Politico: Joe Scarborough trashes special counsel's report

Joe Scarborough trashes special counsel’s report

Scarborough, a former Republican representative who’s now a harsh critic of former President Donald Trump, said that Hur, “from Trump university,” was playing the role of a neurologist and a lawyer in the report. Hur concluded that Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified information but that criminal charges weren’t warranted.

“So bizarre. So many people immediately heard these random conclusions, irrelevant conclusions, politically charged, Trump-like ramblings,” Scarborough said on the program. “Why in the world would he put that in a report? His neurological assessment of Joe Biden and secondly why Merrick Garland would release garbage like that in the Justice Department.”

In the report, Hur stated that Biden couldn’t recall when his son Beau died and said a jury would be sympathetic to Biden, who was described as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Prediction: the Scotus ruling is gonna be bonkers

It sounds like Jackson, of all people, is questioning why the office of president was left off the specifically enumerated offices covered in the Insurrection Clause -- like one of the leading concerns in 1867 was whether some former Johnny Reb was gonna get elected president.

Meanwhile the conservative judges are asking questions to question the wisdom of having different major candidates on only some states' ballots. In other words, they're calling into question the US Constitution's granting to the states the power of administering their own elections. The conservatives, I suspect, are just about do a perfect flip-flop on States' Rights and try to invalidate the original intention of the Framing Fathers.

The Supreme Court is about to throw gasoline on the fire and ruin its residual reputation

Today's magical discovery

If you carry an avocado in your coat packet for too long, it turns into guacamole on its own
🥑

Good lord, this dumbbutt and his dumbbutt lawyers

In Vox the ever informative Li Zhou (Lee Joe) breaks down the Trump lawyers' surprisingly foolish arguments to the SCOTUS. She's quickly becoming my favorite political reporter, after Rachel Maddow.

Essentially Trump's case for not getting booted off the Colorado ballot it has two arguments. One is substantive, rooted in the Bill of Rights, and the other is positively bonkers. Guess which one Trump's lawyers is going with.

The serious argument is basically a due process argument. Trump hasn't been found guilty of insurrection; he is only been determined to have participated in insurrection on January 6th (and in my opinion earlier in 2020 as part of the planning for the insurrection and the fraudulent elector schemes) as a legal finding a fact. It's not a verdict.

There's also the wacky argument, the "spoiled child trying to wiggle out of punishment using word games" argument that the president of the United States is not an officer of the United States.

And surprisingly half of their brief to the scotus, and most of their formal argument in that brief, is dedicated to the egregiously silly case that the president is not in officer. The due process argument, something that the SCOTUS 6 could at least hang a week finding on, is barely mentioned in the brief

I can't tell if they're really that drunk, or if Trump's lawyers are just going with the one argument he's intellectually capable of grasping--that whatever words mean in reality, they don't have to mean that when Trump is involved. Instead of an argument de juris or an argument de facto, it's basically an argument de testicules, an argument made just flex on how big his balls are. Basically he's telling the four justices who are not Thomas or Alito that they're going to have to vote in his a favor regardless of what the law actually says or how stupid his arguments get.

I need some help with genocide explanation

I'm having a running argument with a colleague.

Part of the discussion has turned to Vladimir Putin's insistence that Ukraine isn't really a separate nationality from Russia, as laid out in his famous On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians essay.

Now I've made all the familiar arguments like (a) if they were the same people, he wouldn't have to invade them, (b) Russia has repeatedly attacked Ukraine from the Holodomor in the 1930s to the Crimea invasion in 2014 to the suppression of the Ukrainian language under the czars, (c) they're actually separate languages, and (d) Russia may have evolved out of Ukraine, but saying they're the same is like saying the UK should be controlled by the US.

But when it turns to the genocidy parts of Russia's treatment of Ukraine, beside the erasure of forced depatriation of Ukrainian civilians and handing Ukrainian children over to being adopted by Russian couples, I also want to point out how denial of the Ukrainian ethnicity from Russian is also a stop in genocide.

The literature I've found so far says that dehumanization, calling an out-group community subhuman, is a step toward genocide. So is the symbolization or otherization, making the unique features of the targeted group seem lesser or hateable. But denying the separateness of the Ukraine people is almost the opposite of that--saying that they're not different from us, so they have to be loyal to us.

I've looked at the 10 stages of genocide and the 8 stages of genocide and seen plenty on denial of citizenship of a targeting minority. Only what Russia is doing at home is forcing Russian citizenship on reluctant Ukrainians, Which feels like erasure, but I don't see it listed among the steps of genocide per se. Isn't it?

So far I haven't found any literature by experts on the topic that defines not the emphasis on their separateness, but rather the denial of their separateness that is genocidal in nature.

Can someone help me find a source on this?

(please don't bother posting non-answers like "don't waste your time on people like that" -- I'm looking for help for me as much as for my interlocutor)

No, seriously, Trump is taking credit for stock market performance under Biden

Trump claims credit for record-high stock market under Biden

Former President Trump, who has predicted economic doom if he’s not elected back to the White House, said Monday he should get credit for the stock market’s recent record highs, more than three years after he left office.

In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump claimed that polls that show him ahead of President Biden in a hypothetical rematch in November are driving the optimistic outlook on Wall Street.

“THIS IS THE TRUMP STOCK MARKET BECAUSE MY POLLS AGAINST BIDEN ARE SO GOOD THAT INVESTORS ARE PROJECTING THAT I WILL WIN, AND THAT WILL DRIVE THE MARKET UP,” Trump wrote in an all-caps missive on Truth Social.

Biden’s campaign team mocked the post, describing it as Trump “desperately trying to take credit for the stock market hitting record highs under President Biden.”

The Hill/Decision Desk HQ analysis of polls shows Biden and the GOP front-runner, Trump, in a close race in a general election match-up, with Trump ahead by an average of 2.2 percentage points.

I missed this a few days ago: Lindsay Graham has flipflopped on Trump *again*

Dude's a political windsock. Totally squealed on Trump to the Atlanta DA.

If Trump is Hitler, Evangelicals were Poland. The GOP establishment is France.

Nikki Haley is like this last little French general, barely holding out with insufficient troops in some little corner of Bordeaux, waiting for the buzz of bombers and growl of panzers to emerge over the horizon and finish her off.

Already the quislings, Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, JD Vance, men who once had the lights to call Trump a tyrant, an American Hitler, a thug, a bully, one by one they've all bent the knee and kissed the ring and licked the poop-smeared boot. These good little quislings are now packing their bags, learning the rituals of Maga sycophancy, and planning their moves to Vichy to keep their precious seats.

Today's Republicans line up so good. The party of moral panics and Joseph McCarthy and WMDs, they've always excelled at obedience; they've always sung the praises of Main Street while kowtowing to Wall Street. I suppose they're pretending that Trump won't be a harsher master, those fools. When Trump is done with them, I'm sure they'll line up again and go away silently, compliantly.

The Republican continent has fallen, just like in 1940, to the quiet glee of who's ever watching from the Kremlin. Trump just had to kick them hard enough a couple of times and, like a beaten hound dog, they beg for forgiveness and believe they deserve it.

Bullies always get their way, at least for a little while. The decent Christians of the Republican Party praise the tyrant's name and pretend he's Jesus. Once again, like 2016 and 2020, it's down to us. The Democrats are England again, getting ready for the fall Blitz. Republicans couldn't stand up to a fascist, even when they've said before his triumph that they see the insanity and the bully in their leader. Some who prostrate themselves before their master Trump now even called him a fascist before they fell in line.

Oh, two or three got away, I guess, hopped on a plane and fled the continent. Most have formally left the party: Liz Cheney, George Conway--even Matt Romney will cave in soon enough, or fly away from the party a defeated man to retire and watch to see if democracy dies.

It's just you and me now, you, me, and maybe a hundred million other Democrats huddled on this island called small-d democracy, waiting our turn to fight the Hun. The big screeching maniac and his zombies will show up soon enough, and we'll fight them and their lies and their crazy conspiracies and their counterfactual spins. We'll fight them in juries as well as ballot boxes, we'll fight them in news articles and online comments; at family dinner table arguments and in voter drives. We'll fight them in red states and blue states and purple. We'll fight them in phone banks and fund drives and marching with placards in rallies wherever we can make it. We will never surrender.

It might seem surreal today, but this is where history has found us, standing up for liberal democracy in the land that gave it it's first home. A decade ago, few among us would have thought we were living in an age when our form of constitutional government, the proud traditions that sustained an industrial revolution, broke fascism and Jim Crow, and built an American empire, would be at risk of destruction from within. Flaws and corruption of the American way, of course, were always part of any large prosperous human society. But to witness self-blinded lunatics trying to destroy the Constitution while wrapped in a flag? This seemed like a monster destroyed at least since the Great Depression, if not since Appomattox.

But nope, the narcotic of tyranny is back and here we are, trying to "keep a republic" has Benjamin Franklin challenged us in 1787, 237 years ago. That old imperfect rule of law, that's what we're fighting for--having a true republic to pass on to our children and grandchildren. I feel fairly confident we can win, I really do, but I candidly have to tell you now we're in for one hell of a fight.

I'm glad you're with me.

Confirmed: facing facts is fatal to conservative movements

So long, Ronbo. Hope you saved a couple of books to sit down and burn with your kids at home.

3 yrs old video, Trump's gross reality. Disgusting, hearsay, confirmation biased, yuck.

I'll never look at Riff Raff the same again. I'm not sure how much I buy all of this, but it's hilarious.