America - The Official Thread

[Liquid]

Do you know who also brags about hole-in-ones?

Goldfinger.

I imagine a game of golf with Trump is pretty much like how Gert Fröbe and Sean Connery acted out this masterpiece:

 

[Keef]

Marjorie's eligibility to run for office is being challenged and she's filed a lawsuit to block the challenge. Interestingly, a similar challenge against Cawthorne has been blocked by federal judges and thus appealed to higher courts.

Action is being taken to limit America's reliance on foreign resources and supply chains. It seems as though lessons have actually been learned from the Covid catastrophe, and economic issues caused by Russia sanctions have compounded the issue.

 

[Blitz24]

Marjorie's eligibility to run for office is being challenged and she's filed a lawsuit to block the challenge. Interestingly, a similar challenge against Cawthorne has been blocked by federal judges and thus appealed to higher courts.

I feel that believing in Jewish space lasers should automatically disqualify her but sadly that isn't a requirement.

 

[Keef]

Apparently Zelensky recorded a message that aired during the Grammys about an hour ago. Wow. We'll see how much attention that garners, as if our government isn't already focused enough.

 

[sirjim73]

It would mean having to use the phrase "aroused from my slumber" when describing your morning.

I'm not sure whether that's better or worse.

It would also mess up a classic Beatles song...

"Aroused from my slumber.
Got out of bed
Dragged a comb across my head..."

Just doesn't sound right.

 

[UKMikey]

I feel that believing in Jewish space lasers should automatically disqualify her but sadly that isn't a requirement.

You must be referring to the Death Star of David. It's like she could sense millions of voices crying out "make Alderaan America great again" and then they were abruptly silenced.

 

[Blitz24]

You must be referring to the Death Star of David. It's like she could sense millions of voices crying out "make Alderaan America great again" and then they were abruptly silenced.

It also fires bagels and lox, cheesecake and hamentaschen, depending on season.

 

[Pupik]

It also fires bagels and lox, cheesecake and hamentaschen, depending on season.

So that explains the recent cream cheese shortage. The Mossad was not answering my calls for help in this matter.

Death Star-shaped Hamentaschen would be very appropriate during Purim.

 

[Blitz24]

So that explains the recent cream cheese shortage. The Mossad was not answering my calls for help in this matter.

Death Star-shaped Hamentaschen would be very appropriate during Purim.

In two weeks it will be matzah in order to cause our enemies digestive issues!

 

[UKMikey]

It also fires bagels and lox, cheesecake and hamentaschen, depending on season.

Also dependant on the amount of Schwartz present.

 

[GBO Possum]

Republicans used to have a platform. I'm not sure how long ago that actually was, but they did.

Now? Not so much...

<snip>

Possibly in 2016, but since Trump took over, they are too afraid to have a policy platform, and choose to do whatever Trump wants. Nobody wants to contradict Dear Leader.

Source - Fox "News" - https://www.foxnews.com/politics/gop-no-new-2020-platform-trump-agenda

 

[Scaff]

So Tennessee has introduced some bat**** bills:

HB0233 removes statutes on marriage, which as I understand it would effectively remove age requirements!

Tennessee General Assembly Legislation

HN2779 effectively does a Texas with regard to abortion

‘Texas-style’ abortion bill advances in Tennessee House

House Bill 2779 would ban all abortions and allow anyone to sue those who help someone seek an abortion.

www.actionnews5.com

 

[Keef]

Frankly, I lost hope in any state below the Mason-Dixon years ago. Perhaps Georgia is the only one with any sense left, go Dawgs. Everything else is just a lost cause. I use every opportunity I can to espouse the superiority of the North, constantly reminding Southerners about the Civil War. I even have an "Undefeated out of Conference" decal with William Tecumseh Sherman's face on it on my rear window.

 

[Liquid]

just a lost cause.

Crusty, white Southerners:

Triggered

 

[TexRex]

In Which Reason and NRO Address the Rat ****ery of Ted Cruz

Ted Cruz Hates Due Process

During his Fox News appearance on Sunday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) said that Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson and other public defenders root

reason.com

Ted Cruz Is a Hypocrite on Public Defenders | National Review

Must one conclude that Ted Cruz has a “natural inclination” toward state laws that ban dildos?

www.nationalreview.com

 

[Populuxe]

For those that don’t want to go to twitter, this is the quoted screenshot.

 

[Famine]

So Tennessee has introduced some bat**** bills:

HB0233 removes statutes on marriage, which as I understand it would effectively remove age requirements!

It's clearly an oversight though, I mean, what Tennessee Republican could possibly want to remove age limits for (heterosexual) marriage? It's not like any of them would meet a 12-year old girl and wa...

John Rose (Tennessee politician) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

... oh.

 

[Danoff]

It's clearly an oversight though, I mean, what Tennessee Republican could possibly want to remove age limits for (heterosexual) marriage? It's not like any of them would meet a 12-year old girl and wa...

John Rose (Tennessee politician) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

... oh.

Looks like they got married as she completed her bachelors degree (4 years post high school, so probably about 22) and he was about 123 years old, give or take.

 

[Blitz24]

Looks like they got married as she completed her bachelors degree (4 years post high school, so probably about 22) and he was about 123 years old, give or take.

I don't think robbing the cradle works here. Maybe robbing the womb. No wonder they hate abortion.

 

[TexRex]

There may be some funny business going on with the edits to that page. It wasn't nearly as entertaining, but I checked out the Talk page and in the process was reminded of this:

I also did a shallow dive into the proposed legislation and discovered it was introduced (and subsequently passed) in committee by Tom Leatherwood.

 

[Famine]

Looks like they got married as she completed her bachelors degree (4 years post high school, so probably about 22) and he was about 123 years old, give or take.

Looks like they got married as she completed her bachelors degree (4 years post high school, so probably about 22) and he was about 123 years old, give or take.

I don't think robbing the cradle works here. Maybe robbing the womb. No wonder they hate abortion.

There may be some funny business going on with the edits to that page. It wasn't nearly as entertaining, but I checked out the Talk page

It's fair to say I don't quite "get" the US school system, but...

Chelsea Brooke Rose (nee Doss) is apparently 33 years old, which means when they married on January 8 2011 she was either 21 or 22. That tallies with the fact she "graduated" high school in 2007, when she would have been around 17 or 18.

It also looks like she first met John Rose in February 2008 (so 18-19 years old), at a "Future Farmers of America" (FFA) gig, and she looked like this:

Now, I'm not saying she looks 13 there and that might be what attracted the Republican Representative, but I don't have an entirely valid way of ending that sentence.

 

[Danoff]

It's fair to say I don't quite "get" the US school system, but...

Chelsea Brooke Rose (nee Doss) is apparently 33 years old, which means when they married on January 8 2011 she was either 21 or 22. That tallies with the fact she "graduated" high school in 2007, when she would have been around 17 or 18.

It also looks like she first met John Rose in February 2008 (so 18-19 years old), at a "Future Farmers of America" (FFA) gig, and she looked like this:

View attachment 1134333

Now, I'm not saying she looks 13 there and that might be what attracted the Republican Representative, but I don't have an entirely valid way of ending that sentence.

Yea she's one of those people that looks younger than she is. Doesn't strike me as 18-19 in that picture. That being said, he looks like the crypt keeper.

 

[TexRex]

SMFH

Furries in Wisconsin schools? Districts respond to alleged ‘Furry Protocols’

(WFRV) – A viral video of a UW-Oshkosh professor and a Wisconsin talk show host is causing some school districts in Wisconsin to respond to alleged ‘Furry Protocols’. There have b…

www.wearegreenbay.com

 

[TexRex]

 

[Sprite]

You must be referring to the Death Star of David. It's like she could sense millions of voices crying out "make Alderaan America great again" and then they were abruptly silenced.

Every time she is running her mouth on TV this warning should be mandatory.

 

[TexRex]

Admiral Akbar in a yarmulke is hilarious.

...

Here's a ****ing great article about this. It's not paywalled, so I've transcribed it below for convenience, but maybe give the page a click anyway if you appreciated it as I did.

Trump’s Judge-Shopping Flop

Cynicism, mendacity, and incompetence rolled into one.

www.thebulwark.com

Donald Trump has what might charitably be called a poor relationship with judges. It’s not clear that he even understands what they do. Recall Trump’s claim that, in light of his campaign pledge to take a hard line on immigration, a judge of “Mexican heritage” could not hear a case involving his defunct “university.” (“I’m building a wall,” Trump said; “it’s an inherent conflict of interest.”) More recently, he has expressed disappointment in the three justices he placed on the Supreme Court, none of whom voted to hear a lawsuit seeking to overturn the 2020 election.

Trump has been especially critical of Brett Kavanaugh. “I saved his life,” he complains. “Where would he be without me?” The comment is a telling one. In Trump’s mind, it would seem, a judge must be loyal to the president to whom he “owes” his seat. Trump would have been glad, in the weeks after the 2020 election, to have seen his three appointees rule in his favor in a lawsuit attacking the election’s outcome.

Bear that in mind as we pick at a curious aspect of Trump’s latest legal publicity stunt, a civil racketeering action in which the former president alleges that Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, John Podesta, and James Comey, among many others, conspired to rig the 2016 election. The curious thing is that Trump’s lawyer (about whom more later) chose to file the complaint in Fort Pierce, Florida.

Now, the nation’s federal trial courts are divided into 94 districts. Many districts, in turn, are split into divisions. The Southern District of Florida, for instance, contains five of them. The Miami division is the largest of these, and has many judges. There is also a West Palm Beach division, home to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort; it has two active judges. The last division worth mentioning, the Fort Pierce division, has one judge.

The two judges in West Palm Beach were appointed by Presidents Clinton and Obama. The judge in Fort Pierce was appointed by President Trump. You see where this is going.

The lawyers of southern Florida are instructed to sue in the division where the “incident” underlying their lawsuit “occurred,” or, failing that, in the one where their client lives. Trump is sure to have a theory as to why the pertinent “incident” in his case “occurred” throughout the country, enabling him to sue where he likes. (Put to one side the very real problem of whether the court has personal jurisdiction over the defendants.) Regardless, it is impossible to shake the suspicion, Trump being who he is, that filing in Fort Pierce was a calculated decision. Trump apparently wanted a judge appointed by Trump.

It didn’t work out that way. Sometimes, usually to balance caseloads, a court shifts filings in one division to a judge sitting in another. That happened here, and Trump drew Judge Donald Middlebrooks, who is stationed back in Trump’s Palm Beach stomping ground. In a delicious bit of irony—assuming that plaintiff Donald Trump indeed reached for a Trump-appointed judge—the lawsuit is now before a judge appointed by the husband of defendant Hillary Clinton.

This is when your average county-court hustler would see that the plan had backfired, shrug it off, and proceed to some new scheme. Trump’s legal team did not do this. Instead, they moved to disqualify Judge Middlebrooks. That the judge was appointed by Bill Clinton “amounts,” they contended, “to prejudice so virulent or pervasive as to constitute bias” against Trump.

The words “virulent” and “pervasive” appear to have been plucked from cases involving more extreme situations, such as when a judge’s prejudice is revealed not by a conflict of interest but by his hostility in the courtroom. In throwing around such terms, Trump’s lawyers set an unnecessarily high bar for themselves. They actually needed to show only that the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned.

This is not the most satisfying test. A judge’s attitude toward the parties at the outset of a case generally does not lend itself to demonstration. What is clear, however, is that Trump’s motion was baseless. Consider that Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, both appointed to the Supreme Court by President Clinton, took part in an appeal related to Paula Jones’s claim that Clinton had sexually harassed her—and joined the unanimous ruling against him. Likewise, three justices appointed by President Nixon joined a decision ordering the release of Nixon’s Oval Office tape recordings. And of course, two justices appointed by Trump helped resolve his appeals in cases about his tax records—and not in the way he wanted them resolved.

If there really were some colorable ground for recusal, Trump’s attorneys could be relied on to miss it. The motion contained nothing that could fairly be called a reasoned argument. No one with viable mental faculties proofread it. It was filed before any of the defendants even appeared in the case. (Seeking rulings before the other side can respond would be a sound move, were it your goal to bias a judge against you.) Cynicism hitched to indolence—an alliance of mendacity and incompetence—drove the filing of this motion.

That Trump’s lawyers are this bad tells you all you need to know about the lawsuit itself. As Ken White, a former federal prosecutor best known as Twitter’s Popehat, put it:



The attorney who signed the complaint has repeatedly been suspended from practicing law. At his website—no kidding: www.legalbrains.com—you will find a selection of his poetry (“Momentary anguish and I walk away / To fall in love ten times a day”). You will also learn that he devotes his time to the usual practices of a country lawyer—family law, personal injury, estates and trusts—which props up one’s surmise that, when the task at hand is taking down the arrayed forces of the Deep State, he does not receive the first phone call. Yet this is Trump’s man on the spot. This is the best advocate that a former president of the United States, at this point, can get.

In a succinct order issued last night, Judge Middlebrooks declined to recuse himself. Along the way, he remarked on Trump’s decision to file in Fort Pierce. He noticed too that when Trump “is a litigant before a judge that he himself appointed, he does not tend to advance these same sorts of bias concerns.” So ends (one would hope) a bizarre gambit in which the Trumpian ethos of litigation found full expression.

The good news, for those of us at risk of becoming numb to Donald Trump’s legal antics, is that Trump and his lawyers invariably find fresh and unexpected ways to fall on their faces.

 

[GBO Possum]

... Here's a ****ing great article about this. It's not paywalled, so I've transcribed it below for convenience, but maybe give the page a click anyway if you appreciated it as I did.

Trump’s Judge-Shopping Flop

Cynicism, mendacity, and incompetence rolled into one.

www.thebulwark.com

"The attorney who signed the complaint has repeatedly been suspended from practicing law. ...

... he devotes his time to the usual practices of a country lawyer—family law, personal injury, estates and trusts—which props up one’s surmise that, when the task at hand is taking down the arrayed forces of the Deep State, he does not receive the first phone call. Yet this is Trump’s man on the spot. This is the best advocate that a former president of the United States, at this point, can get."

"Appreciated" would be a right royal understatement. This is full-on, snort coffee through both nostrils territory. Which reminds me, I somehow got out of the habit of listening to Charlie Sykes' "Bulwark" podcast. I really must catch up on missed episodes.

 

[Jezza819]

Senate confirms Ketanji Brown Jackson to Supreme Court in historic vote

Judge Jackson is set to become Justice Jackson later this year, making good on Biden's promise to put the first Black woman on the court.

www.nbcnews.com

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Sounds real good.

 

[TexRex]

That's a nice picture.

 

[Populuxe]

YEAs ---53
Baldwin (D-WI)
Bennet (D-CO)
Blumenthal (D-CT)
Booker (D-NJ)
Brown (D-OH)
Cantwell (D-WA)
Cardin (D-MD)
Carper (D-DE)
Casey (D-PA)
Collins (R-ME)
Coons (D-DE)
Cortez Masto (D-NV)
Duckworth (D-IL)
Durbin (D-IL)
Feinstein (D-CA)
Gillibrand (D-NY)
Hassan (D-NH)
Heinrich (D-NM)
Hickenlooper (D-CO)
Hirono (D-HI)
Kaine (D-VA)
Kelly (D-AZ)
King (I-ME)
Klobuchar (D-MN)
Leahy (D-VT)
Lujan (D-NM)
Manchin (D-WV)
Markey (D-MA)
Menendez (D-NJ)
Merkley (D-OR)
Murkowski (R-AK)
Murphy (D-CT)
Murray (D-WA)
Ossoff (D-GA)
Padilla (D-CA)
Peters (D-MI)
Reed (D-RI)
Romney (R-UT)
Rosen (D-NV)
Sanders (I-VT)
Schatz (D-HI)
Schumer (D-NY)
Shaheen (D-NH)
Sinema (D-AZ)
Smith (D-MN)
Stabenow (D-MI)
Tester (D-MT)
Van Hollen (D-MD)
Warner (D-VA)
Warnock (D-GA)
Warren (D-MA)
Whitehouse (D-RI)
Wyden (D-OR)

NAYs ---47
Barrasso (R-WY)
Blackburn (R-TN)
Blunt (R-MO)
Boozman (R-AR)
Braun (R-IN)
Burr (R-NC)
Capito (R-WV)
Cassidy (R-LA)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Cotton (R-AR)
Cramer (R-ND)
Crapo (R-ID)
Cruz (R-TX)
Daines (R-MT)
Ernst (R-IA)
Fischer (R-NE)
Graham (R-SC)
Grassley (R-IA)
Hagerty (R-TN)
Hawley (R-MO)
Hoeven (R-ND)
Hyde-Smith (R-MS)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Johnson (R-WI)
Kennedy (R-LA)
Lankford (R-OK)
Lee (R-UT)
Lummis (R-WY)
Marshall (R-KS)
McConnell (R-KY)
Moran (R-KS)
Paul (R-KY)
Portman (R-OH)
Risch (R-ID)
Rounds (R-SD)
Rubio (R-FL)
Sasse (R-NE)
Scott (R-FL)
Scott (R-SC)
Shelby (R-AL)
Sullivan (R-AK)
Thune (R-SD)
Tillis (R-NC)
Toomey (R-PA)
Tuberville (R-AL)
Wicker (R-MS)
Young (R-IN)

Of the Rs, only Collins, Murkowski, and Romney voted yes. Romney I'm not surprised. He's pretty much the last old school Republican left. Collins and Murkowski talk a good game but almost always fall in line when push comes to shove, so I'm definitely surprised they voted yes.