Category Archives: current events
Sheldon Whitehouse kicks ass and takes names
In less than sixty seconds!
Trump Judge Aileen Cannon overturned 3-0 on appeal
Every person with any legal training knew that Aileen Cannon’s staunchly loyal, batshit ruling the other day, enjoining the Department of Justice from conducting its criminal investigation into evidence seized during a legal search of Mar-a-Lago, was unsupported by any evidence, was literally arbitrary and capricious and an abuse of discretion.
A three-judge panel at the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with all the other reasonable legal minds who have looked over this strictly MAGA decision. They wrote, unanimously:
The Justice Department “argues that the district court likely erred in exercising its jurisdiction to enjoin the United States’ use of the classified records in its criminal investigation and to require the United States to submit the marked classified documents to a special master for review,” a three-judge panel of the appeals court wrote. “We agree.”
The NY Times reported that F POTUS maintains his alternative view of the facts:
… in an interview that aired late Wednesday, Mr. Trump made the extraordinary claim — not advanced by his own lawyers or supported by prior practice or legal precedent — that he had the right as president to declassify documents by wordlessly willing it to be so.
“You can declassify just by saying ‘it’s declassified,’ even by thinking about it,” Mr. Trump told Sean Hannity on Fox News.
The three judge panel had that canard covered:
Mr. Trump “suggests that he may have declassified these documents when he was president,” the appeals court wrote. “But the record contains no evidence that any of these records were declassified.”
The court went on to say, “In any event, at least for these purposes, the declassification argument is a red herring because declassifying an official document would not change its content or render it personal.”
Lawrence O’Donnell provides an excellent overview of the decision and what it means.
Class Action against DeathSantis
Heather had too much news in her Letter from an American last night. Here’s another important story:
Today, three of the migrants Florida governor Ron DeSantis flew from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard filed a class action lawsuit against DeSantis, secretary of the Florida Department of Transportation Jared W. Purdue, the state of Florida, the Florida Department of Transportation, and others, for planning and executing “a premeditated, fraudulent, and illegal scheme” to exploit vulnerable migrants—in this country legally—“for the sole purpose of advancing their own personal, financial and political interests.”
The suit alleges that the defendants trolled the streets outside a migrant shelter in Texas offering humanitarian assistance, “then made false promises and false representations that if Plaintiffs and class members were willing to board airplanes to other states, they would receive employment, housing, educational opportunities, and other like assistance upon their arrival.” Once they agreed, the plaintiffs put them up in hotels away from the migrant center where someone might tell them they were being abused.
The defendants allegedly paid $615,000 to charter two private planes ($12,300 per passenger) and told the plaintiffs they were being sent to Washington, D.C., or to Boston. While on the plane, the defendants gave the migrants “a shiny, red folder that included other official-looking materials, including a brochure entitled ‘Massachusetts Refugee Benefits’” full of false information.
The migrants were dropped on Martha’s Vineyard in the evening without food, water, or shelter, and with no one aware they were coming. Then the defendants disappeared and refused to answer calls from the plaintiffs to learn what was going on. This, the plaintiffs say, was “cruelty akin to what they fled in their home country.” They allege the defendants violated their Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights as well as the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The next day, DeSantis claimed responsibility. Since then he has claimed on Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity’s show that the migrants traveled voluntarily and that they signed consent forms, although he could explain how he had authority to move migrants from Texas when he is the governor of Florida only by saying that migrants come to Florida, but “the problem is we’re not seeing mass movements of them…. It’s just coming in onesie-twosies.” So he had those likely to come to Florida rounded up in Texas.
Today he called the lawsuit “political theater.”
Another fake commie witch hunt by left wing fascist cucks! Radical Left, Christ hating, name calling drama queen fucks!
Me, as we teeter on the possible threshold of one-party rule, by an angry party that embraces an absurd lie about a stolen election and is hell-bent on revenge, I keep thinking of the Nazi knack for mocking and dismissing. Also, their unhesitating use of any lie that pops into their collective head. Jews on line for the gas chamber were told by their Nazi handlers at “Camp Auschwitz” that they were going to have a hot shower, men and women together, and then would be given a hot meal and allowed to rest. That false and misleading statement was quite a whopper, as it turned out. Or, as defenders of such things would say “political theatre” by partisans keen on making honest Nazis look “evil”.
The DISCLOSE ACT
Heather Cox Richardson explains:
Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) announced yesterday that the Senate will vote later this week on the DISCLOSE Act, sponsored by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), which requires super PACs and other groups that do not have to disclose their donors—so-called dark money groups—to identify those who give $10,000 or more during an election season. It would also prohibit foreign entities from contributing at all. In a blow against those who have helped to pack our courts, it would require anyone spending money to advance the candidacies of judicial nominees to disclose their donors, too.
Thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, such advocacy groups can take unlimited money from individuals, corporations, or other entities so long as they don’t directly coordinate with a candidate, and they do not have to identify who the donors are. “Their ruling has paved the way for billions in unlimited campaign contributions by Super PACs and other dark money groups over the last decade,” Schumer said. “Ordinary citizens, meanwhile, have had their voices drowned out by elites who have millions to spare for political donations.”
Pointing to the recent $1.6 billion donation to a new right-wing political advocacy trust, President Joe Biden noted that the public found out about that donation only because someone tipped off a reporter.
Republicans are expected to oppose the bill.
Of course, what they will likely do in opposing the bill is filibuster it, on behalf of their dark money benefactors. Just the way anti-lynching laws were blocked from being publicly debated by the likes of Strom Thurmond, on his feet blustering for hours while peeing in a bag attached to his leg.
endlösung
The Germans, with their knack for putting a lot of meaning into a single compound word, have a word for “final solution” — an infamous plan that was almost a decade in the making before it was carried out. That word is endlösung. It was used by Herr Hitler to describe his ultimate plan for the virulent enemies of the Thousand Year Reich, but he was coy about what it actually meant, lying to suit the occasion, until it became grimly clear what he meant — the forced relocation and mass murder of millions. By then, well, that was the final word on the mostly secret Final Solution.
I just read a brilliant February 2017 account, by Ron Rosenbaum, of the failure of German media, and German politicians, to ever get a hold on the slippery liar who would become their infallible leader for all twelve years of its glorious Thousand Year Reich [1]. He was, in the alarming manner of our own Donald J. Trump, normalized, even in his most bizarre, clownish, insane moments.
There are some, I suppose, who still believe that Hitler’s military machine that conquered much of the world with its blitzkrieg, lightning war, a maniacally fast overrunning of nations by soldiers literally flying on speed, (a drug called Pervitin [2] was widely distributed to keep the wehrmacht triumphantly on the offensive), was Germany’s greatest hour. Such people are, as a lawyer friend might put it, not unsympathetic to Nazism.
What is MAGA’s endlösung, er, endgame? They want states’ rights, except when it comes to abortion, gay marriage, contraception, interracial marriage, voting rights, unlimited dark money in politics, repudiation of Climate Alarmism, end of all government “entitlements” and regulation, enforcement of cannibis prohibition and so forth. All those are well within the federal government’s right to regulate everywhere at once, according to the unique and purely “transactional” legal geniuses of the extreme right-wing judicial fraternity known as the Federalist Society. Standard rules for elections for federal office to ensure full voting rights for all citizens? States’ Rights! Medical insurance/health care for poor people? States’ Rights! Pollution? States’ Rights! Guns? States’ rights! The unappealable right of a state legislature to overturn an ugly election result? States’ Rights!
During the Third Reich, when Herr Hitler was making Germany great again, the Nazis realized the importance of having a uniform, lockstep, one party government, judiciary, media and culture. Again, German had the word for it: gleichschaltung. Rosenbaum describes it:
But swiftly, oh so swiftly, the order of the day became “gleichschaltung” — “realignment,” or forced conformity, savage normalization. Goebbels and other Nazi propagandists made it their crusade to get the German body politic “adjusted” to the new reign of terror. “Gleichschaltung” meant normalize or else.
The first German profession to fully Nazify, expelling all Jews, Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats, Christian Democrats, etc., was the German doctors. They were quickly followed by German lawyers. Soon it was the civil service and everything else. If you wanted to advance, or even keep your job, as long as you weren’t a Jew, you swore an oath of personal loyalty to Herr Hitler. In a very short time, it became normal that every clerk you met, every teacher, every policeman, every judge, was a Nazi who has taken a blood oath to whatever the Führer had decided to do that day.
So we have many MAGA candidates running on the proven lie that the 2020 presidential election (and not any others on those same ballots) was riddled with fraud, rigged, stolen from the rightful winner who got a record (for an incumbent) almost 74,000,000 votes. Biden, not really the president, not REALLY, you know, if you consider how much outright fraud there was (none was actually demonstrated, outside of a few aged Floridians casting multiple votes for F POTUS), and all the allegations, well, you can’t ignore the millions who honestly believe that the REAL lie is that the election was fair. They are literally running on the Big Lie.
The Big Lie was perfected by Hitler’s PR genius, Minister of Public Enlightenment Aryan Superman Dr. Josef Goebbels (popularly known as the Poisonous Dwarf). Comparisons are odious sometimes, but when the foo shits…
[1] Against Normalization: The Lesson of the “Munich Post” February 5, 2017 • By Ron Rosenbaum https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/normalization-lesson-munich-post/?s=03
[2] Pervitin was Nazi Germany’s wonder drug, one that was designed to enable pilots, sailors and infantry troops deliver superhuman performance. Soldiers who took Pervitin stayed awake for days at a time, walked for miles without resting, and felt no pain or hunger. Today we know this drug as methamphetamine, or crystal meth. (from top google hit, oddly enough a site called Amusingplanet.com, under the title: Pervitin: the Wonder Drug that Fueled Nazi Germany
1https://www.amusingplanet.com/2020/05/pervitin-wonder-drug-that-fueled-nazi.html)
Update on American Eichmann, Jeffrey Clark
The DC Bar Association Ethics Committee is investigating whether to take disciplinary action against Jeffrey Clark, Trump’s most loyal DOJ employee, a lawyer who was willing to send a letter from DOJ to multiple states asserting lies in order to try to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Ruth Marcus writing in yesterday’s Washington Post describes Clark’s response to the disciplinary committee.
The document reads like something the Federalist Society would submit if it had created an artificial intelligence program to draft legal pleadings. The bar doesn’t have authority to discipline Clark because that “would intrude on the President’s exclusive and unreviewable authority over federal criminal and civil investigations occurring during his term of office.” The bar can’t act “because the President has an absolute right to seek legal and other forms of advice as to the discharge of his responsibilities under the Take Care Clause.”
Disciplining Clark “would intrude on the President’s exclusive and unreviewable authority to remove and appoint senior officials of the Department of Justice.” It would violate the separation of powers, the supremacy clause, the confrontation clause, the equal protection clause, the due process clause and the prohibition against bills of attainder.
Also, he argues, it would trample on executive privilege, law enforcement privilege, the major questions doctrine, the political question doctrine, Clark’s “official immunity” and his freedom of speech. The Senate’s acquittal of Trump at his second impeachment bars the charges. Even Hunter Biden’s laptop makes a surprise appearance.
https://wapo.st/3dobVYg1
DeSantis and Abbott need to be prosecuted for this malicious taxpayer funded PR stunt
Texas governor, MAGA Man Greg Abbott and Florida strongman governor, MAGA man Ron DeSantis, are the new MAGA Abbott and Costello. Their latest hilarious prank was sending 50 Venezuelan asylum seekers from Texas to Florida, and then, at $12,000 a head, flying them to Martha’s Vineyard, with a film crew to document the libs of Martha’s Vineyard being owned by their own hypocrisy.
Leave aside the Florida taxpayer money DeSantis spent on this stunt, more than half a million dollars, leave aside the transparent cruel mockery of sending a film crew to get campaign footage, leave aside that these two fucks waited until they were within the DOJ’s 60 day no announcements of Investigations into political candidates period.
To get these people legally fleeing violence and oppression in Venezuela on to the airplanes for their publicity stunt, DeSantis promised them work, food, living places and help with their asylum applications. Instead they were sent to an island off the coast of Massachusetts where they would be unable to appear for their scheduled asylum hearings in various faraway locations.
Nazi comparisons are odious, of course, even when talking about the inhuman hijinks of our modern-day MAGA Abbott and Costello. However it’s hard not to think about the postcards Jews were forced to write to their families about how good everything was and how happy they were, before being loaded into cattle cars for transport to the death camps. Or even comparisons to our own murderous racists who, in the early 1960s sent southern Blacks to northern cities with similar false promises of work, new homes and freedom. When they arrived in the northern cities they were met by nobody, they were simply fucked. This happened here 60 years ago, and it happened right here the other day. Check this shit out:
The fool actually brought this lawsuit
F POTUS brought yet another lawsuit to obstruct justice, on bogus, frivolous, murky, dubious, ambiguous, unsworn legal claims. Claims in equity, actually, fairness harm that can’t be adequately remedied at law, according to F POTUS’s hand picked MAGA judge.
Check out the title of this transparent operation to block an ongoing criminal and national security investigation. You can’t make this shit up.
MAGA has one move
MAGA always doubles down, no matter what. They double down so much that the compulsive gambler’s term is now part of everybody’s vocabulary in this great land. Doubling down is their signature move, since they never back down or reconsider any position, although they change public positions quite nimbly because they’re “transactional” like their fearsome leader.
When MAGA was in the White House and had the bully pulpit, which they took quite literally, their other signature move was to angrily accuse others of the same malice and self-dealing corrupt intent that they had, and then to double down on the attacks. The DOJ under Sessions and then, to an even greater extent, under Barr, was weaponized to protect F POTUS’s friends and intimidate his enemies. They did this quite publicly. Now, of course, they accuse the current Department of Justice of having been weaponized by radical leftists, like AG Merrick Garland.
As their mad leader was being forced from office by majoritarian tyranny, (another thing they hate in MAGA world), Mitch McConnell made sure to ram through a few last Federalist Society judges. One he got appointed after F POTUS lost reelection was the extremist who’d sit on the federal bench in F POTUS’s new district when he relocated to South Florida.
I suppose Aileen Cannon, a lawyer with no experience as a judge, was chosen specifically for her Federalist Society orthodoxy, brazenness and willingness to do whatever fucking F POTUS might need her to do in the future. So far, so good.
She doubled down yesterday on her completely unsupportable ruling in Donald J. Trump v United States, a hare-brained civil suit Trump brought to block prosecutors from investigating his criminal acts in relation to stolen government property, much of it classified and very valuable/dangerous. She also halted the FBI’s review of illegally retained classified and top secret documents found five weeks ago pursuant to a legal search warrant.
Canon doubled down yesterday, as if nothing was wrong with her first decision, although it was mocked and harshly criticized by lawyers of every political orientation. (“Did they not also mock our Lord and Savior?” she’s probably thinking — the Federalist Society cult is dominated by extreme right wing Catholics.)
Yes, she notes, the government argues that they classified the materials that F POTUS illegally took, but you can’t trust the government, and their extreme bias against F POTUS is well-known! So-called National Security means nothing compared to the reputation of one of the greatest of American brands.
She has surely consulted with experienced judges and lawyers in her cult. She knows that federal trial court judges are given great deference in the finding of fact. She also knows that the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, where she sits, has a majority of judges also appointed by F POTUS. Clarence Thomas, naturally, oversees the 11th Circuit. So why not roll the goddamn dice, she figures, what better way to get to the top of the short list to join Amy Coney Barrett and her fellow frat members on the highest court of the most powerful country in the world?
And it’s not as if anything in her extreme opinion could lead to her impeachment from her lifetime post. It’s called a judicial opinion, asshole, so sue me! Oh, right, you can’t sue me for my opinion as a federal judge since we are presumed to act in good faith and you won’t be able to show corrupt intent or any kind of quid pro quo. Even if you could, we’d just double down. It’s not like you can prove that I deliberately aided the president in his transparent obstruction of justice attempt . Y’all have a blessed day!
gratuitousblahg 