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

[CaptainEurope]

In another decision that has legal Twitter pulling out their hair, Judge Loose Cannon appoints special master in Mar-a-Lago case and rejects DOJ request to revive criminal probe .


What’s next now that a special master has been chosen to review the Mar-a-Lago docs

US District Judge Aileen Cannon appointed Raymond Dearie, a Brooklyn based senior federal judge, to be the special master to review the materials that were seized. In an order setting the parameters of the review, she mostly sided with Trump’s proposals for the shape it could take, creating a much slower and extensive process than what the prosecutors had recommended.

In what was perhaps the biggest shot at the Justice Department, she also denied its request that the documents it seized that were marked as classified be carved out from the review, keeping in place her order blocking the criminal investigation from using them.

That move by Cannon sets the stage for the Justice Department to quickly put the dispute over the materials in front of an appeals court and perhaps even the Supreme Court in the coming days.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

In another decision that has legal Twitter pulling out their hair, Judge Loose Cannon appoints special master in Mar-a-Lago case and rejects DOJ request to revive criminal probe .


What’s next now that a special master has been chosen to review the Mar-a-Lago docs

This sounds like pure obstruction by Loose Cannon. Hopefully, DOJ has a plan in place to counter this nonsense.

[Kevinroc]

The judiciary is corrupt. The system is corrupt.

[Tendrin]

I think WBE will appreciate this link for his next Clay Higgins update.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/ocasio-co...215347935.html

Julia Mueller
Thu, September 15, 2022 at 2:53 PM
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on Thursday slammed Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) for his treatment of a witness during a House Oversight Committee hearing.

Higgins had a contentious exchange during the hearing with clean energy advocate Raya Salter, who he at various points referred to as “young lady” and “boo.”

“I’m trying to give you the floor, boo,” Higgins told Salter at one point as the two talked over one another. Higgins later tweeted about the exchange.

Salter accused Higgins’s state of being “owned” by the fossil fuel industry.

The committee was meeting to examine profits and climate pledges from Big Oil companies like Exxon and Shell in the context of the ongoing climate crisis.

Salter is the founder and executive director of the Energy Justice Law and Policy Center.

“Do you care about the planet, good lady? Like, do you have ecological concern, for real? … The Lord gave us dominion over the planet and the creatures thereof … from a biblical perspective, I am an environmentalist. I love my planet and the people and the creatures thereof. Do you?” Higgins asked Salter.

Ocasio-Cortez said she wanted to apologize to Salter for how Higgins had treated her, saying “the people do not deserve to see that.”

[JCAll]

Did we really go from "Republican politicians are kidnapping refugees" to "They were probably illegal and human trafficking is good sometimes actually" to "What about the cartels blah blah" in less than a day? I'm having a stroke...

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Did we really go from "Republican politicians are kidnapping refugees" to "They were probably illegal and human trafficking is good sometimes actually" to "What about the cartels blah blah" in less than a day? I'm having a stroke...

Right wingers repeatedly bend over backwards to justify the heinous actions of their elected leaders. It’s their default response.

[Jack Dracula]

You're talking like the last several years are the exact same as eighty-nine or the seventies.

How much cartel violence or kidnapping was actually spilling over the border in either of those times?

How many box trucks full of dead people that were being brought across the boarder were found in either of those times?

Two things can be true at the same time.

Are Republicans working an angle? Probably.

Is everything just as peachy as it was back then, and those same Republicans are completely blowing things out of proportion? Come on with that nonsense.

That isn’t the argument. The argument is whether the existence of sanctuary cities is making border enforcement more difficult in Texas and Florida thereby justifying the actions of Abbot and DeSantis. That seems to be what Mets is saying.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, as well as 2021, that “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” published profiles of U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, who as a member of the U.S. House, voted against equal pay for women multiple times, insisting that “women don’t want it”. She’s also a co-sponsor of the “Birther Bill”, denies that Mitt Romney ever passed a healthcare program in Massachusetts, and gave an infamous interview where she falsely claimed that the Affordable Care Act (which she also was a part of the “lie of the year” at Polifiact, predicting it would lead to death panels) was a violation of HIPAA, and when asked repeatedly to explain how that’s even possible, she just kept repeating the same falsehood robotically without actually providing any logical answer.

She was also a big proponent of the 2013 Government Shutdown, and on the day it began, went on FOX and Friends to optimistically predict that it would actually teach ordinary Americans about all the “big government” ideas that were being defunded that they can do without (which the opposite actually happened over the 16 day stretch). Our update on Blackburn continued covering her hyper-conservative voting record, as well as the fact that she spoke at the South Carolina Freedom Summit and claimed Christians were a persecuted minority in the United States. When reporters followed up on her remarks and asked her to name an example of such persecution, she failed to be able to cite a single one.

Marsha Blackburn was also particularly awful during the GOP's witch hunt after the Center for Medical Progress released their deceitful smear of Planned Parenthood, insisting that after all investigations had been concluded that Planned Parenthood had still been caught "selling baby body parts", and during the paranoia around the affair, attempted to use the House Intelligence Committee's investigation as a means to demand a complete list of every medical students, residents, or other medical personnel around the country who have ever participated in an abortion, because there's no way that such a thing would enable domestic terrorists in the radical anti-choice movement to assassinate those people (when they already have done so).

Through 2017, continued to make the rounds on cable news and with the media, where she can do things like insinuate that James Comey is a liar to help provide cover for Donald Trump while he’s investigated for accepting help from the Russians to get elected in exchange for dropping sanctions against them, or when she can be one of the few politicians who actually defended Donald Trump’s spur of the moment decision to ban transgendered soldiers from the military before he ever consulted the Pentagon about what kind of impact that might have. Make no mistake, she’s “all-in” on the Trump administration, and with any luck, she might get swept away with it at some point. Maybe when she was caught in the middle of the NRA/Russia connection, someone should have thrown a flag.

After she started catching some serious hell at her town halls in 2017, where she’s been raucously booed and openly been accused of lying, she responded to that treatment by going on CNN a week later to claim that the people who booed her weren’t actually from her district. The usually passive Wolf Blitzer fact-checked her on, pointing out that people had to show ID to prove they were from her district to get into the building in the first place.

Marsha Blackburn takes advantage of how red of a state Tennessee is, winning election to ther U.S. Senate to replace the retiring Sen. Bob Corker in 2018 with 55% of the vote. She was more than willing to rubber-stamp whatever judicial nominees the Trump administration put in front of her, regardless of how terrible of people they are, or how wildly unqualified they are for the job (which make no mistake, Marsha Blackburn has begun doing that as a Senator)…

We’re also going to note that Marsha Blackburn unilaterally blacked a bill in the Senate that would have required any presidential campaign that receives offers of assistance from an agent of a foreign government to report it to the FBI, opening the door for Russia to assist the 2020 Trump campaign the way they did in 2016. (And at least a dozen GOP Congressional candidates also accepted help from Russian hackers, per the Mueller report). This should come as little surprise, though, because Blackburn knows exactly how deep Trump is in it with Russia… after all, she was on the Trump transition team. She deemed the bill, submitted by Mark Warner, as “over-broad” and that “it should be done in a bipartisan way” even though outside of Blackburn, it had unanimous support. And that Warner offered to allow her to suggest how to amend it to make it not “over-broad” or “more bipartisan”, however the hell she assumes to interpret those words.

In January of 2020, Sen. Blackburn was predictably among the Republican senators who voted against allowing witnesses in the impeachment trial for Donald Trump, thereby making it a “trial”, and then voted to acquit him after said “trial” in spite of the mountain of evidence that he tried to solicit foreign aid in the 2020 elections from Ukraine by threatening to withhold aid from them.

For all the effort she put towards doing that, she’s been mostly twiddling her thumbs to do anything to help the country survive the economic impact of the coronavirus since passing the original stimulus bill back in March. She saves all of her energy for lashing out at the media for daring to fact-check her habitually lying ass, like the did after her fib-filled speech at the 2020 RNC.

[AnakinFlair]

In another decision that has legal Twitter pulling out their hair, Judge Loose Cannon appoints special master in Mar-a-Lago case and rejects DOJ request to revive criminal probe .


What’s next now that a special master has been chosen to review the Mar-a-Lago docs

Considering the national security implications of the recovered classified documents, could the DOJ or Defense Department just ignore the ruling? I can't believe that one incompetent judge could threaten the security of the nation like this.

Also, I know they are lifetime appointments so that no administration can just arbitrarily fire judges they don't agree with, but there has to be some way to remove someone so unqualified from the bench like this judge.

[Gray Lensman]

Considering the national security implications of the recovered classified documents, could the DOJ or Defense Department just ignore the ruling? I can't believe that one incompetent judge could threaten the security of the nation like this.

Also, I know they are lifetime appointments so that no administration can just arbitrarily fire judges they don't agree with, but there has to be some way to remove someone so unqualified from the bench like this judge.

It would make any later trial nearly impossible. All evidence that wasn't reviewed can be thrown out. The DoJ only has 2 moves now. Either accept or appeal.

[worstblogever]

Her voting record, just since 2020:

• January 31st, 2020: Marsha Blackburn votes against witnesses being allowed in the first impeachment trial of Donald Trump, effectively making it a “trial”.
• February 5th, 2020: Sen. Blackburn votes against the first impeachment of Donald Trump, in spite of the mountain of evidence showing that he solicited foreign assistance in the 2020 elections.
• February 25th, 2020: Blackburn votes for the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, an insane piece of anti-choice legislation that would ask abortion providers to try to admit aborted fetuses to a hospital if they were “alive” after the procedure, which is medically impossible given the age that abortions can be performed at.
• February 13th, 2021: Marsha Blackburn votes to acquit Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial, feeling that he deserves no punishment for inciting an attack on the Capitol and jeopardizing the lives of the legislative branch of our government.
• March 6th, 2021: Sen. Blackburn votes against the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, because he can’t be bothered to care if people need financial assistance during a pandemic.
• June 9th, 2021: Blackburn drafts a nonsensical resolution that is meant to combat “cancel culture” without explaining exactly what that’s even supposed to mean.
• July 10th, 2021: Marsha Blackburn does the important business of a U.S. Senator, specifically taking time out to do an interview with the white nationalist website Breitbart and continue a feud with pop star Taylor Swift over Swift’s relatively mild political stances, chastising her and telling her she would be one of the first “victims of socialism”.
• August 26th, 2021: Sen. Blackburn immediately politicizes the death of 11 members of the armed forces killed in an attack during the evacuation of Afghanistan, calling for President Biden to resign as a result.
• December 14th, 2021: Blackburn votes against raising the debt ceiling, jeopardizing the United States’ credit rating.
• January 12th, 2022: Marsha Blackburn rails against judicial nominee Andre Mathis, over SPEEDING TICKETS, which after the people she rubber-stamped during the Trump administration, certainly wasn’t a ridiculous excuse for trying to stop a person of color from becoming a federal judge.
• February 28th, 2022: Sen. Blackburn votes against the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would have established a right to physicians to perform abortions to save their patients’ lives.
• March 23rd, 2022: Marsha Blackburn gets on Twitter, and defiantly points out that the Constitution doesn’t award Americans the right to an abortion, just the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. People who aren’t idiots or drunk remind her the Constitution doesn’t mention those things, they’re actually in the Declaration of Independence.
• March 30th, 2022: Blackburn votes against putting the extremely qualified nominee, Judge Kentanji Brown-Jackson, onto the Supreme Court.
• April 4th, 2022: Marsha Blackburn trips over herself on Twitter again, claiming that Tennessee wants a border wall on their southern border, and people point out it's 1,000 miles away from the U.S. Mexico border, and unless they’re trying to keep out people from Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi… she’s a dumbass.
• May 26th, 2022: Sen. Blackburn votes against the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2022, because at this point, domestic terror is a policy plank of authoritarian Republicans.
• July 27th, 2022: Marsha Blackburn votes against the PACT Act, blocking additional funding towards veterans exposed to “burn pits” while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a vote conducted out of spite that Democrats passed the Act the prior day. Several Republicans are seen shaking hands and fist bumping to celebrate screwing over the vets, while releasing a series of photos of the Senate GOP Caucus filling USO boxes and claiming they “support the military”.

Marsha Blackburn truly “embraces stupid”, unflinchingly, as she argued in favor of “Neanderthal thinking” as a better approach to tackling the Covid-19 pandemic.

Yeah, that much. And the country will be stuck with Marsha Blackburn in the Senate until 2024. Just… great. Great.
 

[AnakinFlair]

So, that stunt of DeSantis flying migrants to Martha's Vineyard? Turns out it was so much worse than we thought.

Link goes to a video on Twitter of an official laying out exactly what happened, including the fact that officers of the Department of Homeland Security apparently chose random addresses of homeless shelters across the country to list as the addresses for the migrants, of the migrants being told there would be housing and jobs waiting for them, and a lot of horrible mis-information they were fed in an attempt to ultimately get them removed from the country for failing to comply with the laws, because they were given the wrong information to start with. To be honest, I had to stop the video about 2/3 of the way through, because I was so pissed off on their behalf.

[Mister Mets]

Considering the national security implications of the recovered classified documents, could the DOJ or Defense Department just ignore the ruling? I can't believe that one incompetent judge could threaten the security of the nation like this.

Also, I know they are lifetime appointments so that no administration can just arbitrarily fire judges they don't agree with, but there has to be some way to remove someone so unqualified from the bench like this judge.

It's really hard to come up with a system to fire judges for decisions you don't like that won't be abused against judges you like who do things that are controversial, but in your eyes necessary.

One underappreciated point is that Trump's insistence on a special master shows how atrocious his actions have been. He has allowed classified documents, which are supposed to have a well-documented chain of custody, to be intermingled with his own personal documents.

Did we really go from "Republican politicians are kidnapping refugees" to "They were probably illegal and human trafficking is good sometimes actually" to "What about the cartels blah blah" in less than a day? I'm having a stroke...

It's a bit misleading to suggest that the conservative response is that "they were probably illegal."

As a factual matter, the majority are almost certainly illegal (or to put it more politely, have not been granted legal citizenship and do not meet the strict standards for asylum.)

I'm curious how a sanctuary city in California or New York inhibits Texas from patrolling its borders. You may make assumptions that more illegals are attempting to cross the border because of the existence of sanctuary cities, but unless you can inarguably prove that's the actual reason for people crossing, it's just speculation.
Consider that New York City has been a sanctuary since 1989 and LA since the '70s, but only within the last several years has this status become so important to conservatives.

I do suspect that the existence of sanctuary cities, where the policy is to not enforce immigration laws, serves to attract undocumented immigrants, as an example of how inconsistent enforcement of existing immigration laws is.

That isn’t the argument. The argument is whether the existence of sanctuary cities is making border enforcement more difficult in Texas and Florida thereby justifying the actions of Abbot and DeSantis. That seems to be what Mets is saying.

The existence of sanctuary cities isn't the only thing that makes border enforcement more difficult. I also mentioned actions by the federal government.

A major one would be the Biden administration's decision to end the "remain in Mexico" policy.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politic...-mexico-policy

The DHS pushed a new policy for ICE to end raids on workplaces where there were undocumented immigrants.
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/12/10452...lace-raids-dhs

ICE officials were ordered not to prosecute anyone who had been in the country for twenty months, which led to 60,000 case closures.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/p...-facto-amnesty

The question about whether federal guidance to deportation officials violated federal laws will be addressed by the Supreme Court.
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/07...supreme-court/

You may think these are wise policies but that's different from whether it makes it easier or harder for states to enforce immigration laws.

[SUPERECWFAN1]

So, that stunt of DeSantis flying migrants to Martha's Vineyard? Turns out it was so much worse than we thought.

Link goes to a video on Twitter of an official laying out exactly what happened, including the fact that officers of the Department of Homeland Security apparently chose random addresses of homeless shelters across the country to list as the addresses for the migrants, of the migrants being told there would be housing and jobs waiting for them, and a lot of horrible mis-information they were fed in an attempt to ultimately get them removed from the country for failing to comply with the laws, because they were given the wrong information to start with. To be honest, I had to stop the video about 2/3 of the way through, because I was so pissed off on their behalf.

Well the people are rallying to help those that Governor DeSatan dropped off there with his buddy Abbott. Telling the camera..."You expect a Crisis....YOU...HAVE...FAILED..." Basically ruining a scheme to try and delve the state into chaos. I would love to see the states slapped with Federal lawsuits after this and see Florida pay more fines since they seem to do that a lot.

[shooshoomanjoe]

I don't know how to link on my phone but apparently Putin told Modi he's going to end his war in Ukraine. I wonder how true that is.