The Washington Post offers tips on how to keep your EV battery running in frigid temperatures. The link at the end of this graf is supposed to be a "gift link" (from me, Marie Burns, the giftor!), meaning that non-subscribers can read the article. Hope it works: https://wapo.st/3u8Z705
Friday
Apr262024
The Conversation -- April 27, 2024
The White House Correspondents' Dinner is tonight. Here, via Deadline, are your many options for watching the festivities, which also begins at various times. President Biden will speak, and Colin Jost, "co-anchor" of SNL's "Weekend Update" will host.
A doctor, a lawyer and a CEO walk into a bar. The punchline: they're all fake electors. ~~~
~~~~~~~~~~
Noah Weiland of the New York Times: "The Biden administration announced expansive new protections on Friday for gay and transgender medical patients, prohibiting federally funded health providers and insurers from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. The new rule reverses a policy instituted by the Trump administration and helps to fulfill part of President Biden's vow to restore civil rights protections for L.G.B.T.Q. people that were eliminated by his predecessor."
Michael Birnbaum & Christian Shepherd of the Washington Post: "Chinese and U.S. leaders sought Friday to stabilize their contentious relationship, but Secretary of State Antony Blinken said as he left that there had been no promises on the top U.S. priority of cutting support for Russia's defense industry.... Russia would struggle to sustain its assault on Ukraine without China's support, Blinken said. 'If China does not address this problem, we will,' he added, in a possible reference to sanctions against Chinese businesses involved in the trade with Russia." An AP report is here.~~~
~~~ Ana Swanson & Vivian Wang of the New York Times: "Preserving some semblance of cooperation -- and the difficulty of doing so -- was at the heart of a meeting between Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and China's leader, Xi Jinping, in Beijing on Friday. It was the latest effort by the rivals to keep communications open even as disputes escalate over trade, national security and geopolitical frictions. Officials in both countries said they had made progress on a few smaller, pragmatic fronts, including setting up the first U.S.-China talks on artificial intelligence in the coming weeks. They also said they would continue improving communications between their militaries and increase cultural exchanges. But on fundamental strategic issues, each side held little hope of moving the other, and they appeared wary of the possibility of sliding into further conflict." (Also linked yesterday.)
The Trials of Trump, Ctd.
Jesse McKinley & Jonah Bromwich of the New York Times: On Friday, witness "David Pecker, who has known Mr. Trump for decades, faced a stern cross-examination from one of the former president's defense lawyers, Emil Bove, who pressed Mr. Pecker about two deals he had reached in 2015 and 2016 with people who were seeking to sell stories about Mr. Trump. Mr. Bove sought to convince the jury of two fundamental points about the stories, which Mr. Pecker bought and then buried: Such arrangements, characterized by prosecutors as 'catch and kill,' were standard for the publisher, and that Mr. Pecker had previously misled jurors about the details of the transactions.... Despite the defense lawyers' aggressive questioning, Mr. Pecker was even-keeled, a small, gray-haired man answering in a quiet monotone.... Rhona Graff, Mr. Trump's former executive assistant ... at Trump Tower, testified about entries from the Trump Organization computer system that contained contact information for Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model, and for a 'Stormy.' The day's last witness was Gary Farro, who was [Michael] Cohen's banker when the former fixer executed financial transactions with First Republic Bank to enable the hush money payment to Ms. Daniels." ~~~
~~~ Marie: The consensus among teevee lawyers was that Pecker held his own again Bove, and that during re-direct, the prosecution successfully cleared up any confusion Bove introduced during cross-examination. ~~~
~~~ New York Times reporters live-updated developments Friday in the Trump 2016 election interference case. See yesterday's Conversation for some entries. Justice Juan Merchan did not make any decision regarding the prosecution's assertions that Trump has violated the gag order multiple times (15, as of yesterday), but said he would hold another hearing next Thursday. New York state law allows only two penalties for violations: a $1,000 fine for each violation or incarcerations up to 30 days. So some teevee lawyers are dreaming up ways the judge might try to deter Trump from repeatedly violating the gag order. Andrew Weissmann suggested the judge could task one of Trump's lawyers with monitoring his posts; Weissmann said that Neal Katyal and suggested the judge could tell Trump he would sentence him for the violations at the end of trial, without revealing of course what the sentence would be. And Weissmann said NYU law professor Ryan Goodman suggested the judge tell Trump that if he is convicted in this case, the judge will consider the gag order violations when he sentences Trump. ~~~
~~~ Kate Christobek & Jesse McKinley of the New York Times: "The second week of Donald Trump's Manhattan criminal trial was dominated by four days of testimony by David Pecker, the former publisher of The National Enquirer, who detailed his efforts to safeguard Mr. Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.... His testimony also teed up the story of Stormy Daniels, a porn star who claims to have had sex with Mr. Trump in 2006 and received a hush-money payment in the days before the 2016 election, a deal at the center of the case.... Here's what happened during the second week, and eighth day, of Mr. Trump's trial[.]" ~~~
~~~ The Washington Post's summary of the week's proceedings, titled "Secrets, Lies & Payoffs Laid Bare...", is here.
Ben Protess, et al., of the New York Times: "... while defendants often offer feedback to their lawyers..., [Donald Trump] could hamstring [his lawyers]. Others might concede personal failings so their lawyers can focus solely on holes in the prosecution's evidence.... But that time-honored tactic is not available to a defendant who is also the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, a man who despises weakness and is allergic to anything but praise from the people around him.... The defense team will need to walk a fine line to appease both of its audiences: 12 jurors and a singular defendant. 'Trying the case to your client's vanity, rather than to the jury, is a losing game,' said J. Bruce Maffeo, a former federal prosecutor....
"Mr. Trump is known to be mercurial and prone to outbursts. In private, he has dressed down lawyers in several of his cases, even questioning their entire strategy just minutes before they were set to appear in court, people who have seen him in action say. And inside the courtroom at two recent civil trials, he badgered lawyers, directing them to object at inopportune moments, muttering grievances into their ears and twice storming away from the defense table. Once, Mr. Trump exhorted his lawyer, Alina Habba, to 'get up' as he banged her arm with the back of his hand. Those cases ended in defeat."
Do these justices know that we can hear them? -- Patrick, in yesterday's Comments ~~~
~~~ Adam Liptak of the New York Times: "Before the Supreme Court heard arguments on Thursday on ... Donald J. Trump's claim that he is immune from prosecution, his stance was widely seen as a brazen and cynical bid to delay his trial. The practical question in the case, it was thought, was not whether the court would rule against him but whether it would act quickly enough to allow the trial to go forward before the 2024 election. Instead, members of the court's conservative majority treated Mr. Trump's assertion that he could not face charges that he tried to subvert the 2020 election as a weighty and difficult question.
"They did so, said Pamela Karlan, a law professor at Stanford, by averting their eyes from Mr. Trump's conduct. 'What struck me most about the case was the relentless efforts by several of the justices on the conservative side not to focus on, consider or even acknowledge the facts of the actual case in front of them,' she said.... Michael Dorf, a law professor at Cornell, said that 'the apparent lack of self-awareness on the part of some of the conservative justices was startling.' He noted that 'Justice Alito worried about a hypothetical future president attempting to hold onto power in response to the risk of prosecution, while paying no attention to the actual former president who held onto power and now seeks to escape prosecution.'... Sending the case back to the trial judge [as the Court seems prepared to do, Prof. Karlan] said, 'to distill out the official from the private acts in some kind of granular detail essentially gives Trump everything he wants, whether the court calls it immunity or not.'"
Wasn't the whole point [of the American Revolutionary War] that the president was not a monarch and the president was not supposed to be above the law? -- Justice Elena Kagan, during oral arguments on Trump's immunity case
~~~ Jesse Wegman of the New York Times: "The right-wing justices seemed thoroughly uninterested in the case before them, which involves a violent insurrection that was led by a sitting president who is seeking to return to office in a matter of months. Instead, they spent the morning and early afternoon appearing to be more worried that prosecuting Mr. Trump could risk future malicious prosecutions of former presidents by their political rivals. And they tried to draw a distinction between official acts, for which a president might have immunity from prosecution, and private acts, for which no immunity would apply.... The justice system is doing its job by trying to hold to account a former president for subverting the last election before he runs in the next one. That is a very important job! And yet the right-wing justices are saying, essentially, not so fast -- and maybe not at all.... Still, the right-wing justices seemed impervious to the urgency of the matter before them. 'I'm not focused on the here and now of this case,' Justice Brett Kavanaugh said. 'I'm very concerned about the future.'" ~~~
~~~ Marie: Even the most gullible observer must see that the winger Supremes had two objectives in mind: to act as belated accomplices to the insurrection and to be mighty contributors to Donald Trump's re-election bid. Update: At the end of yesterday's Comments thread, contributor Bill dubbed the Supreme Trump Team the "Supreme Courtesans." Nothing could be more apt vis-a-vis their contributions to the immunity hearing. And I'll be stealing that. ~~~
~~~ Uh, What about the Constitution? Josh Gerstein of Politico: "'The legal approach [right-wing Supremes] seemed to be gravitating toward has no basis in the Constitution, in precedent, or logic,' said Michael Waldman, president and CEO of New York University's Brennan Center for Justice. 'It sure ain't originalism.'... 'There is no immunity that is in the Constitution, unless this Court creates it,' [the attorney for the special counsel Michael] Dreeben declared. 'There certainly is no textual immunity.... I think it would be a sea change to announce a sweeping rule of immunity that no president has had or has needed.'... [Justice Elena Kagan said,] 'The framers did not put an immunity clause into the Constitution. They knew how to. There were immunity clauses in some state constitutions. They knew how to give legislative immunity. They didn't provide immunity to the president.... And, you know, not so surprising. They were reacting against a monarch who claimed to be above the law.'...
"Sometimes, the court has found the absence of such language to be of great import. Writing for five conservative justices in the earth-shaking abortion case two years ago, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, Justice Samuel Alito referred to the notion of guaranteed access to abortion as 'an asserted right that is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution.'" MB: Funny, innit? ~~~
~~~ The Last Word. Paul Campos in LG&$: "Donald Trump tried to steal the 2020 presidential election. This is a simple historical fact. It's all anyone knows or needs to know about the matter for the purposes of whether one ought to make him president again.... A criminal trial on the question of whether Trump tried to steal the election is an attempt on the part of the government to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump violated certain highly technical federal statutes in regard to election fraud and related issues.... The last thing we need is to set up an interpretive frame in which a verdict, or the failure to reach a verdict, in a criminal trial, has any salience to the actual historical record, which is unambiguous to anyone with eyes and ears." Thanks to RAS for the link. MB: This should be the bottom line. Full stop. Instead, we get poll after poll that asks the hoi polloi, "Would you vote for Donald Trump if he was convicted of trying to overturn the last presidential election?" If there's going to be any sort of survey about the insurrection it should be along the lines of, "Would you vote for Donald Trump knowing he tried to stage a coup against his own government?"
Charles Homans of the New York Times in the Times Magazine: "No major American presidential candidate has talked like he now does at his rallies -- not Richard Nixon, not George Wallace, not even Donald Trump himself. Before November 2020, his speeches, for all their boundary crossings, stopped short of the language of 'vermin' and 'enemies within.' When I asked the political historian Federico Finchelstein what he made of the speech, he replied bluntly: 'This is how fascists campaign.'"
Conservative Bill Kristol in the Bulwark throws in the towel: "God, we need a healthy and vigorous liberalism here in America. Conservatism can no longer cut it. American conservatism was once at least in part committed to the defense of liberal democracy. Now conservatism has degenerated into rabble-rousing populism in politics, anti-intellectualism in ideas, and Know-Nothingism in civic life. Accordingly, originalism in the courts has become sophism. A real case for democratic capitalism has become the mere defense of oligarchic power and economic privilege. A necessary critique of mindless progressivism has become hostility to anything emerging from any liberal precinct, reasonable or not. A mostly healthy fighting spirit has become a partisanship that knows no bounds and that acknowledges no enemies to the right. In foreign policy, hostility both to American world leadership and to free nations around the world has replaced a commitment to a tough-minded defense of liberty. Or, to put it more simply: American conservatism has died in Trumpism."
James Pollard, et al., of the AP: "Students protesting the Israel-Hamas war at at universities across U.S., some of whom have clashed with police in riot gear, dug in Saturday and vowed to keep their demonstrations going, faculty at several schools condemned university presidents who have called in law enforcement to remove protesters. As Columbia University continues negotiations with those at a pro-Palestinian student encampment on the New York school's campus, the university's senate passed a resolution Friday that created a task force to examine the administration's leadership, which last week called in police in an attempt to clear the protest, resulting in scuffles and more than 100 arrests."
Presidential Race
Tit for Tat. Sam Stein of Politico: "If Nebraska Republicans changed their electoral college rules to help Donald Trump this November, a top Maine Democrat said her party would try to do a similar move to counteract the impact. The state House majority leader, Maureen Terry, said in a statement on Friday that the Democratic-controlled Legislature would 'be compelled to act in order to restore fairness,' should Nebraska's Republican governor sign legislation that made the state a winner-take-all election in 2024."
Amy Wang, et al., of the Washington Post: "President Biden said Friday that he will debate ... Donald Trump ahead of their expected November election rematch. Biden made the comment during a lengthy live interview with radio host Howard Stern. 'I am, somewhere,' Biden said when asked if he would debate Trump. 'I don't know when. I'm happy to debate him.' Trump later wrote on social media that he would debate 'ANYWHERE, ANYTIME, ANYPLACE.'" This is a liveblog, dated Friday. A CNN story is here.
Bullying the Bully. Katie Rogers of the New York Times: "This week, one presidential candidate has called the other a loser, made fun of him for selling Bibles, and even poked fun at his hair. That kind of taunting is generally more within the purview of ... Donald J. Trump.... But lately, the barbs have been coming from President Biden, who once would only refer to Mr. Trump as 'the former guy.'... 'We'll never forget lying about Covid and telling the American people to inject bleach in their arms,' Mr. Biden said at a fund-raiser on Thursday evening.... 'He injected it in his hair,' Mr. Biden said. He is coming up with those lines himself [according to a campaign spokesman]." ~~~
~~~ Marie: The difference between Biden's "bullying" and Trump's bullying, which Rogers doesn't address, is that Biden is gently calling attention to a bully's own failings by telling affable jokes about him. Trump, by contrast, viciously picks on people -- often vulnerable people -- by attacking them with lies or by making fun of conditions the people cannot change, like their race or their appearance or their physical limitations.
Chris Cameron of the New York Times: "The Republican Party sent a letter to the Secret Service on Friday urging the police agency to keep protesters farther away from the venue for the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July.... Todd R. Steggerda, counsel to the Republican National Committee..., argued that convention attendees would be forced to pass by the protesters on their way into the venue, raising the potential for confrontations.... The R.N.C. did not propose an alternative location for the demonstration zone in the letter, instead suggesting that the Secret Service expand the security perimeter to move protesters away from the area." The park currently designated as the place protesters may gather is about a quarter mile from the convention arena.
New York Times: "The Wall Street Journal reports that allies of Donald Trump are devising ways of watering down the central bank's independence if he is re-elected president. If true, that change would represent the biggest shake-up in U.S. monetary policy in decades. But it also raises questions about whether such a plan is possible -- or whether Trump's Wall Street supporters would back it.... Among the most consequential would be asserting that Trump had the authority to oust Jay Powell as Fed chair before Powell's term is up in 2025. While Trump gave Powell the job in 2017, he has since soured on his pick for raising rates, and has publicly said he wouldn't give Powell a second term." (Also linked yesterday.)
Donald Trump Has Been Asking, "Are You Better Off Than You Were Four Years Ago?" Let's Check. Top News in at NBC News, April 26, 2020: "Prescriptions for two antimalarial drugs jumped by 46 times the average when the president promoted them on TV. There's no proof they work against Covid-19.... The extraordinary change in prescribing patterns reflects, at least in part, the outsize reach of the Trump megaphone, even when his pronouncements distort scientific evidence or run counter to the recommendations of experts in his own administration. It also offers the clearest evidence yet of the perils of a president willing to push unproven and potentially dangerous remedies to a public desperate for relief from the pandemic." (Also linked yesterday.)
Marie: A Washington Post article is headlined on the site's front page" "He threatened Marjorie Taylor Greene amid a mental health crisis...." My visceral reading of the headline was that the person suffering the mental health crisis was MTG. Seems reasonable. Then I read a bit of the story itself, and this phrase, too, confused me: "... including several of his two children...." If you have only two children, how can there be several among them? The English language is confusing.
~~~~~~~~~~
Michigan Senate Race. Neil Vigdor of the New York Times: "Peter Meijer, a Republican who voted to impeach ... Donald J. Trump when he was a member of the House, announced on Friday that he was dropping out of the Republican primary race for U.S. Senate in Michigan. 'The hard reality is the fundamentals of the race have changed significantly since we launched this campaign,' Mr. Meijer said in a post on Facebook, adding that he did not have a 'strong pathway to victory.' He was facing a crowded primary field featuring another high-profile Republican: Mike Rogers, who served seven terms in the House and rose to become the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.... The seat is being vacated by Senator Debbie Stabenow, the state's senior senator and a Democrat, who announced last year that she would not seek a fifth term.... The Republican nominee is likely to face Representative Elissa Slotkin, the most prominent Democrat seeking to succeed Ms. Stabenow." CNN's report is here.
South Dakota. Kristi Shoots Her Pets Dead if They Displease Her. Phillip Nieto of Mediaite: "South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R), who is being eyed as a potential running mate to Donald Trump, admitted to shooting and killing a puppy she called 'less than worthless' -- along with her 'disgusting' goat -- in her new book." Read on for details. And here Gail Collins was so upset about Mitt's traveling with his dog on the roof of the car.
News Lede
CNN: "Destructive tornadoes gutted homes as they plowed through Nebraska and Iowa, and the dangerous storm threat could escalate Saturday as tornado-spawning storms pose a risk from Michigan to Texas."
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Reader Comments (18)
The latest in the annals of the I'd rather not know party that already willfully ignores the effect of fossil fuel use on climate, the effect of rampant inequality on democracy, the effect of the private medical and pharmacy industry on the nation's health, the effect of limited control of advanced weaponry on the prevalence of mass shootings, the effect of limiting the definition of corruption on the nation's declining moral fiber....but now we have Justices willfully ignoring the events surrounding Jan. 6 when discussing presidential immunity....
There's just so much for Rightists to ignore, including but not limited to the will of the people on a whole range of other issues.
No match at all here. It would be hard for even the woke-est Leftie to be so wrong.
Biden's week
Marcy Wheeler takes Alito and the Courtesans back to the 13th century to show them that even some kings didn't have full immunity.
Three Supreme Court Justices walk into a bar.
The first one says 'gimme a beer.'
The second one says 'anybody in this bar interested in paying off
my new RV?'
The third one says 'got any wine from the 1860s? Ths new stuff just
doesn't cut it.'
Who are these people?
The word criminal doesn't do it justice. It's much more sinister than that.
The Supreme Court just showed us that Trump is not incompetent. He's a master of corruption
Francis Wilkinson, 4/26 in the LA Times, starts out with this -- and keeps on going. (Read the whole thing.)
I have badly underestimated Donald Trump. Thursday was the day that his justices — it turns out that they are indeed his justices on the Supreme Court, just as he claimed — got it through my thick head: Trump is not just competent but masterful. He is not just capable, he is supreme.
Because Trump is clumsy at his alleged crimes, surrounding himself with flagrant thugs, telling obvious lies, leaving prolific trails of damning evidence, offering ridiculous defenses for indefensible conduct, I had long concluded that he is incompetent at crookery along with his other manifest failings. That’s true as far as it goes. But for all his mad greed and compulsive lawlessness, for all his sleaze and stupidity, crime is ultimately not Trump’s game. Trump is nothing like a master criminal. But he is a master of something far more sinister and complex: corruption.
Digby's reprints some of a Charlie Pierce piece from a decade ago on Republican brain rot. Some of the names have changed, but the results remain the same.
There is also a video of Bill Barr responding to Trump trolling Barr's endorsement of him. Republicans have no respect for themselves so their lack of it for others makes sense. But Barr was the top law enforcement officer in the country and his brain rot is so strong I still occasionally get shocked by the depths of their madness.
Biden and the liberals are the ultimate danger to their country despite Trump inciting an insurrection, calling on the DOJ to lock up his rivals and enemies, claiming immunity to assassinate his rivals, promising internment camps and to be a dictator on day one. All the criminality and lawbreaking can be overlooked by Barr because a few bigots get fired from their private company jobs when they become an embarrassment to the company and threat to the bottom line, or capitalism in other words. But Biden hasn't fixed the broken immigration system and "open borders wahh" even though Trump just torpedoed a Republican's wishlist border package.
Hanna did say that Kavanaugh would step up for Donald. And he did not disappoint his liege.
Recently, a disgruntled editor at NPR, Uri Berliner, published a jeremiad in which he excoriated that network as a hotbed of lefty robots.
Hmmm…that was certainly news to me, and likely to quite a few of you. Many of us have regularly disparaged the way NPR has gone full Both Sides and routinely handles the most outrageous right-wing abuses with kid gloves, if mentioned at all.
The Times has also been ripped as a den of liberal layabouts. Also news to me. In both cases, however, these screeds have been giddily embraced by wingers as proof that NPR and the New York Times are mean and bad, unfair and downright awful.
But the casting of these supposed heroes of the Right Way to do Journalism (the right-wing way, that is) has been questioned by a piece on the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting site:
“Berliner’s screed was the latest instance of a trend in which legacy-media staffers publicly grouse that their workplaces are overrun by left-wing firebrands. Former New York Times assistant opinion editor Adam Rubenstein recently did so in the Atlantic (2/26/24). Two months before that, James Bennet, previously the editorial page editor at the Times, spent 16,000 words lamenting that the Times had “lost its way” in the Economist’s 1843 supplement (12/24/23).
Readers were invited to view these critics as brave iconoclasts at odds with the radical doctrines of their former employers. But the records of NPR and the New York Times show just how misleading this characterization is.”
In fact, both NPR and the Times bend over backwards to play nice with the MAGAts, liars, and traitors, like, f’rinstance, Tom “Rip their skin off” Cotton:
“Both Rubenstein and Bennet condemned the Times’ handling of an op-ed (6/3/20) by Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) that they took part in publishing. Appearing during the uprisings, the op-ed called for the deployment of the military to suppress protests. (In Bennet’s view, Cotton wanted to ‘protect lives and businesses from rioters.’) After much reader—and staffer—outrage at the bald incitement of racist violence, the Times appended a note stating regret over the piece, and both editors left the newspaper.
Embittered by the Times’ response, neither Rubenstein nor Bennet paused to consider that a paper that had not only commissioned a fascistic op-ed by a neocon senator, but had published that same senator multiple times before—in one case, to celebrate the Trump-ordered assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassim Suleimani (1/10/20)—might not be beholden to the left.”
And so all those bastions of the mythical Liberal Media routinely knuckle under to pressure from anyone who says “Boo! Yer a dirty liberal!” And so we get 6,000 word essays on how to understand MAGA world and it’s red hatted denizens.
But is there a similar chest thumping, mea culpa-ing on the right? Why haven’t we heard from Fox or NY Post writers about how left leanings are stepped on?
Because there aren’t any. They are not allowed. But no one takes Fox or Newsmax or the WSJ editorial page to task for being one-sided.
Think there’s anything like this happening at Fox?:
“Contrary to Berliner’s allegations, [former NPR reporter Alicia] Montgomery noted that staffers were ‘encouraged to make sure that any coverage of a Trump lie was matched with a story about a lie from Hillary Clinton.’ When a colleague ‘asked what to do if one candidate just lied more than the other,’ they were met with silence.”
No. Never.
In a recent substack column
, Margaret Sullivan takes MSM goliaths to task for allowing right-wing liars and propagandists to set the framing of their reporting.
“Here’s another one — the recent New York Times story that carried the headline: ‘Republicans Are Divided on Impeaching Biden as Panel Begins New Inquiry.’ Literally, true, yes; but the headline and much of the story seem to accept that there’s some reason for a proposed impeachment other than rank political gamesmanship. As the Cornell University historian Lawrence Glickman observed: ‘The set up is that the GOP is ‘divided’ about impeaching Biden, rather than pointing out in the lede the elementary reality that they have no basis for doing so.’
The story considers efforts to impeach Biden for his border policies — or, hey, if that doesn’t work, perhaps for supposed financial corruption. It’s not until the eighth paragraph that we hear of the House Oversight Committee panel looking into the latter; that panel ‘has yet to produce any evidence of wrongdoing by Mr. Biden despite months of scrutiny…’”
I recently saw a Times lede that informed readers that “Republicans are winning the disinformation war!”
What war? They are the only ones who live for and by disinformation. A headline like this not only suggests, but out and out states that Democrats do it too.
Both sides.
There is no liberal media. The idea on the right is, if their propaganda is questioned even momentarily, it’s “Aieeee! Liberal media is out to kill our holy messsge!”
I wish that WERE the case. But it ain’t.
Favorite hypothetical for Medieval Sam Alito, so worried about what might happen in the future—and do immunity is a must— he has no interest in what’s happening right now.
“If a woman President had an abortion in Idaho, would she be immune from prosecution?”
@Monoloco: I suspect you're giving Trump far too much credit. Trump did not turn hordes of sweet, generous innocenti into corrupt factotums. These people -- from Thomas & Alito to Chuck Grassley to Bill Barr -- were already corrupt. They proved it well before there was a Trump on the horizon. And the younger, less marinated pricks -- the Gym Jordans & the Josh Hawleys -- who may not have had time to prove their public corruption -- were predisposed to it.
And into the mire, along came Trump the Grotesque. The bumbling lout. At most, he is merely the hall monitor. He passes out permission slips. Hall passes to the Kleptocracy. His acolytes already had the skill set, the proclivity, the capacity to swindle and loot.
Akhilleus,
Kudos from my wife and from me for your hypothetical....
And yes, corruption is the key to it all. Of law, of knowledge, of science, of manners, of morality...and the ignorant Pretender is the perfect avatar.
Corruption has always been with us, and for a long while took the form of it's OK if you don't get caught. Now corruption is OK even if you do get caught, and our SCOTUS blesses it from its high bench. What else could a patently corrupt court that refuses to police itself do?
After all, they don't want to be open to the accusation of hypocrisy.
Tautology Man to the Rescue!
Little Johnny Roberts was very, very unhappy with the appeals court ruling that Fatty doesn’t have total immunity.
Why?
“Tautology! It’s a tautology!”, he blathered. His argument is, as are almost all of the arguments coming from the right side of the court, disingenuous, misleading, and self-serving.
His reference is based on his interpretation of something mentioned in passing in the lower court ruling, which basically said something like “Trump is currently being prosecuted” which Johnny then recreates as the tautological statement “He can be prosecuted because he’s being prosecuted.” Which was not their core argument. The primary argument is “There is nothing in the Constitution that gives a president the kind of blanket immunity Trump demands for himself.
But Little Johnny doesn’t want to deal with that argument. Better to say something like “It’s a tautology!” It’s like complaining the whole thing is null and void because someone used a dangling modifier.
You wanna play that game, Johnny?
Okay. Let’s play the Tautology Game:
Right-wing Supreme Court Justices are Supreme Court Justices because they’re on the Supreme Court. Not because they deserve to be there, or because they’re honest, diligent pursuers of the rule of law. You could say Spam in a can has more right to be on the court. Hey, at least Spam in a can doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is. It didn’t lie to get there.
Spam: better than Sam.
Ken,
Thanks. It’s not an original of mine though…I wish it were. I heard it mentioned as a favorite tweet on a podcast.
Forrest,
The punchline to your joke is that the bartender is Trump, who promises them whatever they want—for full immunity.
After they give it to him, he says “Great. Closing time! No more service for anyone. Now get out!”
Ak: If Donald was the bartender, the drinks would be hexechloriphine
or bleach, mixed with muddy water from the pool at Marred-a-Largo/
I read somewhere that bars in parts or NJ are doing strange things
with drinks. Don't drink in NJ.
It wasn't me
Kristi Noem…what? She shot a puppy because it was behaving like a dog???
Can we treat MAGAts the same way?
So, wait. She was training this puppy to be a hunting dog, to catch pheasants, birds, in other words. But when the dog went after another kind of bird, she shot it? It was “useless”?
No. No. If the dog wasn’t responding to her day or two of “training”, maybe the fault lay with the trainer, not the dog. If your kid is not leaning to read, do your shoot the kid? Or maybe see if her teacher is up to snuff.
My dog went after a neighbor’s chickens once. She let the things walk out on the road. Rocket went after one. He killed it. I apologized to the lady and paid her, but wondered what possessed her to let chickens walk around on the road in a neighborhood full of dogs.
I’m not a dog trainer, but I certainly didn’t shoot Rocket—for being a dog. He goes after snakes, moles, mice…he’s that kind of dog. I wasn't going to SHOOT him because of that. I worked it out with the neighbor to see what time of day her chickens went on walkabout, and Rocket and I stayed away during those times.
And Noem killed a goat? Why? Because he smelled like a goat? And behaved like a goat? If the goat is knocking down the kids, put him in a pen. Or tell the kids to stay away from him, or give him to someone who knows how to properly take care of the animal.
Nope. “Had to shoot those fuckers. It’s a tough job but I was up to it.”
Wow. Good for you. Congratulations. Here’s your Vivisection Award.
The really sad thing? Plenty of MAGAts will think her shooting her pets was pretty cool.
Where do these fucking people come from?!?
No gravel pit