The New York appeals court told Trump and his lawyers to zip it about the civil trial judge’s law clerk, and the judge let them know he intends to enforce the gag order “rigorously.” From The Messenger:
New York appellate court on Thursday reinstated the gag orders barring Donald Trump and his lawyers from making public statements about the principal law clerk of the judge overseeing the former president’s ongoing civil fraud trial.
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron noted that the ruling also reinstates a separate gag order imposed on Trump’s lawyers.
“So I intend to enforce the gag orders rigorously and vigorously, and I want to make sure that counsel informs their clients of the fact that the stay was vacated,” Engoron said.
It’s a narrow ruling that prohibits Team Shitgibbon from ginning up deranged online mobs to harass one individual who is not a public figure. Trump is still allowed to send flying monkeys after the judge, make gross comments about the attorney general, etc.
But despite his client’s freedom to continue making a world-historic ass of himself, Trump’s lawyer meeped about the ruling in court as if someone had literally shoved a cue-ball in Trump’s gaping maw and wrapped chains around his bulbous orange head to keep it in place. (If only!)
“We’re aware, your honor,” Trump’s lead attorney Christopher Kise responded, before adding: “It’s a tragic day for the rule of law.”
“In a country where the First Amendment is sacrosanct, President Trump may not even comment on why he thinks he cannot get a fair trial,” Kise added in a subsequent statement to the press. “Hard to imagine a more unfair process and hard to believe this is happening in America.”
Jesus, what a drama llama!
On a related note, someone in a thread yesterday linked this excellent Dahlia Lithwick essay that says we should not only pay attention to Trump’s increasingly fascist, violent, eliminationist rhetoric but to how it’s being received:
If you want to fret about something, it shouldn’t be that former President Donald J. Trump is allowed by the machinery of media and First Amendment law to keep talking. It’s that the pool of people who think what he says is vitally, life-alteringly, and materially important is not just vast, it’s also now incapable of shame.
Lithwick notes that now no one can pretend the “mediocre demagogue’s” threats aren’t serious because his record includes an attempted coup, complete with a violent mob attack on the Capitol building. In other words, it’s no longer even remotely credible to claim that the cultists take their Orange Jeebus’s demented babbling “seriously, but not literally.” She’s right.
Open thread!
Butch
Mediate is noting that Trump has already resumed his attacks on the judge’s wife, multiple times. There’s a link at Joe.My.God.
ronno2018
great post. boggles the mind that reasonably smart people want trumpf back. so many that hate the guy after working for him still say they will vote for him, barr etc.
Harrison Wesley
I think Trump’s about ready for a Hannibal Lecter mask. He’s got the poisonous sociopathic personality down, except he wields bullshit lies instead of a sharp blade. And, of course, dines on a hamberder with ketchup and a diet soda in lieu of a human liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
I typically adhere to the “Going Godwin” ethos of making contemporary comparisons to the Nazis and the people who voted for them in 1933.
But events of the last 7 years continue to show the aptness of such comparisons when it comes to the Orange Fart Cloud and the people who take him literally.
trollhattan
In actual good news, this here is pretty, pretty cool.
Historical anecdote, the Salton Sea today was created accidentally in 1905 when a canal carrying Colorado River water broke, filling the formerly dry ancient lakebed and creating a lake and salty marshland environment. Ancient sea ‘splains how lithium is now concentrated there.
It would be nice not to have to deal with any lithium cartels as we address future energy storage demand. Been there/done that.
DFH
What bugs me about the shitgibbon’s lawyers bemoaning 1st amendment rights, which is 100% complete bullshit, is that dumbasses will believe it.
TeezySkeezy
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Godwin himself has said his law no longer applies in the case of Trump and co.
Mag
Robert Kagan, yes the neocon, has a long op-ed in WaPo today: “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.” Despite the author, it’s worth a read…
HumboldtBlue
@trollhattan:
Wow.
bbleh
It’s that the pool of people who think what he says is vitally, life-alteringly, and materially important is not just vast, it’s also now incapable of shame.
I’ll go considerably further. Yes it’s very important to the mob, but only insofar as it promises, and thereby validates and further encourages, what they want, which is to visit pain and destruction on those they hate. They want immigrants treated barbarically. They want LGBTQ+ folk ruthlessly suppressed at a minimum and exterminated at a maximum. They want people of color to be treated as second-class citizens, with all the suffering that includes, and to accept it silently. And they want women to stay in their place and do as they’re told. They think this is not merely not shameful but righteous and should be proclaimed and enforced publicly. And very importantly, they are willing to pay a substantial cost in their own suffering and economic deprivation for these things to happen.
Most people realize TIFG is consumed with vengeance, but what I think is not yet clear to a lot of observers is that very many of his followers are likewise. They live for their hatreds now, and we are the objects of those hatreds.
Martin
Just a reminder that the IPCC estimate is that we’re consuming what margin we have of avoiding 1.5C at a rate of about 1% per month – so about 8 years to get to net zero to avoid 1.5C. They estimate we’re consuming the margin of avoiding 2.0C at a rate of about 0.5% per month – so about 16 years to get to net zero to avoid 2.0C. Biden’s plan is to get there in 27 years, which is considered ambitious in the US.
4 years of Trump takes out huge chunks of what little time we have to fix this.
hrprogressive
This country has a large cadre of people who, if Trump told them to “Open Fire”, would not hesitate to actually do it.
And our media is, at best, in many cases, still playing the “both sides” card, or completely dismissing it altogether.
I know a lot of left of center spaces don’t like discussions around armed civil conflict, but I really wish more of these spaces would start telling their readers to prepare themselves for this plausible outcome.
Voting is important. Wanting more Democrats is important. Adhering to the rules of law is important.
Ignoring or disregarding the vast number of citizens who literally cannot wait to start assassinating anyone they deem to be “their enemies” is not.
SomeRandomGuy
I just want to mention, because I never see reporting mention it: Trump’s complaints about the judge’s law clerk are that the law clerk is doing their job, and this is somehow unfair to Trump.
I still can’t understand why this isn’t in every piece of reporting on the subject.
rikyrah
@trollhattan:
Had never heard of the Salton Sea. Just Googled it. That doesn’t look like a large area. They sure it has such a large deposit?
catclub
The unemployment rate in Germany in 1933 was 47% and the nazis did not get a majority of the vote. I am not sure if that says something about the german voters or the US ones.
Old School
@Butch:
The judge’s son as well.
rikyrah
@bbleh:
It’s been clear from the beginning for a group of us.
I think those in denial are:
Martin
@trollhattan: Challenge with Salton Sea is going to be the water injection they’ll need to keep the sea from shrinking further and creating a larger environmental problem. The only realistic source for that is the Colorado – you know, the thing that created it – and that requires reducing river water use even further than we already need to cut it. That’s a tough problem to solve.
I’ve seen interesting proposals to build a water exchange system with Laguna Salada that could treat Salton Sea as a pumped hydro sink (-226′ elevation) from the Gulf of California. It’s not like the sea water is any less saline or polluted than what’s in the Salton Sea now. But that requires a big lift from the feds to build a multinational project like that. And there’s no way to make it profitable, so it would have to just straight up be a public works project.
SomeRandomGuy
@hrprogressive: I know part of the issue is, Republican sources castrate their media, so they don’t report obvious facts that disabuse Republican talking points – disabusing Republican talking points, the looping-knife wielders explain, “is placing free campaign ads for Democrats.”
No – failing to report actual ELECTED OFFICIALS believing bullshit stories and conspiracy theories is making in-kind contributions to Republicans – it’s burying stories that are in the extreme interest of the public.
Honest to goodness, I think most of the press won’t report the truth about Covid-19, and a contradicted Republican claim about Covid-19, in the same article. And the closest answer I’ve seen is that they don’t want to campaign on one side or the other.
Journalists should always campaign on the side of the truth – and hope that they apply the same incisiveness when it hurts to believe that someone as honest and law abiding as TFG might have just kinda forgotten he wasn’t allowed to steal from the federal government, by retaining items that belong to the President, not the poor has-been.
That we don’t seem to notice that in this country is just farking mad.
jonas
@rikyrah: It’s shrunk over the years due to less runoff over the years from nearby mountains and more agricultural diversion, but it covers a pretty sizeable chunk of the Imperial Valley.
rikyrah
@hrprogressive:
The assumption is that our side isn’t armed, which just isn’t true.
And, that, we’re gonna sit there, and let them come after us, which also isn’t true.
Suzanne
@Harrison Wesley:
I said before…. this would be so much better if it was a ball gag order.
I just about included a coda to this that was really graphic, and I typed it out, and then thought better of it and deleted it. But it’s making me laugh heartily.
MomSense
@Martin:
Yeah we are totally fucked and we’ve wasted so much time. Corporations have been running the tobacco playbook on this issue and the media are so fucking inept. I feel like we’ve gone backwards just on public acceptance of the science since I first got involved in the mid 80s and I am struggling with serious grief about it.
Captain C
@rikyrah:
At this point, I assume anyone who votes Republican would nark me out to whatever gestapo TFG sets up; that as much as they claim to like me, their (shitty) principles* or greed for reward would lead them to treat me like the shitbag who informed on Anne Frank. This includes long-time friends and family. If this hurts their precious MAGA fee-fees they can suck it.
*In college, I once met a latter day Hitler Youth-type who piously declared that he would totally turn in any Jews if the Nazis asked because, “God said it’s wrong to lie.” I’m pretty sure that aiding and abetting genocide is a little higher on the list of divine no-nos than lying to Nazis to save a life.
trollhattan
@rikyrah: @jonas:
Pretty darn large, even the current, reduced footprint.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/Saltonseadrainagemap.jpg
Once flew from Palm Springs to Calexico (long story) and we were over the Salton Sea for a good while.
rikyrah
@hrprogressive:
this is domestic terrorism against citizens. Black folk lived through this – called Jim Crow.
Not going back to that.
Ken
@rikyrah: I would guess the deposits are associated with the Salton Trough, not the sea — which, as noted already, is the result of an accidental diversion of the Colorado River. Such diversions have happened frequently over geological history, and the northern part of the trough — everything from Palm Springs south to the Gulf of California — is infill from the Colorado River delta.
trollhattan
@Suzanne:
“…something, something, something, pliers and a blowtorch.”
Martin
@rikyrah: Yes. It’s reasonably geologically active. In fact, one of the benefits of doing lithium brine extraction is that you can get geothermal power in the process. With pumped geothermal, they could produce about 3GW continuous power there, which is maybe 5% of the state demand.
One challenge there is that surrounding the sea is a large and pretty critical agricultural region, so you don’t want to fuck that up, and the fertilizer runoff from those operations have really polluted the Sea so the place is a real environmental hazard.
The other challenge is that both lithium extraction and pumped geothermal require the addition of at least some water. You recycle a lot of it, but you still need to add, and it’s in a place where water is, well, a problem.
Ken
@jonas: “Imperial Valley” is one of the greatest marketing triumphs in history. It was originally the “Salton Desert”, but entrepreneurs got the idea that it could be irrigated from the Colorado River and sold as farmland. It went well enough until the failure of the (rather makeshift) gates on their diversion canal led to the Colorado turning north and creating the Salton Sea.
schrodingers_cat
testing
Omnes Omnibus
Hmmm…. The gag order to Civil War in three easy steps. Looks like this will be a fun thread.
Baud
America doesn’t create any inland seas anymore.
I blame wokeism.
NotMax
@trollhattan
Worthwhile documentary on that ecologically embattled area: Miracle in the Desert: The Rise and Fall of the Salton Sea.
Martin
@MomSense: I mean, we are making progress, and meaningful progress, but the public has not internalized what needs to happen. It’s been superficial around the edges stuff, but you always get the easy gains first, and people really don’t get that to keep up what momentum we have, is going to have to move this more front of mind and to internalize the goal into our behavior. That doesn’t mean it’s actually hard or expensive, but it is different. And we gotta embrace that, and we’re still fighting it, let alone accepting it.
Betty Cracker
From the Sarasota Herald Tribune — hmmm!
I don’t know how much credence to give this story (though I expect rank hypocrisy from Repubs, and this would fit the bill). But this part is interesting:
Not exactly a confident endorsement of the Zieglers’ sterling character, is it?
Delk
Florida moms for liberty/gop chair three way rape. Link
edit—what Betty just said. 😀
jonas
So according to Augustine, what the Christian is obligated to do in that case is tell the authorities “I know where the person is, but I refuse to give them up” and be willing to face the consequences. But yeah, it’s a mortal sin to lie and say you don’t know anything when you actually do, even to ostensibly save someone’s life.
Ken
@Baud: I blame the lack of good endorheic basins with a divertible nearby river. We’ve also got a bunch of, to be frank, underperforming rivers — the Humboldt isn’t even trying to fill its basin.
RaflW
@bbleh: “they are willing to pay a substantial cost in their own suffering”
Except they can’t even stand not getting to date women who are Dems or pro-choice.
So they really won’t tolerate much, except for things they don’t even realize they’re paying, like what repealing ACA would cost them … because they have no idea what that price would be. No one in their political circle knows, because Fox/OAN/crazy uncle Ted won’t tell them
“They live for their hatreds now, and we are the objects of those hatreds.”
Yes, this. It’s what decades of marinating in RW radio, TV and internet cesspools has produced. I do fear that many of this 27% (+/-) crazed base really would openly, in the streets attack their neighbors if goaded just right. History has shown many times that people can be pushed that far. We’re teetering, IMO.
NotMax
@Martin
Geothermal steam can be pretty dang corrosive, though. At test sites in Hawaii it ate through the pipes in a matter of weeks.
Harrison Wesley
@Suzanne: A ball gag, and maybe – a court-appointed dominatrix? Interesting…….
jonas
Narrator: “They don’t.”
Matt McIrvin
@rikyrah: On the one hand, they’ve got us vastly outgunned, because most gun enthusiasts are right-wing, most cops are right-wing, a majority of the military is probably right-wing. It’s not 100% but that’s the way to bet.
On the other hand, a lot of these people are frankly dumb, which is a disadvantage.
Glidwrith
@rikyrah: it’s pretty big, just north of me over a set of mountain ranges. Very desolate too.
Ken
@jonas: True, they don’t take the allegations seriously — but normally they would deny the allegations, and claim it’s a politically-motivated prosecution. That the party is covering their asses this early in the process makes me think that something very serious, and very undeniable, happened.
Though that would raise the question of how the party knew about it, and for how long they’ve known.
NotMax
@Matt McIrvin
“Give them a light and they’ll follow it anywhere.”
– Firesign Theater
//
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
WRT to cops, we control their pensions.
Martin
@Baud: There’s still hope. Models are that if we get a sufficiently large atmospheric river like we had last winter but longer in duration, that the Central Valley will at least temporarily turn into an inland sea. That happened back in 1862. Killed about 1% of the population of California.
We did get a wee version of that with Tulare lake refilling last winter (which is still filled 9 months later). We’ll see if this El Niño winter fills it further. (Let’s hope not, we don’t remotely have as much reservoir capacity as we did last winter, so dam failures or uncontrolled outflows might become a possibility).
Tulare lake used to be the 2nd largest freshwater lake completely in the US borders. It was pretty big. We drained it for agriculture about a decade before we created Salton Sea. So, we can fuck things up on a climate scale when we really put our mind to it.
Glidwrith
@Matt McIrvin: Dumb and cowards. Notice how only ones and twos show up to support SFB? They are going to jail because of J6 and know it. I think they will just bitch from their armchairs and a good-sized chunk will vote for him, but that’s all.
Now, if SFB actually gets elected, yes they will start killing anyone in their lives that they think needs to be put in their place.
Martin
@NotMax: Doubly so if you’re shoving salt water down there, but we’ve been operating the Geysers for 60 years. I think we know how to do this.
Mike in NC
Fat Bastard has caused a lot of us to gag, for many years. He should have been tarred and feathered a long time ago.
RaflW
@SomeRandomGuy: The press accepted being placed in pens, having their free access to the floor of GOP campaign speeches and events significantly restricted, and being subject to abusive threats from the rabid audience throughout the 2016 election.
They absorbed the lesson that they can be cowed and threatened. They didn’t dare test the premise — which I believe would have worked, at least partly — that the RW machine can’t operate without the oxygen of ‘center’ and left eyeballs.
Its one of the main reasons I try (and mostly do) avoid visiting Musty’s X joint. I hope lots of other eyeballs are continuing to flee his awful swamp (along with advertisers). “Truth” Social is a money hole, I think, because RWers are bored over there. No hippies to punch.
Shalimar
@Baud: I blame Rand Paul. Bastard always clears useful blockages.
rikyrah
@Ken:
Well, the big IF is if they can extract the Lithium without destroying the environment, as is done in so many other places in the world.
But, if they can mine it, and make the USA less dependent on other countries, that would be a good thing.
Dorothy A. Winsor
As an amusing aside, during the currently ongoing debate about expelling George Santos, Rep Troy Nehls (R-Texas) accidentally referred to him as George Soros.
trollhattan
@Martin: First time for me, saw portions of Tulare Lake lapping up nearly to I-5 this October, months after meltoff had ceased. Impressed.
The San Joaquin has limited capacity to transport water and historically, that end of the Valley never drained, at least before Boswell, Salyer, et al decided “That’s for me!”
Sister Golden Bear
@rikyrah: The Salton Sea has a surface area of 343 sq mi. — almost twice as big as Lake Tahoe — and it’s the 19th largest lake in the U.S. Takes about an hour to drive from the north end to the south end.
I believe the original dry lake was a bit larger. Also, the Salton Sea has been shrinking for decades because more water is evaporating than replenished.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
George Santos IS George Soros. It’s all so clear now. /tinfoil hat
Wapiti
@rikyrah: It used to be the north end of the Gulf of California, as I understand it, cyclically filled and cut off by the floods of the Colorado River. It could have a lot of minerals in the sediment from the Colorado watershed.
rikyrah
@Sister Golden Bear:
Glad everyone corrected me. I am somewhat pleased to know how desolate it seems to be. So, it won’t be displacing communities when they mine.
Shalimar
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Like that Ryan Reynolds movie where the old guy gets his consciousness put into a young body. This would explain so much Santos grifting. He’s used to being wealthy, that’s all.
Sister Golden Bear
@NotMax: CA has had geothermal powered electrical stations for years, presumable they’ve dealt with the corrosion issue — although the Salton Trough maybe saltier than where the current stations operate.
jonas
The LA Times ran a great story a couple of years ago on the 1862 floods — and the implications if something similar were to happen again now. It would be very, very bad, not just for California, but for the country. In 1862, the region didn’t produce something like 1/3 of all the fresh fruits, nuts, and vegetables in the US.
Villago Delenda Est
Kise has proven himself to be unfit as an officer of the court.
different-church-lady
[Checks pocket Constitution…] Nope, not seeing anything in the First Amendment that says “Right to threaten others.”
Wapiti
@Martin: ... the Central Valley will at least temporarily turn into an inland sea. That happened back in 1862. Killed about 1% of the population of California.
Wait… my father, a gold bug, used to tell me stories about how the the hydraulic mining in the Sierras raised the riverbeds in the Central Valley and impacted agriculture so badly that hydraulic mining was restricted to rivers that emptied directly into the Pacific (like the Klamath (because to hell with the local natives, amiright?) ).
Hydraulic mining started in 1853. It might have contributed to the floods. It wasn’t banned until 1884.
zhena gogolia
@Omnes Omnibus: It’s breathtaking.
Another Scott
Meanwhile, Sen. Durbin (yes, Sen. Dick Durbin) throws his weight around and the GQPers have a sad.
RollCall.com:
Good, good.
There are the votes to approve the nominees. They went through the process and the GQPers want to throw more gravel in the gears. It’s good that Durbin wasn’t having it.
Cheers,
Scott.
Citizen Alan
@Mag: Well, I was going to read it, but then the Washington Post said I couldn’t unless I paid them money. And it seems counterproductive to pay to read an article about encroaching fascism put out by one of encroaching fascism’s chief enablers. Do they still publish editorials from The Torture Guy?
Citizen Alan
@catclub: I’ve been saying for some time that I consider Trump supporters to be worse than those who voted for Nazis, because the latter group at least had the excuse that they were literally starving amid the ashes of post-WWI Germany. The MAGAts who pulled the lever for Shitgibbon were living in the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth at a time of unprecedented prosperity and it didn’t matter in the face of their seething rage at a black man becoming president and a woman poised to follow him and continue his policies.
Citizen Alan
@rikyrah: A part of me genuinely hopes my sister will say something at Christmas that will justify me going no-contact and never returning to Mississippi except possibly for the occasional funeral for the handful of family members I still care about.
NotMax
@Citizen Alan
Turning off javascript obliterates the WaPo paywall.
Dan B
@trollhattan: In addition there are battery technologies like Sodium Ion that are looking very good. No Lithium or cobalt needed. They’re mostly far less expensive and many are recyclable, less likely to thermal runaway, etc. We’re at the dawn of another industrial revolution and the buggy whip manufacturers are panicked
Lithium will still have many applications so almost every battery technology will contribute.
rikyrah
The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) posted at 3:49 PM on Wed, Nov 29, 2023:
BREAKING: A court-ordered financial auditor has caught Donald Trump quietly moving $40 million from the Trump Organization into a personal bank account—seemingly so Trump could pay his whopping $29 million tax bill. https://t.co/7TorN42r8k
(https://x.com/thedailybeast/status/1729980882734268612?t=agltPzZ0OxvcG5hnlurMsQ&s=03)
Slowly Boiled Frog 🏳️🌈 ✡️ (@davidcaryhart) posted at 6:20 PM on Wed, Nov 29, 2023:
That $40 million would then be taxed as ordinary income. I am of the opinion that all of those legal fees paid by the PAC are taxable income to Trump.
rikyrah
@Dan B:
This made me happy to read.
Timill
@Citizen Alan:
Gift Link
Citizen Alan
@NotMax: I understand what some of those words mean.
rikyrah
@trollhattan:
Ok,
They discovered a $700 Billion Dollar deposit of Lithium in Mexico, which has been nationalized, and is the reason why all the GOP Candidates are supporting military action against Mexico.
So, this possible deposit is larger than that?
catclub
@Citizen Alan: at least had the excuse that they were literally starving amid the ashes of post-WWI Germany.
ummm, there might have been ashes in 1923, by 1929 Germany was fully recovered economically – except for the size of its military. By 1933 it was the great depression that the whole world faced.
Mag
@Citizen Alan: Here’s a gift link to the Kagan op-ed.
SomeRandomGuy
@NotMax: That puzzles me – I keep thinking “heat engine” not “direct steam from the water.”
Maybe heat engine extraction is too expensive to be economical. That’s one of the cold, hard truths about global warming: you can’t make investors run at a loss, but OMG do subsidies invite corruption.
I often wonder if we’ve made all the savings from “big iron” we could. e.g., I have a standard residential block. Maybe we could dig a deep hole, build an enormous heat pump, and then let people hook up to the heat pump exchange fluids. Would that let you handle some 32 houses of heating and cooling, at sufficient gain in efficiency that it’s worth building at scale? Is heat exchange fluid transfer too lossy to work?)
Wanna go really crazy? If you could build that great, big, heat pump, maybe you could put in a bunch of batteries for people to rent, as emergency backups, but, they could sell space to utilities.
I wonder if parading ideas like this (which are proudly socialist) might be good for rehabbing “socialism”.
cain
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I’m not sure that is accidental. If they can successful make it look like it was George Soros getting kicked out – the GOP crowd would just nod along.
cain
Our so-called liberal video cutting off pro-Palestinian voices:
https://truthout.org/articles/msnbc-drops-mehdi-hasans-show-as-he-speaks-out-for-palestinian-rights/
This is just a tragedy. You can be pro-Palestinian – it doesn’t mean you’re anti-Jew. Hell they are both Semitic people.
Bill Arnold
@trollhattan:
In case it’s not clear, the deposit is thousands of feet underground. Geothermal plants access the (lithium-rich?) brine already (don’t know the details on how the heat is transferred).
When I last visited the area in the late 1900s, saw a burrowing owl colony near one of the geothermal plants on the South shore. Those owls are really fun to watch.
Soprano2
@Mag: That was one of the most depressing op-eds I’ve ever read, mostly because there’s no lie told in there even though it’s Robert Kagan.
Bill Arnold
@Martin:
4 years of Trump already took out 4 years of what little time we had/have to fix this. The effects on change-momentum of the rest of the world were also considerable. )(Perhaps killing upwards of 100-400M humans in the fullness of time. Estimates vary. That’s numerically similar to 10-40 holocausts.)
Suzanne
@trollhattan: More like “something something something rubbing balls on his face and dunking them in his mouth”.
trollhattan
@Wapiti: Was pleased to have been introduced to “Battling the Inland Sea” this year, which chronicles mining vs. agriculture vs. navigation in the southern Sacramento Valley and Sac-San Joaquin Delta. Went on decades longer than I had realized.
A trip to Malakoff Diggins State Park is worthwhile for getting a sense of the scale of hydraulic mining, so long ago. The Sierra are still dotted with flumes and tunnels that once supplied water to power the monitors. Mine waste remains too, a whole other topic.
Ruckus
@ronno2018:
It might not be that they absolutely want him back but it’s him or a democrat. And that’s the side they hate for a number of reasons but part of it is that their hate is something that SFB believes in and supports. SFB may be the shittiest pea in the pod but he’s not the only one, just the most public one, and the most likely one they voted for. Not supporting him is out of the question for most of them, as it always is in a cult. For it to be a cult there has to be a leader, someone shitty enough that they will always be a cult if they have any popularity, because it takes someone willing to be sold an entry ticket to get into the cult. And he will always have some so deluded/racist/stupid, or all 3, to vote for him. That the rethuglican party has decided to completely go that direction should not really be all that surprising. They have been going down this road for decades – a lot of decades, they are just more obvious about it now. Hell my congressman here in SoCal 50 yrs ago was a member of the John Burch Society, on top of being a rethuglican.
Dan B
@hrprogressive:
@rikyrah: There are other Lithium deposits in the US even larger than the Salton Sea. They’re also in arid regions so the challenges are similar. Two big ones are in northern California bridging southern/ southeast Oregon. They’re basically the northwest of the Nevada desert. I’ve driven through several times.
Princess
@Mag: It was worth a read and I agree — Trump can definitely win the election. I give Biden only a hair-thin lead. Kagan is right— the people inclined to vote Trump are not going to care about any of the things we care about — democracy, his indictments, even convictions. I expect white Republican women voters to mostly continue doing so. And I feel like our side dislikes Trump so much that we’re pretty complacent that everyone will agree with us.
Brachiator
Love, love, love the thread title.
Also would have liked “Mouth Wide Shut.”
jonas
From what I can tell, it’s now Republican policy to hate EVs and stop electrification however they can. I don’t see how seizing Mexico’s lithium in some neo-colonial venture advances that goal unless you’re suggesting it’s to shut down any further extraction.
West of the Rockies
I read an interesting article today produced before the 2020 election by http://www.icaa.cc
The panel of medical researchers gave Trump and Biden high chances of surviving their terms if elected in ’20. It suggested Biden would outlive Trump and thought a likely expiration date would be 88 years of age.
This was, of course, before the dramas of January 6, a second impeachment, four indictments, and 91 felonies.
I hope the Trump prediction was generous by about 9.5 years.
Ken
@SomeRandomGuy: The Biden administration and congressional Democrats are ahead of you. There are generous subsidies for installing geothermal HVAC, which help soften the blow of the initial installation cost.
My church is looking into replacing our ancient gas boiler with one of these. A nearby church did so a couple years ago, and report excellent savings in their energy bill. I could easily see a neighborhood banding together to do the same, especially as it requires multiple wells to be drilled.
(My argument that we could get by with just one well, provided they went deep enough to hit magma, was dismissed, even though I referenced The Finches’ Fabulous Furnace.)
CliosFanboy
@Mag:
he’s a neocon, but he’s also a pretty good historian
zhena gogolia
Let’s do everything we can to make sure Biden-Harris win the election. That’s what we can do. Talk up the great things this administration has done and will continue to do.
Dan B
@rikyrah: The interesting difference in the past few years is they’ve increased the energy density of Sodium Ion batteries to the point it rivals Lithium Ion. Sodium, of course, is everywhere, plentiful, and cheap. Because it’s heavier than Lithium it was considered suitable only for fixed battery storage at solar PV and / or wind farms. Now it seems there might be applications for transportation.
prostratedragon
Harrison Wesley@3: Joining late to say I absolutely agree, and have thought so for months now. Not satirical exaggeration.
Dan B
@SomeRandomGuy: Also it may be a great way to make the heat pumps highly efficient CO2 heat pumps.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
Example of how the GOP are weaponizing lawsuits to stop things they don’t like. Guest link.
They don’t care if they lose as long as their constant legal action or the threat of legal action interferes with sensible policy. We care about whether a case will win, not whether they will stop for fear of getting sued. This is why every single time they send their howler monkeys out to threaten people, we should sue, sue, and sue more. We should sue law enforcement when they fail to follow up on threats. We should sue Newsmax and others when they make up crap about private citizens and even political figures. It doesn’t matter if we lose. We should make it painful.
WaterGirl
@zhena gogolia: Betty’s post announces good legal news for our side.
Thread turns into
glass half fullbarely a drop of water in the glass.brantl
Assumes facts not in evidence.
Subsole
@rikyrah:
Minor quibble.
I think most of us who have lost family to the MAGA cult are under zero illusions about their willingness to cast us into the fire.
I mean, they already did. They took a look at us, and a look at Tucker Carlson, and chose poorly.
Ruckus
@rikyrah:
Over half a century ago I used to hang out around the Salton Sea quite a lot. Camping, boating, duck and goose hunting, there were areas of vacation cottages there. But all of that has gone away, because the water became more and more chemically polluted/enriched. It is a bounty of certain chemicals. One’s we seemingly need now, for electric powered vehicles. Because we can’t continue to burn stuff just to move our butts around.
Ruckus
@rikyrah:
Our fellow White citizens, who are failing to come to grasp that those MAGA family members would treat them
accordinglyexactly the same way they treat everyone besides themselves.FIXITFY
schrodingers_cat
@rikyrah: I know what I am going to do. I am going follow the lead of black women. They are the most pragmatic voting group bar none
Also fuck Kagan. Nothing is inevitable. Their Orange Emperor is not inevitable. Kagan can’t predict the future. His prediction of Trump’s inevitability is based on polling one year from the actual election and Biden’s approval numbers.
Ruckus
@trollhattan:
As I said above, I used to hang out there a lot. Even knew a family that had one of those small sort of houses among a not all that small area of homes on the eastern shore. It has changed a lot over the last half a century and I believe a lot fewer people live around it, but some still do go boating there.
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat: Right on!
ETA: I haven’t taken any cues from Kagan before, not about to start now.
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: He is judging the entire country based on gutless and spinelss Republicans that populate his party.
Steve in the ATL
@Baud:
That’s a mandatory subject of bargaining, so their pensions are in the hands of people like me—mwahahahaha!
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
I am inevitable.
Or was that Thanos?
Brachiator
@Mag:
Thank you for this. I think that a Trump autocracy can be avoided, but I think that Kagan lays out a compelling case for how Trump might try to become a dictator should he win the election.
I particularly was impressed with how Kagan shows how Trump enjoys the advantages of a shadow incumbency.
Built into this is the refusal of the Republican Party to disavow Trump. They are standing by their man, and an unknown number appear to be ready to tip the election in Trump’s favor if necessary.
And of course these people believe that a Trump autocracy could never do them harm. Only those deemed enemies of the people would have a problem, and those people don’t matter anyway.
Kagan is also good on why so many of the MAGA crowd believe that Trump has previously come through for them.
I have seen people make the claim in other forums that Trump himself created a strong economy and kept the US out of foreign wars. The truth is more complicated, but a lot of people like simple answers, even if they are false.
I am having some medical tests done, and am posting while on a break.
I don’t know if Kagan addresses what Trump might do if he loses in 2024. We have already seen him refuse to concede defeat in 2020, and there is little reason to suspect that he would behave any differently in 2024.
And so, Trump may be a danger as long as the GOP allows him to be a contender.
schrodingers_cat
@Brachiator: The problems as I see it is not Trump but his voters (and his party) who want to turn back the clock to before the Civil War.
Marmot
@Brachiator:
This is clearly the viewpoint of somebody inside the Extended Fox Universe—did Kagan never hear of kids in cages? A botched Covid response? An attempt to overthrow the government?
Come on, man. We’re not trying to win over the Repubs. We just need a few to sit out, and for normies to show up as the have been lately.
Omnes Omnibus
@zhena gogolia: What z_g said.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: We have never seen or heard you, so you could be Thanos, whoever that is.
schrodingers_cat
@Marmot: Agreed. Under the guise of ooga booga Trump dictatorship, Kagan is badmouthing Biden with lies and exaggerations.
There is no runaway inflation. Unemployment is at record lows.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
Pensions, paychecks, the whole nine yards, all dependent on bureaucrats.
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodingers_cat: Kagan is a neo-con. I take any analysis he has with a great deal of salt.
schrodingers_cat
@Omnes Omnibus: Same here.
Dave
@Matt McIrvin: point taken. Still, weapons are relatively cheap (and very available) with a surprisingly short learning curve for the operator (motivation is the question)
Citizen Alan
@Timill: Thank you. And immediately, this jumped out at me.
Jesus, the fucking audacity of writing a paragraph like that in the Washington Fucking Post. How many buttery males articles did they run again? How many “Biden is OOOOOLLLLD!” editorials?
Citizen Alan
@Timill: Jesus, I wish I hadn’t bothered. It’s just nothing but Doom Porn. And it’s Biden’s fault for not stepping aside, natch.
Brachiator
@schrodingers_cat:
I think you have a point, that the key problem is Trump voters. But I don’t think that they have any coherent idea of what they want. Like BREXIT supporters in the UK or fervent nationalists in India, they have worked themselves up to yearn for some fantasy past that never existed and that no one ever wanted.
And in the case of the MAGA crowd, they claim to be Republicans, but repudiate the post Civil War America that the historical Republican Party created. It’s crazy.
But again, I think that Trump can easily be defeated. But I think the poison that he unleashed will be with us for a while.
ETA. Of course, Thanos is a character from the Avengers Saga. The movies are a pretty good and exciting myth. Thanos is an almost bored demi god who believes that he is the inevitable fate of the universe. He is almost sad to think that he cannot be opposed. He is, of course, wrong. Fortunately for humanity.
Omnes Omnibus
Look, you can always find a reason to despair if you look hard enough. It’s a fucking year out from the election. Polls mean fuck all at this point. Based on facts on the ground, I would rather be in Biden’s than Trump’s shoes going into 2024.
lowtechcyclist
@Soprano2:
I think he’s exaggerating considerably about how support for Trump will grow over the next several months. I doubt that there are more than a handful of never-Trumpers supporting Haley, DeSantis, etc., and the supporters of those candidates, when polled, are undoubtedly already saying they’d vote for Trump in a two-man race.
And I think we’re already seeing the collapse of independent/third party candidates. Dean Phillips, RFK Jr., they’re going nowhere, and Manchin can see which way the wind is blowing. And I’m not worried about Cornel West or Jill Stein either. Fuck ’em.
The main problem is still that the Electoral College would go red in a 50-50 election. Thank goodness states like Michigan and Pennsylvania seem to have become much more Dem-leaning than they were four years ago, and if we can get those two, TFG would have to run the WI-AZ-GA-NC table of swing states.
I’ll be retired, and will have plenty of time to write postcards.
Ruckus
@West of the Rockies:
Well SFB seems to be showing what I’d call rather obvious signs of his brain being taken over by old fartitus. Speech seems to be first to start to go, then recognition, then rationality. Of course there is no hard core concept of what goes first but SFB has made some verbal blunders and some start showing early and somewhat strong signs of dementia at around his age. IOW he’s getting there fast.
Just one man’s hopeful opinion.
zhena gogolia
@Ruckus: The Lincoln Project posted a video that showed how many times he has said “Obama” instead of “Biden.” I thought it happened once, but it’s at least four times if not five.
Citizen Alan
@schrodingers_cat:
Meanwhile, a thousand years ago…
If I am reading this chart right, Obama’s approval rating on or about November 30, 2011, was 42%. He did not break 50% approval at any point thereafter until early September, about two months before he was reelected.
Subsole
@Baud:
Wait.
Hold. The. Phone.
If Baud is Thanos, do half the pants on Earth dissolve with a fingersnap?
japa21
@Omnes Omnibus:
Same here. The most pessimistic polls (which as you say don’t men anything) have Trump up by at most 2 points. That is supposedly against a much weakened Biden due to runaway inflation, senility and dementia…..
Although I, like you, take nothing for granted, it wouldn’t surprise me if Biden won by 7-8 points.
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
Would I be wrong if I assumed that of all the felonies he’s been accused of, he might have been convicted on at least some of them by the next time we vote, making him ineligible to hold the office?
WaterGirl
@Ruckus: I’ll be interested to see an answer from Omnes, but I am not aware of anything that says you can’t be president if convicted of a crime. I would be happy to be wrong on that, though.
a thousand flouncing lurkers (was fidelio)
@Villago Delenda Est: Isn’t the judge’s clerk an officer of the court as well? Does abuse of the officers of the court constitute contempt of court?
WaterGirl
@Villago Delenda Est: Everything Trump touches dies. Even the fancy pants 3 million dollar lawyer.
Scout211
@WaterGirl: A felon can run for president, even from jail or prison:
The 14th Amendment is the only law that bars him from office but unless he is actually convicted, the 14th Amendment lawsuits aren’t going anywhere.
Ruckus
@zhena gogolia:
It is definitely more than one or two times. As an old fart and one who has seen a lot of them get to the onset of senility and beyond and live in a old fart apt complex (minimum age – 55, max age – still breathing and had a dad who for his last 5 yrs could not speak a word, and who started out 5 yrs before that often not being able to find the right word. Now he had Alzheimers so that was to be expected but many who don’t have it go through similar if not as long a period. My dad was 4 yrs older than ShitForBrains is when he passed.
If SFB is starting to use the wrong words or can’t find words he is 100000000% unsuitable for any public office. Of course he was already 10000% unsuitable. Decades ago.
RaflW
Don’t want to put this in the cute animal thread above, so I’ll just say here, Whew that Biden statement on Kissinger’s death is brutally brief and filled with carefully embedded knives.
Ruckus
@Scout211:
I’m not sure but I believe it’s possible that section 3 of the 14th amendment might make SFB ineligible for president, depending on if he could be found guilt of insurrection or rebellion – in my mind he really did call for those who rioted to overthrow the federal government so that he could stay in office. I’m not sure there is concrete evidence but there sure might be.
Timill
@Scout211: There’s also the 22nd Amendment…
Steve in the ATL
@WaterGirl:
You forgot to add “said no one ever”
Scout211
From the same linked article:
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
Here is section 3 of the 14th.
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
I may be reading it wrong but it does say any officer of the United States. I believe the president of the US is an officer of the United States.
Scout211
Ha ha. I can see Trump’s defense on that one:
“It was just braggadocio.”
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
@Ruckus: Only a conviction on the January 6 case would render Trump ineligible.
Sister Golden Bear
@trollhattan: Hydraulic mining was so destructive — including causing river channels to silt up, blocking riverboat traffic and causing extensive flooding — that the CA banned it in 1884, a time not known for it’s environmental sensitivity.
Nukular Biskits
@trollhattan:
Ref Salton Sea.
Been there several times.
When I’m in San Diego and I have the time, I typically will take the following drive:
East on I-8 to Hwy 79
North on 79 to Julian.
Eat apple pie a la mode, cup of coffee in Julian.
East on Hwy 78 through Anza-Borrego Desert State Park to Hwy 86, then back down to I-8.
zhena gogolia
@Steve in the ATL: lol
Matt McIrvin
@Brachiator:
This must be like how George W. Bush kept us safe from terrorism with notably rare exceptions.
The reason it’s hard to make the case to them is that they’re deliberately discounting the elephants of Trump mishandling the COVID pandemic, mishandling the massive civil unrest of 2020, and then personally trying to overthrow constitutional government in the United States. Such people can’t be reasoned with.
BellyCat
@Betty Cracker: Moms for Swinging.
Omnes Omnibus
@Steve in the ATL: You forgot to add “Zing!”
BellyCat
@RaflW: Well done, Uncle Joe!
frosty
Can we add a dam to the project? That’s what it takes to get BuRec on board. Their green eyeshades dudes can make any public works project pencil out as cost-effective!
brantl
@WaterGirl: conviction of sedition gets him off the ballot via the 14th amendment.
Ksmiami
@Matt McIrvin: dumb, overweight and mostly pretty lazy.
WaterGirl
@Steve in the ATL: hahaha!
Citizen Scientist
Not sure if anyone’s mentioned it, but there’s an early 2000s (?) movie called “The Salton Sea” With Val Kilmer in it. Probably not Oscar worthy but a decent noir-like story where he tries to figure out who killed his wife.
Chris T.
@trollhattan: Dead thread here no doubt, but: all the bloviation against Li-ion batteries because “there’s not enough lithium” is silly and ridiculous. People who make these arguments are using known reserve numbers. But these numbers (e.g., for zinc) are “known” because the stuff has been valuable for decades or centuries or millennia, so people went out and measured it. Lithium has only become valuable-at-scale recently. There are literally tons of it scattered all throughout deserts, but nobody knows exactly how much because it’s just been “huh, more dirt, moving on”.
Now that we’re starting to look for it, whoa, a billion tons in desert A, another billion in desert B, 500 billion tons in desert C, etc. It’s all over the place—which is not really surprising, it’s element #3 and like hydrogen and stupidity it makes up a lot of the universe. (So does helium, but helium is rare on Earth because it escapes.)
The important trick here is really “cheap and recoverable without making too much of an eco-disaster”. That’s what’s exciting about this find, not the sheer quantity.
Paul in KY
@Martin: Since it is already Salt-on, I guess using seawater would not be a fix. Too high in elevation or whatever.
Paul in KY
@jonas: I wonder if St. Augustine ever had to walk the walk on that one?
Paul in KY
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Fox news will use that in one of their misinformation broadcasts.
Paul in KY
@schrodingers_cat: I have seen Thanos in the movies and he (I guess) definitely wears pants or ‘lower body armour’.