All purpose news and politics thread part v: The quickening

[Tendrin]

In other good news for WBE, Ted Yoho is RETIRING.

https://twitter.com/ChadPergram/stat...09827457486848

(Seriously, Articles of Impeachment *AND* Ted Yoho retiring? It's a good day.)

https://www.rollcall.com/news/florid...k-a-fifth-term

Florida Republican Ted Yoho said Tuesday on a local radio show that he would not run for reelection in 2020, honoring a pledge that he would not seek more than four terms in Congress.
Yoho, a large-animal veterinarian, made his announcement on Florida’s WSKY radio, according to the station’s website. His departure brings the number of retiring House and Senate members to 25, all but six of them Republicans.
The race for Yoho’s landlocked 3rd District in northern Florida is ranked Solid Republican by Inside Elections with Nathan R. Gonzales. In 2016, Trump won it by 16 percentage points.

[worstblogever]

In other good news for WBE, Ted Yoho is RETIRING.

https://twitter.com/ChadPergram/stat...09827457486848

(Seriously, Articles of Impeachment *AND* Ted Yoho retiring? It's a good day.)

https://www.rollcall.com/news/florid...k-a-fifth-term

Thank Christ. He was one of the biggest dumbasses in there. Although, he was surpassed for "Florida Man" status by Gaetz of late.

[worstblogever]

Just was watching last night's Seth Meyers, and he pointed out something to underline how bad at his job GOP counsel Steve Castor has been during impeachment...

It's not just that he's had his ass handed to him by Democratic counsel, by witnesses, by members of Congress, that he hasn't even read the GOP's version of the impeachment report when asked...

He showed up yesterday with his legal filings in a grocery store bag. Not a briefcase, not in a stack of folders... a goddamned grocery bag.

Looks real prepared.

[Tendrin]

Thank Christ. He was one of the biggest dumbasses in there. Although, he was surpassed for "Florida Man" status by Gaetz of late.

Seriously. I mean, I am not expecting much out of a district with that partisan lean but let's hope it's someone less toxic to the body politic.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

It's done, it's official, two Articles of Impeachment have been made against Trump. The vote might be next week.

This just occurred to me: the continuing resolution that's keeping the government running (and federal employees like me working) expires next week, 12:01 AM on Saturday the 21st I think. What are the chances a cornered and desperate Trump dusts off his shutdown threat if the Dems don't put the brakes on the impeachment proceedings?

[worstblogever]

This just occurred to me: the continuing resolution that's keeping the government running (and federal employees like me working) expires next week, 12:01 AM on Saturday the 21st I think. What are the chances a cornered and desperate Trump dusts off his shutdown threat if the Dems don't put the brakes on the impeachment proceedings?

Pretty sure it would make him look desperate and guilty as hell. And every government worker would go, "F*** you for trying to cut off my paycheck right before Christmas to save your orange ass, you dirty sonofab****."

Or some variant of that statement.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Pretty sure it would make him look desperate and guilty as hell. And every government worker would go, "F*** you for trying to cut off my paycheck right before Christmas to save your orange ass, you dirty sonofab****."

Or some variant of that statement.

I know that would be my variant. And any Republican who'd dutifully go along with Trump's threat, especially those with constituents in Virginia, California and other states with large numbers of federal workers would be committing political suicide since the GOP came up woefully short the last three times they shut down the government.

[BeastieRunner]

[Mister Mets]

Vox looks at Trump's judicial nominations, which is the area where the people who would prefer Larry Hogan as President to Bernie Sanders see Trump as being most successful. One interesting takeaway is that Trump's nominees tend to have impressive resumes.

Before he became president, Trump promised to delegate the judicial selection process to the Federalist Society, a powerful group of conservative lawyers that counts at least four Supreme Court justices among its members. “We’re going to have great judges, conservative, all picked by the Federalist Society,” Trump told a radio show hosted by the right-wing site Breitbart while he was still a candidate.

The Federalist Society spent decades preparing for this moment, and they’ve helped Trump identify many of the most talented conservative stalwarts in the entire legal profession to place on the bench.

There’s no completely objective way to measure legal ability, but a common metric used by legal employers to identify the most gifted lawyers is whether those lawyers secured a federal clerkship, including the most prestigious clerkships at the Supreme Court. Approximately 40 percent of Trump’s appellate nominees clerked for a Supreme Court justice, and about 80 percent clerked on a federal court of appeals. That compares to less than a quarter of Obama’s nominees who clerked on the Supreme Court, and less than half with a federal appellate clerkship.

In other words, based solely on objective legal credentials, the average Trump appointee has a far more impressive résumé than any past president’s nominees.

And they’re young, too. “The average age of circuit judges appointed by President Trump is less than 50 years old,” the Trump White House bragged in early November, “a full 10 years younger than the average age of President Obama’s circuit nominees.”

Trump’s nominees will serve for years or even decades after being appointed. Even if Democrats crush the 2020 elections and win majorities in both houses of Congress, these judges will have broad authority to sabotage the new president’s agenda.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-polit...federal-judges

[worstblogever]

Vox looks at Trump's judicial nominations, which is the area where the people who would prefer Larry Hogan as President to Bernie Sanders see Trump as being most successful. One interesting takeaway is that Trump's nominees tend to have impressive resumes.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-polit...federal-judges

Are you trying to gaslight people every day in this thread now?

Trump has literally nominated people who the American Bar Association refuses to endorse. There's an entire running Wikipedia entry about how unqualified or how unusual the nominations for his candidates have been.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald..._controversies

"Impressive resumes my ***."

[Michael Watkins]

gaslighting is all that republicans have left. it works on a small segment of the population.

[Mister Mets]

Are you trying to gaslight people every day in this thread now?

Trump has literally nominated people who the American Bar Association refuses to endorse. There's an entire running Wikipedia entry about how unqualified or how unusual the nominations for his candidates have been.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald..._controversies

"Impressive resumes my ***."

I'm aware that some liberals are upset about Trump's nominations. So I thought it was interesting that a left-leaning website made the argument for the qualifications of Trump's nominations.

A handful have failed on particular measures, but there are some metrics by which these are rather impressive. It's worth noting that when six judges have been rated unqualified, that is out of 162 total appointed (2 Supreme Court justices, 48 appellate judges, 112 district judges.)

One of the reasons for Trump nominees having impressed resumes is that filibuster reform by Democrats when they held the Senate and White House made it easier to nominate qualified candidates.

Similarly, nearly three-quarters of Obama’s post-reform appointees to the federal appellate bench clerked for a court of appeals judge — as compared to less than 38 percent of Obama’s pre-reform judges. One immediate impact of filibuster reform, in other words, is that it made it far easier for nominees with elite credentials to become federal judges.

Here’s why: In the pre-reform Senate, a sterling résumé was often a liability for a judicial nominee because it flagged the nominee as a potential candidate for a future Supreme Court appointment. Both parties can tell stories of fallen martyrs, like George W. Bush nominee Miguel Estrada or Obama nominee Goodwin Liu, whose immaculate résumés painted a target on their backs. Both Estrada and Liu fell to filibusters.

By filibustering plausible Supreme Court nominees before they got on the bench in the first place, the opposition party could diminish the governing party’s pool of potential justices and make it harder for the governing party to find an ideologically reliable Supreme Court nominee when the time came.

But filibuster reform did not just improve the quality of nominees’ resumes. It also cleared the path for known ideologues to join the bench. And it appears to be altering how many sitting judges behave.

As a sidenote, the Miguel Estrada situation is underappreciated in terms of just how unforgivably Democrats acted.

An internal memo by the staff of Dick Durbin suggested it was important to block judicial nominee Miguel Estrada partly because he was latino, and a potential Supreme Court pick.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/2004/02...robe-dems.html

The reason I'm posting is that these appear to be facts that some of the posters here seem unaware of, so I'm just doing my part to provide for more informed discussion.

If you think posting an article by Ian Millhiser of Vox is right-wing gaslighting, it shows an unwillingness to recognize when facts favor the other side.

[worstblogever]

I'm aware that some liberals are upset about Trump's nominations. So I thought it was interesting that a left-leaning website made the argument for the qualifications of Trump's nominations.

A handful have failed on particular measures, but there are some metrics by which these are rather impressive. It's worth noting that when six judges have been rated unqualified, that is out of 162 total appointed (2 Supreme Court justices, 48 appellate judges, 112 district judges.).

Can you name any administration that had more than three botched nominations within 8 years? Let alone six in three?

You can't. Because it's that bad right now. He nominated Stephen Menashi who isn't just a sexist tool, doesn't just have white nationalist beliefs... but when you look past that... HE NEVER SAT ON THE BENCH FOR A SINGLE CASE.

But hey, that resume looks GREAT.

Maybe for working at McDonald's. But not for getting Thurgood Marshall's seat.

[Tami]

Jersey City Shooting Live Updates: 6 People Killed, Including Officer

At least six people, including at least one police officer, were killed in Jersey City, N.J., on Tuesday after two people opened fire at a kosher market, officials said, touching off a firefight involving dozens of law enforcement officers that made the residential area take on the feel of a war zone.

Officials said the dead included three people in the market as well as two suspected shooters. The slain police officer was not immediately identified.

There was “no indication of terrorism,” an official said at a news conference.

Preliminary reports indicated that the episode began when an officer approached one of the gunmen in connection with an investigation of an earlier homicide and was shot dead, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

The gunmen then fled in a truck and eventually ended up at the kosher supermarket. But investigators believe that the store was chosen randomly and that the incident was not a hate crime.

For more than an hour, loud exchanges of gunfire rang out in the Greenville neighborhood of Jersey City, which is just across the Hudson River from Lower Manhattan. Helicopters circled overhead as police officers swarmed the streets.

They aimed handguns and long guns in every direction as they traveled down the street in formations, knocking on doors and ushering residents and business owners to safety.

The shooting started around 12:30 p.m., according to officials.

Jersey City’s mayor, Steven Fulop, said there were two separate incidents involved in the shootout. The first was at Bay View Cemetery, and the second took place at the kosher market near the intersection of Martin Luther King Drive and Bayview Avenue.

This one hits close to home for me.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, as well as 2018, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day posted profiles of John Kavanagh, an Arizona State Senator a man who proudly roasted his good pal, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, by forgetting at a roast you harass the guest of honor, and instead, chose to make a series of racially insensitive jokes at the expense of Hispanics. Kavanagh is also a big beneficiary of the prison industrial complex, having once been labelled by John Oliver on Last Week Tonight as a man who Satan waits in hell for, sharpening his pitchfork, because he defended Arizona's prison hospitals showing pure sugar into a woman's c-section surgical wound as a story that "should be taken with a grain of salt, or in this case, a grain of sugar".

Kavanagh is also wildly anti-immigrant, supporting SB1070, and wanting birthright citizenship granted by the 14th Amendment to be ignored. He's widening his portfolio of bigotry over time, though, trying to create a bill to criminalize transgendered individuals from using the "wrong" bathroom. Inexplicably, he's an Arizona politician who resents the use of solar power, as well. Kavanagh supported another one of those insane bills to allow any coin with gold or silver content to it to be used as legal tender in Arizona, and as a former police officer (because of course), Kavanagh was pulling for a bill in February 2015 which would have prevented the release of an officer's name from the media if they were involved in an incident where they had to use deadly force. That's right... in one of the worst eras in recent memory for police violence against the public, Kavanagh and his fellow Republicans decided to provide cover for the police to continue their behavior, or even allow it to get worse without the public being made aware.

A few years ago, Kavanagh also sponsored legislation that would allow a pharmacist to deny to prescribe birth control or other abortion drugs to patients no “moral grounds”, that law had some very sad consequences in June of 2018 when a Walgreens worker refused to fill a prescription for a woman seeking a drug to treat herself with following a miscarriage, and a CVS pharmacist refused to fill a hormone prescription for a transgendered customer.

Kavanagh has continued to make Arizona a more dangerous place to live, sponsoring legislation to attempt to eliminate background checks on gun sales at gun shows completely (so criminals or potential terrorists can buy them without worry), and also an insane anti-abortion bill to try and force doctors to attempt to “revive viable fetuses” after an abortion. This man makes the term “extremist” seem inadequate to describe his lunacy.

He currently is championing legislation to attempt to allow people to sue cities who don’t enforce immigration laws harshly enough for his liking, in particular cities like Tucson.

Kavanagh continues to be not just a man who Satan sharpens his pitchfork and waits for, but also a legislator, because he was just re-elected to another two year term in the 2018 elections, but only getting 37% of the vote in the effort. We're hoping that the fact that he can't manage more than that will end up helping up with him upset in 2020.