Tag: politics

The US Supreme Court has made it official: you steal it, you keep it:

Former president Donald Trump has seen his last remaining chance to reverse the outcome of November’s election slip away, with the Supreme Court refusing to take up his last challenge to Wisconsin’s voting process.

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to consider Trump’s case against the state of Wisconsin, in which the then-candidate had accused the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) of violating both the Constitution and state law regarding the manner in which they set up mail-in voting for the weeks leading up to Election Day – along with a litany of other complaints.

Monday’s rejection of the certiorari petition thus appears to finish off any chances the former president might have had to keep his position in the Oval Office. As distant a possibility as winning a favorable SCOTUS disposition might have seemed, even the slightest of chances would have represented an improvement over the self-defeating option the plaintiffs opted for.

This concludes the judicial portion of the program. The legislative portion ended some time ago. The question is, is there a third act in the cards?

 I think we can safely conclude that dementia won.

“The vast majority of economists, left, right, and center, from Wall Street to the private, uh, the private, ah ah ah economic private polling initiatives, the economists as I said, left, right, and center, say in addition to the needs that the people have, we need this to grow the economy. That if we haven’t spent this money and recreated the kind of incentive for people to be able to make a good living, that we’d be in real trouble.”

– Not-President Joe Biden

Also, it’s pretty much only Keynesian economists, of the neo- and post- varieties, that still subscribe to the stimulus concept that observably hasn’t been working at all since the early 1970s. Remember, Keynesian economics do not account for debt as a variable in any way, shape, or form, which is why they are increasingly irrelevant with every passing year.

Forget conspiracy theories, Q, and stolen elections. Ignore the Ides of March. Simply apply Ockham’s Razor to the so-called Biden “presidency”:

No news conference. No Oval Office address. No primetime speech to a joint session of Congress.

President Joe Biden is the first executive in four decades to reach this point in his term without holding a formal question and answer session. It reflects a White House media strategy meant both to reserve major media set-pieces for the celebration of a legislative victory and to limit unforced errors from a historically gaffe-prone politician.

Biden has opted to take questions about as often as most of his recent predecessors, but he tends to field just one or two informal inquiries at a time, usually in a hurried setting at the end of an event.

In a sharp contrast with the previous administration, the White House is exerting extreme message discipline, empowering staff to speak but doing so with caution. Recalling both Biden’s largely leak-free campaign and the buttoned-up Obama administration, the new White House team has carefully managed the president’s appearances, trying to lower the temperature from Donald Trump’s Washington and to save a big media moment to mark what could soon be a signature accomplishment: passage of the COVID-19 bill.

Also, not the President. This is not a “White House media strategy”. It’s a “Weekend at Biden’s” strategy.

I have no interest whatsoever in anything CPAC-related, nor am I particularly interested in what Trump has to say in the wake of his failure to metaphorically cross the Rubicon. What separates the winners of history from the losers is acting at the moment of crisis, and as far as we can tell, President Trump failed to act. While it’s now clear that something is going on behind the scenes in Washington DC, it is equally clear that whoever is calling the shots does not answer to Donald Trump, at least not anymore.

I’m not personally down on Donald Trump. I still think he was the greatest President since Andrew Jackson. I’d be happy to see him run again in 2024 if the election system is going to be secured between now and then. But, based on the imperfect information we presently possess, I think he would have done better to emulate Caesar than Cincinnatus.

Anyhow, feel free to discuss the speech here.

I think it’s a little late to talk about “dignity” with regards to Creepy Joe’s Fake Administration:

The Chinese government forcibly anally swabbed U.S. diplomatic officials as part of the Chinese Communist Party’s new Covid testing protocols “in error,” prompting Joe Biden’s U.S. State Department to  beg China to stop violating the “dignity” of Biden officials.

VICE and the Washington Post were among the first outlets to report the story, in which China originally promised to stop anally swabbing State Department officials after complaints from the Biden administration, but has now reversed course and denied forcibly applying the test in the first place.

“The State Department never agreed to this kind of testing and protested directly to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs when we learned that some staff were subject to it,” a spokesperson from Biden’s State Department reported to VICE on Wednesday.

Let’s face it, the Chinese know perfectly well that Biden didn’t win. And now they’ve got carte blanche to do whatever they want, lest they expose the fraud. This is just a public humiliation ritual.

It’s fascinating to see how quickly the Narrative has shifted on Gov. Cuomo, who has gone from hero to target of a two-minute hate campaign.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is calling for an investigation into Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s mounting nursing home crisis.

“I support our state’s return to co-equal governance and stand with our local officials calling for a full investigation of the Cuomo administration’s handling of nursing homes during COVID-19,” the Queens Democrat wrote in a statement Friday.

“Thousands of vulnerable New Yorkers lost their lives in nursing homes throughout the pandemic. Their loved ones and the public deserve answers and transparency from their elected leadership, and the Secretary to the Governor’s remarks warrant a full investigation.”

The Cuomo administration is under fire over its alleged cover-up of New York nursing home deaths, which a state attorney general probe found were 50 percent higher than state authorities said.

Last week, The Post revealed that Cuomo’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa, privately admitted to state lawmakers that the administration deliberately withheld data on COVID-19 nursing home deaths from federal prosecutors out of fear that the true numbers would “be used against us.”

Even Alec Baldwin is piling on. What’s next, a stern denunciation by the woman who ate Taylor Swift? We haven’t hit peak curiousitude yet. Things just keep getting curiouser and curiouser…. 

Despite the best efforts of his lawyers to throw the trial, President Donald Trump was acquitted by the U.S. Senate today.

The second impeachment trial of President Donald Trump fizzled to a predictable close on Saturday as senators voted largely along party lines to acquit the U.S. president of the charge against him, ending a historic chapter in American political history. 

Trump was acquitted on the charge—”incitement of insurrection”—by a vote of 57-43, failing to achieve the necessary threshold of 67 votes.

That’s good news. Now restore the office already, please….

 Anyone with an IQ over 115 is probably better off defending themselves, on average, than relying on a lawyer in most circumstances. It would astonish you to know how few lawyers even bother to read the material that is directly relevant to the situation; some litigators even go so far as to pride themselves on refusing to read anything. They read the judge, you see. Or the jury.

President Donald Trump was set off by the defense mustered by his legal team at the start of his Senate impeachment trial, raging at key admissions and a presentation that appeared to drive away a key Republican vote.

Trump, viewing the proceedings from his new home at Mar-a-Lago, was aghast that one of his lawyers, Bruce Castor, acknowledged the potency of the opening argument put forward by House Democratic impeachment managers, ABC News reported. 

Castor even acknowledged that his team changed course after viewing the Democrats’ presentation, which featured dramatic video of Trump supporters storming the Capitol and taunting police officers with obscenities as they bashed in doors and windows. 

‘I’ll be quite frank with you, we changed what we were going to do on account that we thought that the House managers’ presentation was well done,’ Castor admitted. ‘And I wanted you to know that we have responses to those things.’ 

During three-and-half hours of debate on the Senate floor Tuesday, the defense and prosecution had the chance to argue whether holding an impeachment trial of a former official is in line with the Constitution.

Several Republicans, however, are ridiculing Trump’s defense team for missing the point of their outlined argument against the constitutionality of the timing of the proceedings. 

‘I thought the President’s lawyer – the first lawyer just rambled on and on and on and didn’t really address the constitutional argument,’ Texas Senator John Cornyn told reporters outside the chamber following his vote against moving forward. 

It doesn’t surprise me at all that even a very high-priced lawyer would completely miss the point of the actual argument. From what I’ve seen, most of them – not all, but most – have a tendency to do the legal equivalent of “read until offended”. The legal version is “read until you recognize a term of art that might serve your objective”, then focus on relying upon that to the exclusion of all context, relevance, or consequence. The more procedural, as opposed to substantive, the better. And if anyone happens to point out that the application doesn’t make any sense in light of the context, relevance, or consequence, snort derisively that they just don’t understand the term of art or how the law works.

This inability to read correctly, by the way, is how many insane legal concepts are enshrined into law over time. One lawyer with a weak case presents an argument based on an out-of-context sentence, which a clueless judge erroneously accepts at face value. Once an appeals court accepts the same out-of-context argument, the new precedent is established, which gradually metastasizes up throughout the circuit, until the U.S. Supreme Court either cements the new precedent into law or throws it out entirely.

Translation: how the bipartisan ruling party tried to hide their steal of the 2020 election for the Deep State:

In a way, Trump was right.

There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.

The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.

Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. “The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,” says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program.

This is an outright confession spun for the suckers. 

Then why are Congressional Democrats clearly so terrified of it?

House Democrats are heading into a showdown with Republicans Thursday over GOP Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s past promotion of conspiracies that threatens to provoke an escalating cycle of political retaliation.

The conflict over Greene is one of two that had been festering for House Republicans and reflect tension in the party over its future direction and former President Donald Trump’s continued influence even after he was voted out of office.

GOP lawmakers Wednesday night decided to stand with both Trump loyalists and the old-line establishment. They rejected pressure from Democrats to take steps on their own to punish Greene, who has aligned herself closely with the former president, and voted to keep Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming as one of their leaders despite scathing criticism over her vote to impeach Trump after a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.

“It was a very resounding acknowledgment that we need to go forward together,” Cheney, 54, told reporters after a more than four-hour meeting of House Republicans where she and Greene were the main topics. She did not apologize for the impeachment vote, according to other lawmakers in the room.

Democrats are continuing the battle over Greene. Earlier Wednesday, they set up a vote on the House floor to remove her from the two committees she was assigned by GOP leadership, Education and Labor and Budget.

Just an observation. (whistles innocently)