Tag: law

Those Who Live By the Party

May well see their political careers ended by the party. The British media is preparing the public for Boris Johnson’s long-overdue resignation:

Sue Gray’s long-awaited Partygate report will be so damning that Boris Johnson will have no choice but to resign as Prime Minister, a source has claimed.

A dossier of more than 300 images and 500 pages of information was handed to Scotland Yard by the senior civil servant, who led a Cabinet Office probe into the matter.

She was forced to delay the publication of her investigation into alleged parties held in Downing Street and Whitehall during England’s coronavirus lockdowns due to the Metropolitan Police commencing their own inquiry.

A total of 12 events are being investigated by the police, which include a ‘bring-your-own-booze’ garden party, a gathering in the Cabinet Office to mark Mr Johnson’s 56th birthday and a series of leaving dos.

In an interim report published in January, the Cabinet Office official said there had been ‘failures of leadership and judgment’ in No 10 over the so-called partygate saga.

The Times, citing an official it described as being familiar with the contents of the complete report, said Ms Gray’s full findings were even more personally critical of the Prime Minister and could end his premiership.

After leading the remnants of the British empire out of the European Union, Johnson could have been the Churchillian figure he dreamed of becoming. But unfortunately, he swallowed the Covid Kool-Aid, lurched from one media-driven crisis to the next, and arrogantly refused to follow the very rules he was imposing on the British people. His failure is entirely self-inflicted, and if Dominick Cummings is to be believed, was almost certainly inevitable due to his narcissistic character.

After being caught lying to Parliament; by centuries-old tradition, he should have resigned already.

The Hotness is Hellfire

SJWs are freaked out that the Right is finally getting serious about canceling their wicked culture:

You can be forgiven if you didn’t have “Right-Wing Jihad Against Disney” on your bingo card for 2022.

But I regret to tell you that the entrepreneurs of culture war have grown tired of ginning up indignation about “Drag Queen Story Hour,” CRT, and the cancellation of Dr. Seuss. And so they have found a bright new shiny object of outrage, that bastion of moral decadence and wokeness, the Walt Disney Company.

This is, of course, the Disney of Mary Poppins, Frozen, Snow White, Moana, Encanto, High School Musical, Finding Nemo, 101 Dalmatians, Fantasia, Coco, Epcot Center, Bambi, Cinderella, Ratatouille, Splash Mountain, Beauty and the Beast, Mister Toad’s Wild Ride, Space Mountain, The Lion King, The Little Mermaid, Toy Story, The Princess and the Frog, Remember the Titans, The Mighty Ducks. Old Yeller, and the It’s a Small World After All ride.

But the company has now spoken out against Florida’s new law regulating instruction about sexuality (read gayness), and, since clickbait doesn’t click itself, the new hotness is canceling Disney.

Meanwhile, in Florida, the Devil Mouse is losing its special exemptions and legal statuses that made the Magic Pedo Kingdom possible.

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday asked the state legislature to repeal a law that has given Walt Disney World special privileges for decades, allowing it to operate as a private government over its properties in the state.

On Wednesday, the Republican-led Florida Senate passed a bill that would eliminate a special tax district that has allowed Walt Disney Co. to govern the land where its theme parks sit, The Wall Street Journal reports. The move comes after Disney began engaging in politics, opposing parental rights legislation that restricts classroom instruction on gender and sexuality to young children.

The Disney measure now goes to the GOP-led Florida House which is expected to also approve it. DeSantis has indicated he will sign it.

It’s a good start. Now let’s see Congress repeal the ridiculous Copyright Term Extension Act that was enacted in 1998, aka the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.

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The Republicans Cave, As Always

I very much doubt that anyone is surprised that the usual suspects switched sides in order to ensure that a pro-pedophile Negro is installed on the highest court in the land to rule over occupied America.

The Senate passed a procedural motion Monday night to proceed with Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation – voting 53-47 to discharge her Supreme Court nomination from the Judiciary committee and bring up her name for a vote before the full chamber.

Moderate Republican Senators Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah all joined Democrats after an 11-11 vote earlier on Monday left her Supreme Court nomination in a dead-lock.

Democrats want to vote on her confirmation by April 8, when Congress breaks for a two week spring recess. With a 50-50 split Senate, and the backing of at least three Republicans, Brown will all but assuredly be confirmed in the coming days.

Brown will be the first black woman ever to serve on the Supreme Court bench.

This does raise the obvious question: how do we know Brown is “the first black woman” given the impossibility of determining what a “black” or a “woman” is? For that matter, do we even still recognize the abstract and artificial concept of the number “one” representing some sort of theoretical precedent?

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How Lawyers Lie

First, read this post on ProFootballTalk concerning a claim made by former Dolphins coach Brian Flores and the response by the team’s lawyers.

The Dolphins have responded to a claim made by former head coach Brian Flores during an interview with Bryant Gumbel of Real Sports. In the interview Gumbel asked Flores if it was true “that you were asked to sign an NDA, a non-disparagement agreement” when the Dolphins fired him earlier this year. Flores said he was and left “a lot” of money on the table because it would have “silenced” him.

Flores said Dolphins owner Steve Ross presented him with the NDA and talked about it with him. The Dolphins called that “categorically false” in a statement released on Tuesday evening.

“This latest assertion by Brian Flores that Steve Ross mentioned an NDA to him is categorically false,” the statement said. “This just did not happen and we simply cannot understand why Brian continues this pattern of making unfounded statements that he knows are untrue. We are fully cooperating with the NFL investigation and look forward to all of the facts coming out which we are confident will prove that his claims are false and defamatory.”

Sounds convincing, right? Where is this guy coming from? The Dolphins simply cannot understand this pattern of unfounded, untrue statements! Of course, Florio of PFT is a lawyer, so unlike his readers – read the comments if you want to see the customary cluelessness of the average non-lawyer – he saw through the team’s statement immediately, as he next posted this:

Flores told Bryant Gumbel that the three-year head coach left a “lot” of money on the table by declining to sign a document that would have “silenced” him. The Dolphins issued a statement specifically denying that team owner Stephen Ross presented Flores with a non-disclosure agreement and spoke to Flores about it.

In response, the lawyers representing Flores posted the documents that Flores opted not to sign. The materials show that Flores specifically waived his buyout by not signing the documents that would have required him to forfeit any legal claims…. Thus, even if Ross wasn’t specifically involved in the communications regarding what Flores could and couldn’t say or do (oligarchy, after all, has its privileges), someone apparently was.

In other words, all the histrionic rhetoric about untrue and unfounded statements that are false and defamatory rely upon the team’s claim that it wasn’t Stephen Ross himself that offered him millions of dollars to sign an NDA, it was Stephen Ross’s representatives doing so on his behalf.

Keep this in mind any time you see a lawyer making a big deal about something being entirely and absolutely false. In most cases, the statement is 99 percent true, but there is some minor and irrelevant detail that isn’t correct. What is particularly dishonest is that they will a) use the detail as an excuse to deny the whole, then b) make an expanded statement that doesn’t refer to the errant detail at all and is completely false.

In the Miami case, the team lawyers actually came out and expanded “This latest assertion by Brian Flores that Steve Ross mentioned an NDA to him is categorically false” to “we did not ask Brian Flores to sign an NDA” even though the documentary evidence clearly proves that they did the latter.

Never forget that lawyers have absolutely no hesitation about lying to the media, the other party, and the judge in any and all circumstances. But they generally do so in a manner that the average individual is unlikely to easily see or understand.

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Twitter and Treason

Mike Pence not only failed to do his duty as Vice-President of the United States on January 6, he also orchestrated the false claim that he did not have the authority to reject illegitimate electoral votes despite a brilliant constitutional scholar making the clear case that he did.

J. Michael Luttig: I was first called by the vice president’s outside counsel, Richard Cullen, on the evening of Jan. 4. We now know that that was after the fateful Oval Office meeting that day between the president and vice president, where John Eastman made the argument that the vice president could overturn the election unilaterally as presiding officer.

Ryan Lizza: And you know John Eastman?

Luttig: John Eastman was one of my clerks — over 25 years ago — and Richard Cullen is one of my closest friends in all of life. And we had been, at that point, talking seemingly every day — if not multiple times a day — throughout the entire Trump administration because, of course, our close friend, Bill Barr, was attorney general.

So he called me. I was having dinner. No big deal: this is like your best friend calling. He called the night of the 4th and says, “Hey, Judge, what do you know about John Eastman?” And I said, “He was a clerk of mine 30 years ago.” He says, “Well, what else do you know?” I said, “I don’t know. John’s an academic, he’s a professor, he’s a constitutional scholar — and he’s a brilliant constitutional scholar.”

Lizza: This is sort of shocking to hear you say this, considering the way that most people have been introduced to John Eastman.

Luttig: Well, read everything that was written about him before, you know, Jan. 6.

Lizza: So that’s interesting: the person who was the architect of the attempted coup, essentially — I think it’s fair to use that language — was actually a well-respected legal mind with sound views of the Constitution and not some legal quack.

Luttig: That’s correct: The farthest thing from it. So Richard said, “Well, you don’t know, do you?” And I said, “Know what?” He said, “John’s advising the president and the vice president that the vice president has this authority [to reject electoral votes] on January 6” — two days hence. And I said, “Wow, no, I did not know that. Well, look, you can tell the vice president that I said that he has no such authority at all. And Richard said he knows that, I said OK, and we hung up.

The “legal authority” cited by Pence was a tweet from a man who didn’t know how to use Twitter and hadn’t even read the Constitutional case presented by the well-respected scholar. All the talk about a coup is nothing more than projection by the traitors who successfully accomplished one by stealing the election with around 20 million fake votes.

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They Were Always Bluffing

As I predicted, Austria is relaxing its Covid restrictions rather than enforcing its much-ballyhooed vaccine mandates:

Austria will lift most of its remaining COVID-19 restrictions by March 5, including scrapping an earlier closing time of midnight for bars and restaurants and allowing nightclubs to reopen, Chancellor Karl Nehammer said on Wednesday.

The government said the steps were being taken cautiously with daily new infections hovering below their record peak and a manageable situation in hospitals due to the smaller incidence of severe cases in the latest wave of the coronavirus, dominated by the highly contagious Omicron variant.

Most, though obviously not all, vaccine mandates were nothing more than a bluff. Remember, evil always prefers your consent through submission. Threatening consequences, but not following through on the threat, has proven to be a moderately effective way to obtain compliance among the weak-willed and weak-minded.

Learn to recognize the patterns. Pattern recognition is prediction.

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Portrait of a Promethean

This socialite is the sort of individual in whose garden one would dread to dig. Note the customary link to the world of money as well as the charity circuit.

A Connecticut socialite has pleaded guilty to inappropriately filming minors as part of a mysterious plea deal in which other more serious child sex abuse charges were dropped.

Hadley Palmer, 53, is a mother-of-four, financier’s wife and the daughter of a wealthy hedge fund founder. She lives in Belle Haven, Connecticut, in a $10million home and has four kids with her estranged husband Bradley.

Palmer is a regular on the Connecticut social scene and is regularly photographed at charity events but in October last year, she was arrested on charges of felony voyeurism, felony invasion of privacy and felony causing injury to a child. More serious charges of employing a minor in an obscene performance, a Class A felony, and possession of child pornography, were on the table.

The case has only just been brought to light by matter of the plea deal – one of the only publicly available documents in the case. It was reported by The Associated Press – which has been fighting to make the story public – on Monday.

After her arrest in October, Palmer filed an application for a special probation program known as ‘accelerated rehabilitation’ which immediately sealed the file…. Legal experts tell the Associated Press – whose reporters opposed the seal – that it was a highly unusual move for her file to be sealed immediately and many say she did not even qualify for accelerated rehabilitation. They are demanding to know why she has been able to hide from public view, when other defendants have not.

This is what post-Christian societies look like. There is one law for the wicked and another for those upon whom they prey. When you see people who are not being held accountable for their confirmed crimes, and when you see their punishments are excessively light to the point of being absurd, then you can be certain that it is a member of the Promethean cult that has been exposed.

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Diversity Time Bombs

One danger of hiring Diversity Officers that has hitherto been ignored is the way their customary posture-and-lament routine places their employers at serious legal risk due to the way their rhetorical posturing will be interpreted as damning legal evidence of structural bias within the organization.

The civil lawsuit filed by former Dolphins coach Brian Flores includes this damning quote at paragraph 7 from Troy Vincent, the NFL’s longtime executive V.P. of football operations: “There is a double standard, and we’ve seen that . . . And you talk about the appetite for what’s acceptable. Let’s just go back to . . . Coach [Tony] Dungy was let go in Tampa Bay after a winning season. . . Coach [Steve] Wilks, just a few years prior, was let go after one year . . . Coach [Jim] Caldwell was fired after a winning season in Detroit . . . It is part of the larger challenges that we have. But when you just look over time, it’s over-indexing for men of color. These men have been fired after a winning season. How do you explain that? There is a double standard. I don’t think that that is something that we should shy away from. But that is all part of some of the things that we need to fix in the system. We want to hold everyone to why does one, let’s say, get the benefit of the doubt to be able to build or take bumps and bruises in this process of getting a franchise turned around when others are not afforded that latitude? . . . [W]e’ve seen that in history at the [professional] level.”

Paragraph 8 attributes this quote to NFL senior V.P. and chief diversity & inclusion officer Jonathan Beane: “Any criticism we get for lack of representation at the GM and head coach positions, we deserve. We see that we’re not where we want to be. We have to do much better. We’re focusing on all roles at the league, and all these roles are key roles . . . But certainly at the top of the house, general manager and head coach, that’s the responsibility of the NFL to make sure that we are representing our current fan base and we’re representing those that are in the league today. And if you look at it right now, we’re grossly underrepresented.”

Shed no tears for the NFL. It couldn’t happen to a more deserving organization; the NFL absolutely deserves to suffer for its embrace of its own convergence. But it is a salient lesson in the foolishness of permitting activists inside one’s organization, and the intrinsic danger of permitting even seemingly harmless token gestures in the direction of diversity, inclusion, and equality.

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No Corporate Mandate

But the nose of the federal camel into health care permits the health care mandate to stand:

The Supreme Court has stopped the Biden administration from enforcing a requirement that employees at large businesses be vaccinated against COVID-19 or undergo weekly testing and wear a mask on the job.

At the same time, the court is allowing the administration to proceed with a vaccine mandate for most health care workers in the U.S.

The court’s orders Thursday during a spike in coronavirus cases was a mixed bag for the administration’s efforts to boost the vaccination rate among Americans.

The court’s conservative majority concluded the administration overstepped its authority by seeking to impose the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s vaccine-or-test rule on U.S. businesses with at least 100 employees. More than 80 million people would have been affected.

It’s not an unreasonable outcome. It’s hard to argue with the logic presented by the Supreme Court.

The challenges posed by a global pandemic do not allow a federal agency to exercise power that Congress has not conferred upon it. At the same time, such unprecedented circumstances provide no grounds for limiting the exercise of authorities the agency has long been recognized to have,” the court wrote in an unsigned opinion.

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Partygate Confirmed

The British Prime Minister, his wife, and 38 or so of his closest political associates are confirmed to have broken the lockdown laws.

At 6pm on May 20, 2020, the spring sky was still a deep blue, with the lawn bathed in dappled sunlight. Those entering the garden were reportedly met with a buffet-style spread of crisps and sausage rolls, while the drinks table was stocked with gin and rosé as well as red and white wine.

Some revellers ‘brought their own booze’ from the claustrophobic Tesco Express store that does a roaring trade in beer, wine and sandwiches next to Westminster Tube station.

Some of the dozens of guests were said to have been looking to the sky with paranoia in case a drone flew over, while other admitted that the trashed garden after the party ended was also a giveaway.

And amid the paranoia, Downing Street staff were allegedly advised to ‘clean up’ their phones by removing information and pictures that could suggest lockdown parties were regularly held at No 10, according to The Independent. A senior member of staff told people it would be a ‘good idea’ to remove any evidence that might even imply they had attended.

However, up to 40 people are believed to have taken up Martin Reynolds’ invitation. They included the Prime Minister and his then fiancée, sources told the BBC. Carrie was said to have been drinking with her friend Mr Newman, then an adviser to Cabinet minister Mr Gove and now a senior figure at No10.

One official is said to have joked about the risk of being filmed by drones, The Times reported. There were also claims of complaints from Downing Street staff about the state of the garden afterwards.

With Britain basking in 80f (27C) sunshine – the hottest day of the year so far – our beaches and parks should have been packed. But this was May 20, 2020, and the Covid lockdown rules could not have been clearer.

Indeed, they were laid out by a Cabinet minister on live TV that very afternoon. Gripping the podium at the daily Downing Street press conference at 5pm, Oliver Dowden told the nation: ‘You can meet one person outside your household in an outdoor public place – provided that you stay two metres apart.’

These were not just the rules, they were the laws of the land.

Given the utter shamelessness of their actions, very single individual who attended should be prosecuted. And the elders of the Conservative Party should inform Boris Johnson that it is time for him to resign the office that he has disgraced so foolishly.

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