He will make “domestic censorship” illegal and make it a crime for any federal bureaucrat to label anything mis or disinformation. What could go wrong?
Category Archives: History and Politics
MAGA justice
“We’re focused on how political our Justice Department has become — they’re making decisions on a political basis, we’re going to look at all that,” [Ohio rep Jim] Jordan said in a November news conference. “We’re concerned about anything that is being done in a political fashion at the Justice Department.” . . .
. . . Jordan’s counterpart on the House Oversight Committee, however, recently said in a CNN interview that following up an investigation into classified documents found at Trump’s private club and estate in Florida “will not be a priority.” Incoming chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) has been conducting the minority party’s own investigation into the August search warrant executed at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, but he has indicated he favors prioritizing investigations examining Twitter’s handling of reporting on Hunter Biden before the 2020 election and the origins of the coronavirus.
https://wapo.st/3HHK6H6
Then with the same level of seriousness and shrewd analysis of what is in the best interest of Justice, the article ends with this blurting from the disgraced former president, our recent 2 year-old in Chief.
“Under the Presidential Records Act and the very well established Clinton Socks Case, the raid of Mar-a-Lago by the FBI, and the taking of documents and many other items, was ILLEGAL,” Trump said Friday on Truth Social. “Everything should be returned, at once!”
US Covid deaths back to a 9/11 body count weekly
Now that the brutal daily death tolls of Covid-19 are behind us, we are all relieved to act like Covid-19 is no longer a deadly threat. We now have vaccines, boosters and a drug that cures it in many cases. The number of people dying of the pandemic has gone way down from its horrific peak numbers around the 2020 elections, even here in America, the world leader in Covid deaths (thanks Jared, Pence and Donald). The sad fact this holiday season: Covid death in the US is on the rise again, a 40% rise over the last two weeks.
The tracker on the NY Times website shows that 466 Americans died of Covid yesterday. Multiply that number by 7 and you get 3,262. More than the 2,996 people who died in the horrific terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. The numbers are also up for the seasonal flu and a new threat called RSV.
Sekhnet, vaxxed and triple boosted, is often the only person wearing a mask outside. I was the only person I saw on the E train last night wearing a mask. Everyone is so relieved not to have that invasion on our personal autonomy, the slight difficulty drawing a breath, that every subway car, supermarket and restaurant is now a superspreader site. Since the radical right weaponized reasonable health precautions and equated wearing masks with intolerable tyranny (totally different from forcing ten year-old rape victims to give birth!), many now see wearing or refusing to wear a mask as a political statement.
If so, think of the statement this way: if I have asymptomatic Covid-19 and could give it to you, there is less chance of transmission if I submit to the tyranny of wearing a fucking face mask, for your sake, and the sake of everyone else who might be susceptiple to dying of this deadly disease, you ignorant, racist, misogynistic, kool-aid drinking, MAGA hat wearing, USA! USA!!!–chanting asshole.
Bezos newspaper describes Elon Musk
From last week’s Washington Post, in an article about Twitter suspending the account of swastika posting genius Ye. Note the pathologically greedy Jeff Bezos’s generous framing of his fellow suremely entitled psychopath
Musk purchased the site for $44 billion in late October, and has moved rapidly to shift the company in the direction of his free speech ideals.
Free thinking idealists, one and all. Democracy dies in darkness, y’all.
American Exceptionalism
Trump’s intent on January 6, 2021, written confession on Truth Social
Lawrence O’Donnell with a smart analysis of Donald Trump’s five dimensional legal chess strategy:
Party of the Big Lie
Because a narcissist like Trumpie can only be the greatest winner in the world or its most humiliated loser, he continues to insist (with all evidence showing he’s lying, he lost by 7,000,000 votes) that he never lost the 2020 election. He has no proof, but he doesn’t need it. He just lies, over and over, and those who love and admire him love him for it. “He’s stronger than the so-called truth, facts, evidence, rules, laws, norms, Constitution, what have you! That’s our boy!”
His latest maniacal move is to call for the abolition of all laws, norms, rules, the Constitution itself, in order to overturn the stolen election that he lost by the same Electoral College margin he called a landslide when it went in his favor in 2016. His party, which rode him to fabulous far right fever dream success, is so far sticking with their man, the leader of their party and its most likely candidate in 2024. Presumably cooler heads within the party are waiting for an indictment and conviction to remove him from the political playing field, although history shows they shouldn’t hold their breath. Here’s a link to Heather with an excellent piece about the latest shamelessness from the shamefully obsequious Grand Old Party. The party of Law and Order.
Nicely stated, Jill Winebanks
Jill succinctly wraps up the major democracy related issues that need to be dealt with once the January 6th committee wraps up its work, issues its report and releases all the evidence gathered during its long investigation.
“When you catch somebody in a fraud you’re allowed to go by a different set of rules”
Heather Cox Richardson:
Today, one of former president Trump’s messages on the struggling right-wing social media platform Truth Social went viral.
In the message, Trump again insisted that the 2020 presidential election had been characterized by “MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION,” and suggested the country should “throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or…have a NEW ELECTION.”
Then he added: “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”
In other words, Trump is calling for the overthrow of the Constitution that established this nation. He advocates the establishment of a dictator.
As anyone in his position would. As he told his crowd at the Ellipse, from behind bullet proof glass, after urging his crew to take away the magnetometers so his angry supporters could attack the Capitol fully armed to kill Pence, Pelosi and others “When you catch somebody in a fraud you’re allowed to go by a different set of rules.”
Is it a surprise that the same guy fell in love with a misogynistic 24 year-old Nazi at a recent Mar-a-Lago dinner with a deranged superstar of rap and self-hatred?
Eleventh Circuit smacks down MAGA judge Aileen “toward my benefactor” Cannon
Every lawyer who discussed this novel case of the target of a legal search warrant bringing a civil suit against the United States of America, to get as much delay as possible in the US criminal investigation into his theft of classified documents, knew Judge Aileen Cannon had no jurisdiction to hear the case. In Trump v. US she claimed equitable (fairness) jurisdiction which is only available when there is no adequate remedy at law and the result would be grossly unfair without a court stepping in. In this case, of course, Trump had an adequate remedy at law — to contest the legality of the search warrant. A case he never brought because there was no chance of success. The search warrant was not only legal, it turned up the evidence described in the warrant, found in the specific places described in the warrant.
So Trump did an end-run to prevent the evidence being used against him by the Department of Justice. Ran his shabby Hail Mary lawsuit 70 miles up the coast to a courthouse where the supremely loyal Cannon was the only federal judge there. He managed to buy about four months of delay. Now his incoherent lawsuit against the US government has been dismissed and the government can review the thousands of papers seized pursuant to the legal search warrant. He’ll probably go to the Supreme Court, because, why the fuck not? They will make a 9-0 one sentence ruling upholding the Eleventh circuit’s decision overruling Cannon’s absurd, although highly loyal, order. The Eleventh circuit appeals panel (two Trump appointees and a Dubya Bush appointee) sent the case back to Cannon to dismiss it herself for lack of jurisdiction, which is the most humiliating way they could have ended the case.
It was a major smackdown. If they’d upheld Cannon’s order they’d be giving permission to every subject of a search warrant to sue the government in civil court to prevent the review of criminal evidence legally seized by the government.
“The law is clear. We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so. Either approach would be a radical reordering of our caselaw limiting the federal courts’ involvement in criminal investigations. And both would violate bedrock separation-of-powers limitations.”
Next move — make a grim example of brand new, lawless federal MAGA judge Aileen Mercedes Canon by bringing her in front of a judicial ethics panel and disciplining her publicly. Or better still, remove her from the federal bench.
