All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[Tami]

A couple hid in two Philadelphia churches for 843 days to avoid deportation. Now they are free

Oneita and Clive, 61, had fled from Jamaica's gang violence in 2004 with their children, after Oneita said her brother was killed and Clive was threatened. Though denied asylum, they were allowed to stay in the U.S., received work authorization, and had periodic check-ins with ICE.

They settled down and enjoyed a "quiet life" raising their seven children in Cedarville, a small town in New Jersey's Cumberland County, Oneita said. For roughly 14 years Oneita worked as a certified nursing assistant and Clive worked with heavy machinery at the Cumberland Dairy processing facility.

That was until August 2018, when ICE under the Trump Administration told the Thompsons they would not extend their stay for removal and were to report to them within days to be removed from the country.

The family turned to the New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia, which found them shelter and assisted in legal proceedings.

"It was a nightmare. From one day living the American dream...within four days all of that was just taken away," Oneita said.

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Children facing deportation are asking Trump and Biden for help

[Tami]

Ali Kinani was 9 years old when he was shot in the head by Blackwater guards on September 16, 2007 in Baghdad Iraq. @realDonaldTrump
just pardoned his killers. I represented Ali’s and five other families in a civil lawsuit against Blackwater and Erik Prince for the killings.

Twitter Link

This is who Trump gives pardons to.

[Tami]

NEW: Despite Trump’s fight to stay, last night White House staff received a detailed email from his exec. office with directions on the departing process. Employees will start leaving the week of 01/04.

Note addresses everything from cleaning microwaves to ethics debriefing.

Twitter Link

Good, can't wait for the Trumpkins to leave.

Update:

Trump White House staffers receive conflicting messages about their departure

Conflicting internal memos created confusion inside the White House on Wednesday about when staffers in the Executive Office of the President should begin preparing to leave work ahead of the transition next month.

In an email Wednesday morning from the White House Management Office, EOP staffers were instructed to “please disregard” an earlier memo that had been sent Tuesday informing them that they “will start departing” on the week of Jan. 4. Both messages were obtained by POLITICO.

[Surf]

I don't have so much as one iota of sympathy for Moscow Mitch who sat on a relief bill since May because he's a miserable freaking bastard. If Donnie Dumbass, clearly looking for kudos before he's kicked out on January 20th, wants to send me two grand instead of a mere $600, I'll take it. GLADLY!

Here, fuckin' here. The bottom of KY is truly one of the poorest places in the county not name West Virginia. I will never understand how this man keep such a stronghold in a place where so many per capita are destitute.

[Malvolio]

I notice we haven't been hearing as much about how senile Biden is (neither on this board, nor by Trump, nor by bot twitter).

He's not senile, but he is prone to make the occasional gaffe. He's been careful for months now, but I give him four or five days after the inauguration before he says something that gets everyone on Twitter joking about it.

That said, it will be nice to have Presidential quotes that are funny without being horrifying as well.

[JackDaw]

That's commerce, if it wasn't money it'd be something else. It's hardly exclusive to capitalism.

Of course..but the rules of the game are rigged against the third world.

[Tami]

The only really notable feature of the absurd new election lawsuit in D.C. is that the plaintiffs sued Mike Pence in his official capacity, meaning I suppose that the Justice Department will now be obliged to defend him from the many pages of absurdity.

Also, good luck attempting service on the Electoral College, which isn't really an organization or a thing. This is like suing "the states."

Prison inmates who represent themselves generally avoid goofy stuff like this.

This is a real lawsuit that's really trying to invalidate the results of the 2020 election in *every* state, based on a legal theory that would invalidate every modern presidential election.

It won't go anywhere for Many Reasons but somebody really did file it in federal court.

Twitter Thread Link

Court Filing

Court Docket

Judge Boasberg says the absurd new election-overturning case in D.C. will go forward just as soon as the @ThomasMoreSoc
files proof of service "on all Defendants," which will be challenging because one of the defendants is the Electoral College, which isn't really a thing.

The lawyers behind this much have gone to the Trump University Mail Order Law School.

[Tami]

Good compilation here from @Kevinliptakcnn re: Pres. Trump’s list of objections to the spending package last night vs. Pres. Trump’s own budget requests:

[Tami]

Trump detonates a truth bomb in the Georgia Senate races

President Trump might not realize it, but he just handed Democrats a big weapon to wield against the two Republican senators running in the Georgia runoffs.

By abruptly calling for $2,000 stimulus checks on Tuesday night, Trump inadvertently exposed core truths about the consequences of continued GOP control of the Senate — ones that Republicans are working to conceal — and about the post-Trump Republican Party in general.

In the video that Trump tweeted, he threatened to wreck the carefully negotiated settlement that led Congress to pass a $900 billion economic rescue package. He insisted that its $600 stimulus checks are insufficient and called on lawmakers to increase the payment to $2,000.

The hidden beauty of this is that it destroys the story that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) wants to tell about how we got here, a story that he hopes will salvage Loeffler, Perdue and his Senate majority.

McConnell agreed to this $900 billion deal in part to save his Georgia senators, admitting that they were “getting hammered” over opposition to stimulus checks. His spin now is that Republicans always wanted to offer this relief and that Democrats were the obstacle to it.

In reality, Democrats were the ones demanding more generous aid — and bigger stimulus checks — for many months. When the White House and Democrats were negotiating on a bigger package with larger stimulus payments that Trump wanted, McConnell opposed it. He didn’t want Republicans to have to vote on it, since many supported doing little to nothing.

[AnakinFlair]

Twitter Thread Link

Court Filing

Court Docket



The lawyers behind this much have gone to the Trump University Mail Order Law School.

Here's another great Twitter feed for this insane lawsuit.

[SUPERECWFAN1]

According to this Pelosi plans to hold a vote tomorrow on a bill to do $2,000 direct payments on what Trump wants to do in the House. Forcing a show down where Republicans will have to next week either accept it or turn it down and risk telling voters they don't care.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/stimulu...ty-2020-12-23/

[AnakinFlair]

Trump just vetoed the Defense Authorization Act. Because they want to take Confederate names off of military bases, and Section 230 wasn't addressed.

[Tami]

Here's another great Twitter feed for this insane lawsuit.

It's insane. The points I kinda got from it are that 'State Legislatures should decide the vote' and 'All States must follow this rule and be uniform in how the elections work' and 'every election since the 1880's if not the founding of the country is invalid because individual states can run elections however they choose instead fo uniformly allowing state legislatures to decide'.

That's about as much as I could extract from it.

Basically they want our elections to be like Russia's and controlled by the government instead of letting the voters vote. They want to undermine the Constitution.

[DrNewGod]

It's insane. The points I kinda got from it are that 'State Legislatures should decide the vote' and 'All States must follow this rule and be uniform in how the elections work' and 'every election since the 1880's if not the founding of the country is invalid because individual states can run elections however they choose instead fo uniformly allowing state legislatures to decide'.

That's about as much as I could extract from it.

Basically they want our elections to be like Russia's and controlled by the government instead of letting the voters vote. They want to undermine the Constitution.

It's not so much that they want to undermine the Constitution. It just happens to be inconveniently in the way of what they do want, so they don't care whether they happen to undermine it.

[Tami]

It's not so much that they want to undermine the Constitution. It just happens to be inconveniently in the way of what they do want, so they don't care whether they happen to undermine it.

That is a good way of putting it.