Turns out that MAGA former DOJ official, Robert “Ben” Hur, appointed Special Counsel by Merrick Garland (and coached by Trump’s team before he testified), actually lied in his 300 page hatchet job on well-meaning, doddering, forgetful old Joe Biden. The transcript of his interview with Biden, released the day Hur resigned from DOJ, shows that Biden told him the exact date that his son Beau died yet all of the headlines afterwards quoted Hur’s report as saying Biden couldn’t even remember the date that his son passed away.
This lie was repeated week after week, regurgitated in The NY Times and other legacy media as often as the unfounded, inflammatory headline that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 atrocity.As authoritatively and widely embraced as the alternative fact that Joe Biden and the Democrats, in coordination with commies, RINOs and other lying traitors, stole the 2020 election from the real president.
Now American Nazis are in full spin cycle, whirling like demented dervishes to preserve their holy mission against “the Biden crime family”, in the face of zero evidence. Their smoking gun witness a Putin asset, in prison and apparently paid by Putin/MAGA? Not a problem. A Biden impeachment will prove to tens of millions that Biden is just as corrupt as Trumpie.
Presumably, once they impeach Biden twice, to even the score, all of the corruption of both will become a wash. Since public lying is now perfectly acceptable political speech in the USA, particularly by devotees of Mr. Chrump, they say all this with a completely straight face, secretly praying for the day Rosie O’Donnell and her filthy ilk finally wind up in one of Trump’s for-profit death camps.
Capitalist tool goes full Nazi-style propaganda
from Robert Hur’s scrupulously non-political report, MAGA will not be happy!
crawling out from under his tenured at UC Berkeley rock, torture memo man checks in
The Grey Lady, with one of her more mealy mouthed pieces of spotty reporting:
Mr. Hur, who has been under fire for including what some have described as disparaging comments about Mr. Biden’s memory, had an incentive to focus on how Mr. Biden’s mental state might come across to a jury as relevant and proper to discuss. . .
. . . Still, at several points, Democrats like Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Representative Mary Gay Scanlon of Pennsylvania induced Mr. Hur to agree that his report also included lines like, “In addition to this shortage of evidence, there are other innocent explanations for the documents that we cannot refute.”. . .
. . . The discussion offered an echo of an ambiguous and much-scrutinized line in the 2019 report by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Unlike Mr. Hur, Mr. Mueller made no decision on whether Mr. Trump should be charged with a crime, only writing, “while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him” of obstruction of justice. . .
. . . Mr. Biden, who at 81 is already the oldest person elected president, has been dogged for months by concerns about his age among voters from both parties. He and his allies have rejected those concerns, but Mr. Hur’s report described memory problems during a five-hour interview.
No mention in the New York Times report of lines in the recently released transcript, spoken by Robert Hur, that directly contradict false assertions he made in the report. For example, at one point Hur noted Biden’s “photographic” recall of the layout of a house. Hur also claimed Biden didn’t even know the month or year of his son’s death. The transcript shows that Biden said “oh, God, May 30th…” and agreed when a staffer added it was 2015. No mention in the New York Times of this rather glaring bit of partisan Bill Barr/John Durham-style lying.Making inaccurate or false statements is New York Times-speak for lying, but there is no note of even false or inaccurate statements by Hur in their article.
The Times also doesn’t report that one of these recorded sessions took place during the international negotiations immediately after the Hamas attack on Israel October 7th.
Nor does the Times include this fairly important factfor assessing Hur’s candor and his agenda, (or allude to anything like an immolation of former Trump DOJ partisan Robert Hur):
House Republicans asked Hur to testify before the Judiciary Committee, chaired by Trump loyalist Jim Jordan (R-OH). Hur prepared for his testimony with the help of Trumpworld figures, and he resigned from the Department of Justice effective yesterday, so he appeared before the committee today not as a DOJ employee bound by certain ethical guidelines, but as a private citizen. . .
. . . Conservative lawyer George Conway wrote on social media: “I think Biden’s State of the Union address last week and Hur’s immolation today will go down in political history as Reagan’s ‘I am not going to exploit…my opponent’s youth and inexperience’ moment…only on steroids.” Conway was referring to Reagan’s response in a 1984 presidential debate to a question about his own age; Reagan’s opponent, Walter Mondale, later said he knew Reagan’s answer was the moment he had lost not only the debate but probably the election.
This is another more intelligent assessment of what happened at the hearing, immolation or no.
No hint about any of this is given to readers of the New York Times report on the latest backfired attempt by MAGA diehards to magnify their wild claims that, unlike very stable genius Donald Trump, Biden is a feeble, stuttering old dotard who doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground, even when he is handing MAGA hecklers their asses on a platter in front of a live national audience.
As Boof Kavanaugh’s mother taught her snarling, partisan son, when judging a controversy use common sense to decide what makes sense, what smells funny and who has the most to gain by claiming what smells funny. Now consider the stench her boy and his judicial fraternity frat bros (with apologies to Amy, a woman’s woman and also a Federalist Society member) have been busy creating since he became an unappealable lifetime ruler on what is justice and what sucks ass.
When it was time for the Supreme Court to rule on a state’s right to kick an insurrectionist off the ballot, for, at minimum giving aid and comfort to Capitol-sacking rioters who stopped the certification of an election Trump lost, the rightwing frat boys quickly rewrote the 14th Amendment (writing section three out of the law) and hurried to release their ruling in time for the big primary day called Super Tuesday. No quid pro quo by the three Trump appointees, no conflict of interest for Clarence and Ginni, they’re all on the same side, with our greatest secretive billionaires!
Trump one, Constitution and the rule of law zero.
When it came to Trump’s absurd Nixonian/Dershowitzian claim that if a president, or even a former president, does it — no matter what it is — it can’t be prosecuted as a crime, the same six extremist fraternity members decided to delay the hearing from December, when Jack Smith asked for it and they kicked it to the DC circuit court of appeals (who took their time writing an unappealable decision), to the end of April for a ruling by the end of June when they break for the summer. Criminal trials for the big orange turd? Not if the Federalist Six can help it! Only a bit of a lie was needed to make their delay holding Trump has no such right fly. Trump two, Constitution and the rule of law zero.
The Fourteenth Amendment was put into place to ensure rights for newly freed Black citizens. It was written to guarantee federally enforceable rights against state governments seeking to re-enslave or otherwise abuse certain citizens under color of law. Its purpose was to ensure that no state could give a citizen rights less than the federal ones protected by the Constitution, specifically the Bill of Rights. The fourteenth enforces the Bill of Rights against encroachment by the states. It guarantees equal protection under the law and a right to all the privileges and immunities of US citizenship. It was soon put into a 90 year judicial coma by a series of sickening Supreme Court decisions, relying on dirty tricks (like limiting the privileges and immunity to an irrelevant three or four and leaving the rest up to the states) but that is another story for another day. Section three, disqualifying insurrectionists and those who give aid and comfort to insurrectionists, like the rest of the fourteenth amendment is self-executing (as the Supreme Court conceded in relation to candidates for state office only.)
When I read Shelby County v. Holder, the case where John Roberts and the boys did away with enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, I saw easily, once I read RGB’s brilliant dissent, that Roberts had lied. His strongest argument, that the Act had worked to correct historical racist voter suppression and that Congress reauthorized the Act based on forty year-old data, was pulled completely out of his impeccable corporate/Federalist Society ass. There had been many hearings in Congress, reams of current data studied, including documentation that the ‘plaintiff’, Shelby County, Alabama itself had recently engaged in racist voter suppression highjinx, not to mention that 98-0 reauthorization vote in the Senate. Days after the decision dozen of new racist voter suppression laws were enacted, or resurrected, in various states.
In Anderson, the recent case from Colorado that wrote the disqualification section out of the 14th Amendment for candidates for federal office, the Roberts court engaged in the same outright lying and judicial deception. Section five, held the court — without any support in law, history of the text of the Fourteenth Amendment — means that if Congress does not make a specific law to enforce a specific provision of the 14th Amendment, courts may not enforce it. This is a plain and easily demonstrable lie.
Cases are brought by the dozens every day in federal courts all over the country based on violations of clauses of the 14th amendment, equal protection, privileges and immunities, and so on, with no federal enabling statute in existence. Section five was included to make sure that if a specific law was ever deemed necessary to enforce the rights under the amendment, in some unforeseeable way (like the Ku Klux Klan Act, for example), Congress was specifically authorized to address it. Balls and strikes umpire Roberts turned the Constitution on his head, no doubt in the spirit of Originalism, or perhaps in the name of the supremely flexible, Federalist Society tweaked Political Questions Doctrine.
Don’t take my word for it. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse does a great presentation on this very issue, the Supreme Court’s ability to rely on false statements in unappealable decisions, which I saw yesterday. He refers to these ongoing decisions based on false premises, decisions that are not later overturned or corrected to address their failure of truthful analysis, as zombie decisions. His talk is easily digestible, super informative and highly recommended.
“Thank you for your service. Now go shoot yourself.”
Republicans were able to wrest this small victory out of the temporary postponement of their ongoing threat to shut down the government.
Republicans were able to use the spending legislation to curtail a policy instituted by the Veterans Affairs Department that aims to prevent veteran suicides by flagging to a federal gun background check system when veterans are found to lack the mental capacity to handle their own finances.
Under language the G.O.P. insisted on, the V.A. could not do so without a court order. Republicans contended that the current practice relies on an overly broad definition of incompetence and could infringe upon veterans’ Second Amendment rights.
God forbid veterans who are facing extreme emotional and financial challenges aren’t able to continue killing themselves in the ungodly numbers they do every day, by any means necessary. If there’s one thing guns are particularly great for, it’s suicide.
It’s shocking to me that a newspaper like the New York Times can print a sentence like this with a straight face (see below). Either their editorial standards have slipped, they truly don’t give a shit about the facts, they are trying to please people on the extreme right, as well as their more distracted liberal readers, or they truly have a Nazi bent somehow.
Read this bit from a recent article about MAGA reliance on a now debunked informant statement in their rush to find a crime or misdemeanor to impeach Biden for and let me know what you think about the word choice “payback for Democrats’ treatment of … Trump” rather than something about partisan retribution for the impeachments brought to try to hold a rogue president, now doing his damnedest to dodge criminal trials for 91 felony counts in four jurisdictions, accountable.
By the way, former DOJ States Attorney Scott Brady, the Trump loyalist who brought the form 1023 to the attention of the public, a guy who resigned one month into the Biden administration, (as he had previously refused to serve under Obama), appears to have knowingly lied to Congress not long ago about the reliability of what turned out to be Putin’s propaganda fed through an informant now in prison and under indictment for lying to the FBI about millions in bribes supposedly paid to Hunter and Joe Biden by a Ukrainian oil company.
Wake up Merrick Garland, a six-year investigation into Hunter Biden’s dick, in the interest of appearing scrupulously fair, means that you have to at least investigate the complicity of fucking MAGA asshole Scott Brady. You already have the letter from Jerry Nadler of the House Judiciary Committee asking for the investigation. Just fucking do it.
The four female members of the court, while joining the 9-0 vote against a state’s right to disqualify an insurrectionist from the ballot — if that insurrectionist is running for federal office — wrote that the five men (and I use the term very loosely) had gone too far, had overreached.
Then the court ruled 9-0 that no candidate for federal office can be disqualified as an insurrectionist unless the MAGA-crippled Congress enacts a constitutional law to enact the disqualification section of the otherwise self-executing 14th Amendment.
The court also scrupulously avoided any discussion of the Colorado Court’s finding that for purposes of the 14th amendment Trump is an insurrectionist, and as such rightfully disqualified under the second Civil War Amendment (and arguably the single most important one in the Constitution for modern democracy).
Doing the math we realize that the 9-0 judicial overreach (to once again favor a Republican, in this case also a Nazi) hung by one vote, that of Black Klansman and corrupt disciple of Antonin Scalia (being on the Supreme Court places me above ethics, you contemptible fucks), the billionaire-funded husband of Ginni, a powerful far-right player in Trump’s insurrection.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the unethical, unimpeachable Clarence fucking Thomas, the well-paid swing vote in the decision that holds every member of Congress who participated in the plans to overturn the election on January 6, 2021 (as well as the rioters themselves, should they seek federal office) immune from any consequences under the Constitution, unless the Congress Trump currently controls makes a new law to enforce an amendment that never needed a law to enforce it before. Mazel tov, Nazis and Klansman, you have a lot to celebrate today.
If your ideas are unpopular, because they represent only one percent of the population’s interests, you cannot count on democracy to implement these ideas. You have to think outside of the democratic box. You propagandize through supposedly non-partisan “think tanks” that you fund, support extremist candidates, create an extremist judicial fraternity and stack the courts with well-trained judges steeped in your unpopular worldview. Then it is simply a matter of having these courts impose your values on everybody, as long as these courts have the final word on what is law and what is justice.
Heather Cox Richardson, as usual, nails it:
Two days ago, in Slate, legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern noted that when Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was Senate majority leader, he “realized you don’t need to win elections to enact Republican policy. You don’t need to change hearts and minds. You don’t need to push ballot initiatives or win over the views of the people. All you have to do is stack the courts. You only need 51 votes in the Senate to stack the courts with far-right partisan activists…[a]nd they will enact Republican policies under the guise of judicial review, policies that could never pass through the democratic process. And those policies will be bulletproof, because they will be called ‘law.’”
As he did in striking down enforcement of the 1965 Voting Rights Act simply by ignoring inconvenient facts, like many sessions of vigorous debate in Congress, thousands of pages of data considered, ongoing attempts by states with a history of racist laws to disenfranchise voters and suppress the vote, the unanimous Senate vote to re-authorize the Act, the near unanimous vote in the House, and the Republican president’s warm public embrace of the Act as he signed it into continued law, Roberts made the plain text of the Fourteenth Amendment a matter of Federalist Society opinion about whether an insurrectionist is eligible for federal office, absent a specific, constitutionally sound law passed by Congress.
In the Voting Rights Act case the holding was 5-4: the Voting Rights Act worked beautifully to eliminate racially discriminatory voter suppression and no longer needs enforcement. In this Colorado decision to disqualify an insurrectionist, textualists and liberals apparently agree that Colorado had no right to remove Trump from their ballot, no matter what their factual findings may have been, and therefore that no state may remove Donald Trump, or any candidate for federal office, from the ballot, absent Congress passing a new law to enforce section three of the 14th Amendment.
Leave out a few key facts, ignore the central one (Trump planned, advertised, aided and gave comfort to participants in a riot that shut down the government in a violent attempt to keep him in power), reframe the narrow issue that you are looking at, et voilà, you can pull any politically expedient holding you would like out of your corporate “balls and strikes umpire” ass. You can even broker a deal to make it a unanimous 9-0, including the spouse of a powerful participant in the attempt to overthrow the election of 2020.
The Court declines to intervene in many cases because of their Political Question Doctrine and professes, under federalism, to defer to states on abortion, criminal law, family and business law, voting rules and procedures and many other matters, but reaches the conclusion, without touching the finding that the candidate in question, at minimum, aided and abetted insurrection, or Colorado’s evidence-based finding that he did, that this political question is one they can unanimously decide, bindingly, on behalf of all fifty states. The plain text oftheirsacred originalist Constitution, and the expressed, well-documented intent of the framers, be damned.
What I don’t understand is how this dog shit decision was 9-0. This time nobody on the Court has a word to say about the stench?
A great one by Paul Krugman. We can talk about yesterday’s vote by at least four unaccountable, craven, fake Christian, extremist judicial fraternity member lockstep fascists later, this one is much more fun to consider.
OK, I have to admit it: I’m enjoying the spectacle of Donald Trump begging for a delay in the $454 million fine he’s required to pay for fraudulently inflating his net worth, for two reasons.
First, his inability to come up with the cash basically confirms the charges: He isn’t as rich as he claims to be. Second, his evident inability to get anyone to lend him the money is poetic justice for a man who has a history of bilking gullible investors.
One small addition to the Trumpenfreude: A GoFundMe set up to help Trump pay his bills has so far managed to raise about a third of 1 percent of the amount he owes.
You do have to wonder about how this will affect his psychological state. Trump’s speeches have become increasingly incoherent lately — a trend that has attracted sufficient attention that a few days ago he felt compelled to respond, telling an audience: “There’s no cognitive problem. If there was, I’d know about it.”
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