Originally posted on:
Here you go.
FIFA Women’s World Cup – Final Match! Spain vs. England 6 am Eastern on SundayPost + Comments (126)
Open Thread: Bill ‘Ever Lower’ Barr Bobs to the Top of the Media Tank, Again
Someone wants his reputation back
Let's not give it to him https://t.co/hT3JvHZRFv
— Michael McDonald (@ElectProject) August 18, 2023
I can think of one attorney general who would've walked away from it. Likely after issuing a misleading statement about the misconduct. https://t.co/R8GhUmpXuA
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 17, 2023
Bill Barr is an old hand at excusing (and implementing) Republican misconduct, and he’s very good at his job. Were he called upon to justify — to, perhaps, a postmortal tribunal called by the stern Catholic God he very publicly professes — he would no doubt use Thursday’s clips to argue that he was always on the ‘Right’ side of the law, at least nominally. Yet here is how the NYPost perceived his presentation:
… Barr appeared on Fox News and was asked by host Neil Cavuto whether judges handling the 77-year-old former president’s four criminal cases should weigh the upcoming primary elections when scheduling Trump’s trial dates.
Barr insisted that while some accommodations may be appropriate, it would be better for the country to have the cases resolved before voters head to the polls in November 2024…
[Let’s get this efficiently swept under the rug(s), so we can start mournfully accusing the Democrats of ‘bringing up settled cases’… ]
Barr dismissed Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against Trump over alleged hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels as “obviously a political hit job” and a “joke” that may not even make it to trial.
He also criticized the most recent indictment against the former president out of Georgia — where Trump faces 13 felony counts related to his alleged efforts to overturn the state’s 2020 election results — as “too sweeping, much too broad” and “excessive.”
Barr argued that it is unlikely to be tried before the 2024 presidential election and that it makes it “look like people are piling on and being excessive to Trump and feeds the narrative that he’s being victimized.” …
[Hurting women and / or people of color — why is that even illegal? Now, if involved white men or paperwork, it would be serious.
Oops…]
Barr, however, called special counsel Jack Smith’s two federal cases against Trump, related to his alleged mishandling of national security documents and “knowingly false” claims made by the former president in an attempt to stay in power after the 2020 election, “responsible cases” that will make it to trial sooner than the other cases…
Open Thread: Bill ‘Ever Lower’ Barr Bobs to the Top of the Media Tank, AgainPost + Comments (125)
War for Ukraine Day 542: CHERNIHIV!!!!!
(Image, entitled Chernihiv, by NEIVANMADE)
Today is the Eastern Orthodox Day of Transfiguration, which is celebrated in Ukraine as the Apple Feast of the Savior. It is also the day that Russia opened up on civilians and civilian targets in Chernihiv.
Chernihiv. The historical heart of the old city. A beautiful summer Saturday. They targeted a theatre, just as in Mariupol. This time, it wasn't a bomb, but a russian missile. Civilians, including children, have been injured and killed. Another "important military target" was… pic.twitter.com/oDuH4AawDb
— Defense of Ukraine (@DefenceU) August 19, 2023
Chernihiv. The historical heart of the old city. A beautiful summer Saturday. They targeted a theatre, just as in Mariupol. This time, it wasn’t a bomb, but a russian missile. Civilians, including children, have been injured and killed. Another “important military target” was destroyed. And this will be repeated again and again. Not only in Ukraine, but elsewhere, until we stop this evil, until all war criminals are punished.
https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1692830218338107595
This is what it means to live next to a terrorist state. This is what we are uniting the entire world against.
Today, a Russian missile hit the heart of Chernihiv. A square, a university, and a theater. Russia turned an ordinary Saturday into a day of pain and loss. There are casualties. My condolences to everyone who has lost a loved one. All services are working on the site. Rescuers, police, doctors.
I urge the world to stand up to Russian terror. Provide Ukraine with additional tools to safeguard life. For life to win, Russia must lose this war.
https://twitter.com/maria_avdv/status/1692870602695061552
https://twitter.com/DefenceU/status/1692930872595329239
As of now, seven people are reported dead and 117 injured as a result of a russian ballistic missile attack on the Chernihiv Theater. Among the dead is a 6-year-old girl. Doctors are fighting for her mother’s life. Most of the victims were outside the theater at the time of the attack; they had just gathered in the city center on a day off. Hundreds of Chernihiv residents lined up at the city’s blood transfusion center. The next three days have been declared days of mourning in Chernihiv.
📷 @sesu
A machine translation of the last posted update from Ukrainian Interior Minister Klymenko’s Telegram channel:
The Kyiv Independent has more details:
Russian forces targeted the city center of Chernihiv in northern Ukraine on the morning of Aug. 19, killing at least seven people, including a six-year-old child.
Twenty-five people were hospitalized, Klymenko wrote earlier.
“A 12-year-old girl is urgently taken to Kyiv by ambulance. The child is in serious condition,” Klymenko wrote on Telegram.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said the missile strike impacted Chernihiv’s central square, polytechnic institute, and theater.
“Here’s what it means to be neighbors with a terrorist state, here’s what we are uniting the entire world against,” President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on Telegram.
“A regular Saturday turned into a day of pain and loss caused by Russia.”
U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bridget Brinks expressed solidarity with the victims, saying she was “horrified by news of today’s daytime attack on the historic center of Chernihiv.”
“Innocent men, women, and children enjoying a beautiful Saturday – a holiday in Ukraine – should never end up killed or wounded,” Brinks wrote on Twitter.
“Russia’s missile and drone strikes on Ukraine’s cities, ports, and people reflect the depths to which Russia has sunk and must stop.”
According to Chernihiv Oblast Governor Viacheslav Chaus, Russian troops likely used a ballistic missile to attack the city.
Following the attack, there have been unconfirmed reports in Ukrainian media that the missile targeted the site where Ukrainian drone producers were holding an exhibition.
The Kyiv Independent confirmed that an exhibition of drone producers was planned for Aug. 19 in Chernihiv, but the location was kept secret. The registered visitors were going to receive the address hours before the event.
Russian government-controlled RIA Novosti news site reported, citing unnamed sources, that the attack on Chernihiv “hit the gathering place of Ukraine’s Armed Forces military specialists on combat drones, which was disguised as a drone festival.”
The media posted what it claims was an invitation to the event that asked visitors not to bring weapons and wear civilian clothes “to avoid identifying the event as being related to the military sphere.”
Klymenko earlier said most of the attack’s victims were people in cars, those crossing the road nearby, and people returning from church service.
One of the photos from the scene shows a body with a traditional church basket next to it.
Klymenko said that “everyone who was in the drama theater went down to the shelter in time,” as police officers “tried to take everyone to the shelter” after the air raid alert went off.
“There is also a large park behind the drama theater. Mothers were walking there with their children since morning,” he said.
Here is President Zelenskyi’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.
Section 3 Is Self-Executing (Please Let It Be So)
"As of this moment, under the professor's reading of Section 3 and of my reading and Professor Tribe's, the former president is disqualified from holding the office of the presidency in 2024," @judgeluttig tells @AliVelshi. https://t.co/Hai9kn5Zyn pic.twitter.com/SZEPfnJZA4
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) August 19, 2023
The only question is whether American citizens today can uphold that commitment.
As students of the United States Constitution for many decades—one of us as a U.S. Court of Appeals judge, the other as a professor of constitutional law, and both as constitutional advocates, scholars, and practitioners—we long ago came to the conclusion that the Fourteenth Amendment, the amendment ratified in 1868 that represents our nation’s second founding and a new birth of freedom, contains within it a protection against the dissolution of the republic by a treasonous president.
This protection, embodied in the amendment’s often-overlooked Section 3, automatically excludes from future office and position of power in the United States government—and also from any equivalent office and position of power in the sovereign states and their subdivisions—any person who has taken an oath to support and defend our Constitution and thereafter rebels against that sacred charter, either through overt insurrection or by giving aid or comfort to the Constitution’s enemies.
The historically unprecedented federal and state indictments of former President Donald Trump have prompted many to ask whether his conviction pursuant to any or all of these indictments would be either necessary or sufficient to deny him the office of the presidency in 2024.
Having thought long and deeply about the text, history, and purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment’s disqualification clause for much of our professional careers, both of us concluded some years ago that, in fact, a conviction would be beside the point. The disqualification clause operates independently of any such criminal proceedings and, indeed, also independently of impeachment proceedings and of congressional legislation. The clause was designed to operate directly and immediately upon those who betray their oaths to the Constitution, whether by taking up arms to overturn our government or by waging war on our government by attempting to overturn a presidential election through a bloodless coup.
The former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and the resulting attack on the U.S. Capitol, place him squarely within the ambit of the disqualification clause, and he is therefore ineligible to serve as president ever again. The most pressing constitutional question facing our country at this moment, then, is whether we will abide by this clear command of the Fourteenth Amendment’s disqualification clause.
We were immensely gratified to see that a richly researched article soon to be published in an academic journal has recently come to the same conclusion that we had and is attracting well-deserved attention outside a small circle of scholars—including Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Anjani Jain of the Yale School of Management, whose encouragement inspired us to write this piece. The evidence laid out by the legal scholars William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen in “The Sweep and Force of Section Three,” available as a preprint, is momentous. Sooner or later, it will influence, if not determine, the course of American constitutional history—and American history itself.
Written with precision and thoroughness, the article makes the compelling case that the relevance of Section 3 did not lapse with the passing of the generation of Confederate rebels, whose treasonous designs for the country inspired the provision; that the provision was not and could not have been repealed by the Amnesty Act of 1872 or by subsequent legislative enactments; and that Section 3 has not been relegated by any judicial precedent to a mere source of potential legislative authority, but continues to this day by its own force to automatically render ineligible for future public office all “former office holders who then participate in insurrection or rebellion,” as Baude and Paulsen put it.
Among the profound conclusions that follow are that all officials who ever swore to support the Constitution—as every officer, state or federal, in every branch of government, must—and who thereafter either “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution or gave “aid and comfort to the enemies” of that Constitution (and not just of the United States as a sovereign nation) are automatically disqualified from holding future office and must therefore be barred from election to any office.
Regardless of partisan leaning or training in the law, all U.S. citizens should read and consider these two simple sentences from Section 3:
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.
Read the whole thing. It’s long, but worth it.
Open thread.
Section 3 Is Self-Executing (Please Let It Be So)Post + Comments (155)
Saturday Morning Open Thread: Silly Season
I would rule in favor of the defendant because if you manage to convince somebody to pay you $200,000 for a picture of a monkey on the computer, you clearly deserve the money more than they do. https://t.co/1mdRLrqfe3
— Starfish Unexpectedly Cancelled For Hating Hitler (@IRHotTakes) August 18, 2023
{GG, using Scooby-Doo villain voice: If it weren’t for those wacky kids…}
Dems in Array! https://t.co/YbpsNFbvWy
— River_Tam (@RiverTamYDN) August 19, 2023
INBOX: pic.twitter.com/PJhnldVptu
— Julia Johnson (@juliaajohnson_) August 18, 2023
Saturday Morning Open Thread: Silly SeasonPost + Comments (136)
Holy Cow!
MY LAPTOP IS NOW STUCK IN ALL CAPS BUT IT LOOKS LIKE WE NEED AN OPEN THREAD!
ON MY WAY TO THE FARMERS MARKET< HOPEFULLY IT WILL MAGICALLY FIX ITSELF WHILE I”M GONE
Friday Night Open Thread: Project Veritas, Going Through Some Things
James O’Keefe said he was exposing waste, fraud & abuse: Now he’s Under Investigation for Looting Project Veritas https://t.co/fzz8G6Zuuu
— Jane Mayer (@JaneMayerNYer) August 18, 2023
It won’t bring back ACORN, but any day where James ‘JOKe3’ O’Keefe III and his merry band of Repub ratf*ckers come under legal scrutiny is a pretty good day for me.
Due props to The Nation for getting there first:
… While the exact nature of the investigation is not yet public, the timing would suggest that it relates to O’Keefe’s alleged financial improprieties during his tenure as the group’s chairman and CEO. Back in February, O’Keefe was accused of spending “an excessive amount of donor funds in the last three years on personal luxuries” by the conservative nonprofit’s own board of directors, amid their very public feud over the management and future of Veritas. Westchester DA Miriam Rocah’s probe follows a raft of civil lawsuits, criminal investigations, and six-figure court losses that have trailed the group under O’Keefe’s leadership—including a still-active federal investigation into the theft of property belonging to President Biden’s daughter Ashley Biden…
Attorneys for Project Veritas also filed a civil complaint against O’Keefe in federal court this past May, accusing the ostensible investigative reporting outfit’s original hidden-camera sting artist of breaching his contract and fiduciary duties to the group, among other counts. Despite that pending litigation, made public alongside a detailed new timeline reiterating the board’s own version of its disputes and grievances with O’Keefe, Veritas says that the organization did not prompt the Westchester DA’s investigation into its former leader via a formal criminal referral…
… O’Keefe has made a name for himself by attempting to unearth further supposed malfeasance by liberal activists, politicians, and institutions—as well as by his perceived foes in the establishment media and Big Tech. Multiple people caught up in O’Keefe’s investigations have lost their livelihoods in the frequently incoherent and often inaccurate publicity maelstroms that have followed the typical Project Veritas exposé: nonprofit workers, Obamacare navigators, NPR executives, public school teachers, and news media employees among them.
In October 2021, a federal judge finally stated the obvious about O’Keefe’s latter day Nixonian dirty tricksters, declaring that it was acceptable for litigants to refer to Project Veritas in open court as a “political spying operation.”…
Following O’Keefe’s attempt to unilaterally fire Veritas Chief Financial Officer Tom O’Hara, in contravention of the 501(c)3’s bylaws, and O’Keefe’s own surprise resignation this past February, the Veritas board published a preliminary tally of its former leader’s financial misdeeds.
Pending a “third party investigative audit,” the board accused O’Keefe of spending “$14,000 on a charter flight to meet someone to fix his boat under the guise of meeting with a donor,” blowing over $150,000 on high-end limo services, and taking thousands of dollars more for personal DJ equipment. O’Keefe, they said, also requisitioned $60,000 for “dance events,” including the production of a semi-autobiographical pop music celebration of his life in muckraking: the Project Veritas Experience. Such self-indulgent expenditures would be what’s known within the Internal Revenue Code for tax-exempt 501(c)3s as “inurement.”…
It’s unclear how this parallel audit, or the group’s new civil complaint against O’Keefe, will aid or hinder the Westchester DA’s criminal investigation already underway. One former PV executive says that the DA sent a request to Veritas for “all financial docs” relevant to the case back in the second week of April—and another long-serving senior-level member of the group confirmed, saying, “We have complied and given them information.” In all cases, these sources close to Veritas would speak only on the condition of anonymity, citing either legal exposure from the group’s onerous use of nondisclosure agreements or physical threats made by O’Keefe’s incensed fanbase—or both.
Compounding all this scrutiny on O’Keefe’s past financial behavior, Veritas board member Matthew Tyrmand—the far-right Polish nationalist, Steve Bannon protégé, and alleged architect of O’Keefe’s ouster, according to O’Keefe’s diehard defenders—resigned last month…
O’Keefe was lucky in his timing when the Great ACORN Drama broke, and he’s kept afloat on the rich right-wing grifter tide ever since through a combination of media-friendly ‘dramatics’ and a Gish gallop of dishonesty at every turn — you couldn’t get a grip on one thread of malfeasance without a dozen squirmy little monsters & malefactors dropping out of the web. But there are far bigger and more professional grift-groups roaming the ‘conservative’ networks these days (*cough* TFG *cough*). When he was fired / jumped ship from Project Veritas back in February, seemed pretty clear Jimmy wanted to get ahead of the prosecutorial pitchforks & torches by hiving off a ‘new’, ‘totally different’ grifteration… but, Murphy willing, he may just have made too many enemies among his PV running buddies to slide out with a tap on the wrist, this time.
Friday Night Open Thread: Project Veritas, Going Through Some ThingsPost + Comments (160)