doing here?” Staff members have been overheard explaining to her that she cannot leave yet because there are more votes to come. . .

. . . For now, her aides have been left to figure out how to make Ms. Feinstein’s office work as well as it can in the absence of a fully functional senator. They have done so, some of them said, by relying on the senator’s three decades’ worth of policy positions and explicit systems she put in place long ago that were designed to make her office efficient — and which earned her a reputation for running one of the more demanding work places on Capitol Hill.

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How actual Nazis do it

There’s a heated debate about whether somebody like Christian Nationalist White Supremacist Marjorie Taylor (she is divorced from Mr. Greene, but made some kind of deal to retain her brand name) is actually in the Ku Klux Klan, and/or a Nazi, or simply a follower of Q, whose anonymous conspiracy theory combines the best of both of these ideologies of hatred.

Nazi is a pretty strong word, I’m aware, and one I’m particularly prone to reaching for, since the Nazis killed virtually my entire family, everyone who did not get out of Europe prior to the US Immigration Act of 1924.

If you want a lesson from history about what amoral people concerned only with fame, power and wealth will do once they are in power, look no further than Herr Hitler, the adored, mass murdering pop star idol of the Thousand Year Reich. The day his Japanese allies “japped” the US fleet in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and Hitler declared war on the US, the Führer issued his secret decree about how to treat civilian prisoners of war, insurgents, intellectuals, partisans, Jews and other enemies of the Reich in occupied territories. Here’s Wikipedia:

Nacht und Nebel (German: [ˈnaxt ʔʊnt ˈneːbl̩]), meaning Night and Fog, also known as the Night and Fog Decree, was a directive issued by Adolf Hitler on 7 December 1941 targeting political activists and resistance “helpers” in the territories occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II, who were to be imprisoned, murdered, or made to disappear, while the family and the population remained uncertain as to the fate or whereabouts of the alleged offender against the Nazi occupation power. Victims who disappeared in these clandestine actions were often never heard from again. . .

. . .Hitler and his upper-level staff made a critical decision not to conform to what they considered unnecessary rules, and in the process abandoned “all chivalry towards the opponent” and removed “every traditional restraint on warfare”.[5] During the Nuremberg trial of the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW) in 1945-1946, the head of the legal department in the OKW, Ministerial Director and General Dr. Rudolf Lehmann, testified that Hitler had literally demanded that opponents of the regime who could not be immediately given a short trial should be brought across the border to Germany in the “Night and Fog” and remain isolated there.[6]

On 7 December 1941, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler issued the following instructions to the Gestapo:

After lengthy consideration, it is the will of the Führer that the measures taken against those who are guilty of offenses against the Reich or against the occupation forces in occupied areas should be altered. The Führer is of the opinion that, in such cases, penal servitude or even a hard labor sentence for life will be regarded as a sign of weakness. An effective and lasting deterrent can be achieved only by the death penalty or by taking measures which will leave the family and the population uncertain as to the fate of the offender. Deportation to Germany serves this purpose.[7]

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As the defeated Trumpie reportedly said to the spineless Mike Pence the morning of January 6th, 2021 (it may have been the 5th) — but wouldn’t it be cool, Mike, to have the power to make democracy just fucking stop, to be able to constantly create your own reality, make up the rules as you go along, your every word the final, irrefutable law of this great land?

In the original German the term was “führerworte haben gesetzeskraft” the Führer’s word has the force of law.

Where is my piece of shit emoji?

Smugly entitled turd, smirking the quiet part out loud:

“My conservative colleagues for the most part support Limit, Save, Grow, and they don’t feel like we should negotiate with our hostage,” said right-wing Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL).

Our hostage, the American people and the world economy, fuck them, you know.

Leaving aside, genius, that the hostage is not a party to the negotiation.

Heather Cox Richardson ends her great piece today with this:

Those taxes helped to pay for the [Civil] war and, after it, to repay the debt. And in 1866, when Confederate-sympathizing Democrats tried to undermine support for the government by changing the terms of that debt to make it less valuable, Republicans wrote into the Constitution that “the validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

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I know it sounds impolite, but fuck the KKK caucus.