It’s long past time for Trump’s head to explode – he is not supposed to be losing!!!
MuellerSheWrote
@MuellerSheWrote (1 hour ago)
Trump’s immunity claim in the E Jean Carroll case is DENIED a re-hearing en banc (by the entire appeals court panel). Earlier, a three-judge panel DENIED his motion to stay the trial pending the outcome of this appeal. As of now, trial begins January 16th. 1/Kyle Cheney
@kyledcheneyThe federal appeals court in NY has *denied* Donald Trump’s request for the full bench to hear his civil immunity appeal. This could be moving ot SCOTUS imminently.
Totally open thread.
Odie Hugh Manatee
May the shitshow continue…
WaterGirl
This has to be the legal nightmare version of “If it’s Tuesday, this must be Belgium.”
Poe Larity
What would it cost to print a million Dark Brandon stickers with “I did that!” to put on gas pumps?
*Except CA/HI where gas will never be cheap again.
MazeDancer
For those of you worried about Dione Warwick losing her mind and performing at an RFK jr fundraiser, as published recently, she just tweeted:
“I don’t know anything about this event. I did not agree to it and I certainly won’t be there“
dmsilev
How long until the various appeals courts start sending back Trump appeals with nothing but a copy of that “Oh Christ, it’s THIS asshole again” picture?
Ryan
He’s a losing loser who loses. I mean, he was in Home Alone 2!
WaterGirl
I seem to have missed the whole “Harvard President” scandal. What’s it about? Is she a good guy being unfairly hounded or a bad guy drowning in her own lies? Or somewhere in between?
mrmoshpotato
@Ryan: The first Home Alone sucked too. Who didn’t want to punch Kevin? Not I!
hueyplong
@WaterGirl: It’s right wingers getting a scalp.
New Deal democrat
@WaterGirl: She was slightly sloppy in not adequately citing some sources. She was hounded out in an extremely orchestrated campaign that probably was really motivated by her testimony before Stefanick.
For a longer but good summary, just read this:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/01/breaking-most-important-scandal-in-recent-american-political-and-legal-history
cain
@WaterGirl:
It’s about MAGA using zionism to attack anyone with anti-Semitism. Apparently, you can only be a zionist if you can’t then you are an antisemite.
There was some talk about plagiarism but I don’t know what that is about – there is a lot of stuff out there but it’s hard to determine what the core thing is.
But this is a Chris Rufo initiated shit show so there you go.
billcinsd
@WaterGirl: Well, she isn’t really either of your two options. She responded truthfully to a setup question from Elise Stefanik and then a friend of Chris Rufo, who lost a job for lying about some stuff accused her of plagiarism. The NYT ran a whole slew of articles about her and she resigned. She is probably not a great person and was not necessarily completely innocent of the charges, although they were way overblown.
New Deal democrat
As an aside to this thread, I imagine sooner or later there will be a discussion about the mechanics of *how* the 14th Amendment’s disqualification clause ought to be enforced. Before jumping to any conclusions, put the shoe on the other foot and imagine how your preferred method would be used by the GOP against Democratic candidates.
MattF
Needless to say, when Trump loses the Presidential election in November, he’ll claim victory and that the voting was rigged. Considering that he now claims to have won every state in 2020, being defeated at the polls, however decisively, won’t shut him up. At least, he won’t be able to invoke the Insurrection Act.
Splitting Image
Every day Trump loses a legal fight, I wake up to “I Got You Babe” on the radio.
bbleh
@WaterGirl: mobbed by Republican Congress-critters at a hearing about how students who support Israel are for sure actually being TERRORIZED at (surprisingly only) Ivy League campuses and then derailed by accusations of plagiarism that happen not to be relevant to her scholarship but IT’S THE PRINCIPLE, and also because Harvard which makes her an Elitist, and NOT AT ALL about her being a Black woman.
… ie what hueyplong said at 9
ETA: the fact that she resigned on the first business day of the year suggests to me that it was a plan agreed some time ago by her and the Corporation to calm the waters and get back to the business of Harvarding. She got caught in a bad place by some very bad actors, and one trusts her landing will not be hard. (She was also poorly prepped, so one also trusts that law firm WILL have a hard landing.)
Ksmiami
I am so sick of him. I hope he melts away or disintegrates like a Halloween pumpkin left out til Thanksgiving. Gfc
Kay
@WaterGirl:
instawajahat
TS
Money buys justice – or supposed money buys justice – it seems the SCOTUS is the personal court of TFG
bbleh
@New Deal democrat: first, like any other qualification established by the Constitution, eg you gotta be 35 and a natural-born citizen, and second, where there is any question of fact (eg is a candidate someone who “engaged in insurrection”) by a proper trier of fact.
SpaceUnit
I hope the court has a giant full-page rubber stamp to mark all the documents in huge block letters. DENIED
And I hope they then threw those documents right in trump’s face. A fella can wish.
kindness
The Supreme Court tried to slow it down for Donald. That didn’t work out very well for them, eh?
Eyeroller
@Kay: I do not believe they “fall for it.” I believe what others have written–they know what they are doing and this is what they want.
Harrison Wesley
@bbleh: Did she pretend to be a Falasha? That would be totes unforgiveable.
Matt McIrvin
@WaterGirl: Basically, if you’re a Black woman and you piss off right-wingers, you had better have been perfect in your every past action or they’re going to hound you to oblivion, and it’s likely nobody will have your back.
Apparently Neil Gorsuch has done similar things and skated on it.
trollhattan
Here’s a we’re sorry in advance. Newest Young Republican Power Power Couple will at some point be in your face, bigly. [retchhhhh]
Can’t say I didn’t warn you.
bbleh
@SpaceUnit: I hope the oral hearing features little but guffaws from the bench every time the Trump lawyer opens his(?) mouth.
“Wait … wait, lemme read from your … uh … brief [snerk] … where it says … hahaha … that based on an, um, report by … hahahahaha … that … ahahahaahahaaa! omg somebody else take over hahahahaahahahaaa!”
Brachiator
Trump is delusional. Unfortunately, his condition is incurable.
His legal setbacks just push him deeper into crazy land. It’s tiresome, but he continues to drag the country through this nonsense.
SpaceUnit
@bbleh:
Or that the judge makes the jack-off motion every time trump’s lawyer stands up and speaks.
trollhattan
Can I get the Tiny String Quintet in here?
Delk
Gorsuch is a plagiarist. Goose meet gander.
Jackie
@trollhattan: That was NINE yrs ago? It seems like just yesterday. Seeing her name brought it all back. She was/is a vile creature.
Edited to add I’m elated to know her life on earth is still hell.
bbleh
@trollhattan: @Jackie: BOOYAH! The arc of the universe is long etc. She was in jail briefly too. And I don’t feel one tiny Appalachian mite of a scintilla of an iota sorry for her either, cuz the wingnut-o-sphere are already GoFundMe-ing
That deserves another beer, resolutions be damned.
Nukular Biskits
Good evenin’, y’all!
Quadrillipede
Donald L. Trump has a ring to it…
Ken
But they haven’t even tried electroshock or lobotomy.
billcinsd
@New Deal democrat: Would not the Dem needed to do something somewhat close to sedition?
Nukular Biskits
@trollhattan:
Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person.
WaterGirl
@Splitting Image: hahaha
Splitting Image
@trollhattan:
When I was young, I learned that it was mean and cruel to rejoice in other people’s misfortunes.
As I matured, I learned that every rule tends to have a fair number of exceptions.
WaterGirl
@kindness: How do you think the Supreme Court tried to slow things down for Trump?
Ken
Asked and answered, surely, when you identify the culprit as “the Dem”.
WaterGirl
@trollhattan:
Then quit your fucking job if it requires you to do something you believe is wrong.
bbleh
@Splitting Image: not a misfortune, rather just deserts. She broke it she bought it. FAFO. Etc and so on. [Insert emoji with thumbs in ears and tongue out.]
Jackie
Per Political Wire:
So much for a quiet news evening…
Chief Oshkosh
@New Deal democrat: Even more succinct:
https://youtu.be/6DGNZnfKYnU?si=cynnrlCPAthQlZjG
Urza
@billcinsd: No, obviously facts are not relevant. If they were, they wouldn’t be trying to impeach Biden using all sorts of easily disprovable conspiracy theories.
WaterGirl
I appreciate all the explanations about the Harvard President. I think we should get rid of Acorn again, just for the hell of it. //
Right after I think “Harvard President, oh no!” I think about all the shit people we have recently been exposed to with degrees from Harvard. That institution isn’t what it used to be.
wjca
Electroshock might have merit. But wouldn’t a lobotomy require finding something not it evidence?
Quadrillipede
I’m actually not sure which is more pathetic actually: either TFG keeps legit losing to Democrats, or otherwise he keeps letting them steal elections out from under him. Sad! Weak! L-word!
WaterGirl
@New Deal democrat: Argh!
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Jackie: The word “ties” is doing a lot of work in that headline. Isn’t this just a list of cellphone contacts, or something?
Joe Biden is in my phone’s contact list, but I wouldn’t say that we have “ties”.
Mr. Bemused Senior
Giblets knows that is not the rule at Pottery Barn, see lost weekend in the Pottery Barn of the soul
JaySinWA
@WaterGirl: It has annoyed me that I hadn’t seen any examples in the sources that sided with or against the charges.
I finally got around finding some of the allegedly plagiarized qoutes, from the Washington Free Beacon that the NY Times claims was the front runner for the attacks.
I am not an academic, but I don’t see these as plagiarism, but more like boilerplate (as even the NY Times put it). It might help to see how others used language to describe this material, to see how it could have been written differently, but they are talking about sentences and sentence fragments in some cases, a paragraph or so in what looks like a natural flow in summarizing another document.
Here’s a link to one of the Free Beacon articles. https://freebeacon.com/campus/harvard-president-claudine-gay-hit-with-six-new-charges-of-plagiarism/
Baud
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon:
Yeah, everyone is getting excited about the upcoming defamation opportunity.
But apparently Trump is caught up in it, so it’s not all bad.
RaflW
@WaterGirl: It’s the NYT being in cahoots with Rufo & Co.
And more broadly, the deep misogynoir that gets unleashed when a black woman ascends to a place of power that too many still see as a white man’s place.
JaySinWA
I doubt that Harvard ever lived up to its idealized image. Or pretty much any of the Ivies.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Baud: I won’t just reinforce his “brand”?
BethanyAnne
@New Deal democrat: No. You are wrong. We need to do exactly the opposite. It is long past time for Democrats to stop cowering and avoiding taking a stand because of what might happen later. We have done that for 50 years, and the Right wing just keeps amping up the crazy. There is zero evidence that us being principled bipartisan citizens encourages good behavior on their part, and time after time after time of evidence that, in the absence of a legitimate grievance, they’ll make one up and speed ahead. And he committed an insurrection. That requires justice. It is craven to avoid justice because it might make the perpetrators angry.
Baud
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon:
Who knows with his supporters?
RaflW
@WaterGirl: Or Harvard very much is what it used to be, but it’s all much more obvious now.
lowtechcyclist
@Splitting Image:
“It’s cold out there this morning.”
“It’s cold out there every morning!”
New Deal democrat
@billcinsd:
What constitutes sedition?
Who decides the issue?
By what burden of proof does it has to be proven?
For example, could the GOP Congress in 2016 have decided that Hillary Clinton engaged in sedition, and was ineligible to run?
What’s that, you say? Absurd? Whaddaya gonna do about it?
heh heh heh
TBone
@BethanyAnne: hear, hear! I didn’t sign up to play defense on a team of cowards. Sea lioning is mere distraction.
New Deal democrat
@TBone: You and BethanyAnne are invited to contemplate my comment just above.
Have a very nice un cowardly evening.
BethanyAnne
@TBone: Watch out, concern troll is cooooonnceerned.
lowtechcyclist
@WaterGirl:
Exactly.
New Deal democrat
@BethanyAnne: Answer my questions in comment number 63 above.
Until then, you have no argument.
RaflW
Also, re: Harvard, this:
He goes on to show how very little the same people cared about Stanford’s chief’s bullshit. A tad of that is east coast snobbiness, I suspect. But mostly it’s about certain characteristics of the two leaders. See if anyone can guess….
bbleh
@New Deal democrat: per 20 above, the Constitutional language is “engaged in insurrection,” which is a question of fact. Seems to me that, apart from monkeyshines like saying those words don’t apply in this particular case because of that particular twist on this particular modern interpretation of that particular word, it then becomes a question of who is a legitimate trier of fact? And as to that in general, there’s a lot of procedure and law and precedent.
And as to the argument that “well, it’s political, so everything’s political,” I can say only, then there’s no point to a Constitutional provision at all. If the people want a 30-year-old pop star for President, they should have her, right?
ETA: oh and no, imo the 2016 Congress could NOT so have decided, because they’re not a trier of fact (other than the Senate in an impeachment) and they didn’t have jurisdiction even if the issue had been raised (which it wasn’t).
BethanyAnne
@New Deal democrat: I already made my argument. We’ve tried the bipartisan, good-faith, upstanding, play-by-the rules good citizen route for 50 years. We’ve had our clocks cleaned for 50 years. If you don’t see that you are advocating more of the same, I can’t make it make sense to you.
Address your specific concerns? Nope! Go sea lion elsewhere. JAQing off is of no value and I answer only to belittle you. Piss up a rope.
New Deal democrat
@BethanyAnne:
Who is empowered to decide that a candidate engaged in insurrection? Congress? The Courts? States’ Secretaries of States? Governors? Local election officials! Goddess BethanyAnne?
By what standard of proof must it be shown? More likely than not? Beyond reasonable doubt? Because Goddess BethanyAnne felt like it?
New Deal democrat
@bbleh:
Okay we’re getting somewhere. Who is/are/ought to be the triers of that fact under the 14th Amendment? What’s the burden of proof?
bbleh
@New Deal democrat: one court has already done so. Generally, trial courts are triers of fact. Executive officials make judgments within their statutory remit, but those can be appealed to the courts. As noted above, other than the peculiar case of impeachment (which is not a legal proceeding), Congress is not a trier of fact.
And as to “blah,” funny how it’s exactly the question you posed in #72.
This trier of fact concludes therefrom you are not engaged in serious discussion. Thank you for your time.
BethanyAnne
@bbleh: Sea lions, man.
bbleh
@BethanyAnne: yeah, but probably even stinkier. And I know from sea lions.
New Deal democrat
@bbleh:
is one local court or Secretary of State sufficient? Is it okay for a federal Constitutional standard to be decided on a state by state basis?
As to Congress, they can find facts for lawmaking purposes and for contempt of Congress cases. So Congress is or can be a trier of fact if the Constitution implies that it is or can be.
Joseph Patrick Lurker
@WaterGirl:
These columns sum up my feelings about Claudine Gay.
Her multiple instances of plagiarism were indefensible and she had to resign. Gay is not entitled to a pass simply because her accusers are reprehensible human beings. Gay has only herself to blame for her downfall. In her resignation letter she takes no personal responsibility and simply whines about being a victim.
James Joyner:
https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/claudine-gay-resigns-harvard-president/
Tom Nichols:
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/01/claudine-gays-resignation-was-overdue/676999/
Tyler Austin Harper:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/claudine-gay-harvard-plagiarism/677007/
New Deal democrat
@BethanyAnne: Nice factual reply.
Have a very nice evening untroubled by thought.
ETA: and as to SeaLioning, I didn’t intrude and pick this fight. *You* did.
TBone
@BethanyAnne: atta girl.
New Deal democrat
@bbleh: So Trump must be convicted of a crime?
Have a nice evening.
Geminid
@New Deal democrat: You may think this is an unpopular argument now, but wait ’til the Supreme Court uses it to throw out these ballot exclusion lawsuits. It will be pitchfork time for sure!
New Deal democrat
@Geminid: And I’m not even wedded to the argument. I can just see a basketful of issues that might be raised, some of which might come back to bite the “good guys” later.
RaflW
@New Deal democrat: “Is it okay for a federal Constitutional standard to be decided on a state by state basis?”
Our infinitely brilliant* founders decided that the individual states would determine facets of election law. One of the reasons that some states demand photo ID, and others don’t.
If that can stand in our very kludgy system, why can’t a federal standard be decided by state courts in different locales. And with possibly different results? The CO supremes seem to think it was their remit. We’ll see what Scotus says on that
*yeah, right
RaflW
@New Deal democrat: And on this, I will join those who say we’ve pissed away a lot of power over decades of worry about the lines the GOP would cross “if we took action”, and then the GOP crosses that line even when we didn’t.
I’d argue that letting Bush Jr. lie his ass off to get us into the second Iraq war, and letting that just sliiiiiide was a serious part of the undoing of our country.
New Deal democrat
@RaflW: You may be absolutely right. As I wrote Geminid above, there are a basketful of issues here, some of which may come back to bite certain proponents later.
jonas
As it happens, the student journalist who blew the whistle on the Stanford president’s misconduct was none other than Peter Baker’s son.
Bill Arnold
@Joseph Patrick Lurker:
Via chatgpt, a respectably powerful Plagiarism Machine. (I made a single minor edit to the chatGPT output.)
Ruckus
@Ken:
But they haven’t even tried electroshock or lobotomy.
Do you really think electroshock or lobotomy will change one iota of ShitForBrains? Maybe a container ship full of TP would be able to clean up that mess. Maybe. But I am doubtful….. Sulfuric Acid might do it.
Ruckus
@Splitting Image:
OK that got a giggle…….
catclub
It is if there is a constitutional sheriff involved, and either tassels or no tassels on the flag.
Bill Arnold
@Ruckus:
You’re looking for piranha solution. One of the best solutions for [the problem of] removal of unwanted organic material.
(To very roughly paraphrase Trump’s (Miller’s?) revolting language about permanently eliminating his verminous enemies.)
evodevo
@Kay:
Why does this remind me of the Shirley Sherrod incident?
The "I Want" Song
@Bill Arnold: Strictly speaking, I believe this would still be considered plagiarism. Rewording doesn’t address the fact that the content and structure are basically unchanged. (Just recalling the briefing I got as a grad student decades ago, so my memory may be a little rusty…)
Quaker in a Basement
Apparently the operatives of incompetent thug Joe Biden are just everywhere.
Fair Economist
@New Deal democrat:
Currently, the standard is “per the judgement of either a judge or relevant state official, subject to approval of the appropriate state Supreme Court and the US Supreme Court.”
That’s pretty reasonable, really.
Fair Economist
@Joseph Patrick Lurker: The actual evidence doesn’t bear out these claims. The examples cited are, at most, two separated sentences with rewording, on well-covered topics, never even a paragraph. By those standards there’s scarcely a person on the planet who writes nonfiction who isn’t guilty of “plagiarism” – including journalists.
randal sexton
@New Deal democrat: me. I heard him advocate it, I watched it happen and I know what I witnessed. It’s on me to show up to stop this every time. Me. Not some black robed sack of credentials. Me.