ALDOUS J. PENNYFARTHING: MTG dimly wonders why judge doesn't slap gag order on bicyclist who called her a fascist

By Aldous J. Pennyfarthing 

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Wednesday, October 18, 2023 at 11:27:40a MDT

 

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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the inimitable Flaxen Klaxon, has gotten her Mussolini Underoos in a twist again because someone rode by her on a bicycle and called her a fascist. She didn’t delve into the lurid details, but if it wasn’t either an early-20th century gadabout hieing to his local publick house on a penny-farthing or a 4-year-old girl riding her Big Wheel to her local Build-A-Bear Workshop, the universe needs to step up its game just a bit.

MTG is M-A-D because U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who’s presiding over Donald Trump’s attempted democracy-murder trial, imposed a limited gag order on the defendant that forces him to behave like a civilized person in a civilized society—something that everyone, including Greene, knows is literally impossible.

Greene, who took an oath to the Constitution that may as well have been a vow to a cheese-pocked Quarter Pounder wrapper, thinks the gag order is a violation of Trump’s free speech rights. Because how is an obviously guilty man supposed to get a fair trial if he can’t summon a feral mob of hooligans to threaten the lives of judges, prosecutors, and potential jurors? Is this still America or what?

RELATED STORY: Donald Trump tells crowd he's 'willing to go to jail' for democracy

Watch:

GREENE: “You want to know what’s dangerous? They have called President Trump Hitler and called him Nazi. They’ve called me Nazi. Someone drove by their bicycle today outside the courtroom and called me a fascist. They call us names all the time. Why isn’t their speech being gagged? Why isn’t their speech being censored? Why isn’t their speech being weighed in the public court of opinion and weighed in courtrooms as being disparaging and inflammatory and inciting violence against people?”

Yes, it’s very rude to call someone a fascist just because they tried to overturn a free and fair election in order to install an unaccountable strongman dictator. It’s like words don’t even mean anything anymore!

Of course, Trump is still allowed to claim he’s being politically persecuted, or that he ran for president against Barack Obama, or that windmills are driving whales so “batty” that they also think they ran against Barack Obama. He just can’t—as a felony defendant—use his bully pulpit to make the folks administering justice in his case feel threatened. In other words, it’s the same standard that applies to any American who’s done (allegedly!) illegal things.

The Washington Post:

The gag order, [Chutkan] said in a ruling issued from the bench after a hearing, will prohibit all parties from statements “publicly targeting” special counsel Jack Smith, his staff, her staff or “any other court personnel.” Statements about the families of those individuals are “absolutely prohibited as well.”

Even before the order was issued, Trump’s lawyer John Lauro said they would appeal any such order, as it would affect important free speech principles, particularly for a leading candidate for president.

Trump “can argue that this prosecution is politically motivated,” the judge said, but he cannot disparage the prosecutor by calling him a thug or “vilify and implicitly encourage violence against public servants who are simply doing their jobs.”

Seems reasonable. But hey, if MTG really wants to seek a gag order prohibiting people on bicycles from calling her a fascist, she’s welcome to try. It would almost guarantee more such behavior, but there’s a principle at stake here. No one other than Marge knows what that principle is, but this is America. She has every right to make a damn fool of herself. And we have every right to enjoy it.

RELATED STORY: Trump is appealing a narrow gag order imposed on him in his 2020 election interference case

Supreme Court Justice "Coke Can" Clarence Thomas is just begging to be impeached

Coke Can Clarence does whatever he pleases.  Or, rather, whatever his rich "friends" please. That's what friends do.

 

By Joan McCarter for Daily Kos

Daily Kos Staff

Monday, October 16, 2023 at 1:30:02p MDT

 

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Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Clarence Thomas caught a lucky break last week, with a news cycle dominated by the attack on Israel and the collapse of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. That meant the latest blockbuster story from ProPublica about the conservatives’ court benefactor, Leonard Leo, as well as Thomas’ hijinks went relatively unreported.

The extensive ProPublica story details the extent to which the whole conservative judicial establishment—from state supreme courts all the way up the ladder of federal courts—has been constructed by Leo and the ultraconservative millionaires and billionaires he’s recruited to the project. In the article, there’s a nugget about Thomas that’s worth highlighting:

On a chilly day in March 2017, about six weeks into Trump’s presidency, Leo arranged for a select group to have a private audience with Justice Clarence Thomas at the U.S. Supreme Court. The attendees were a group of high-net-worth donors who had been organized by [billionaire hedge-fund manager Paul] Singer to marshal huge resources toward electing Republicans and pushing conservative causes. That afternoon, the donors spoke with Thomas. The previously unreported meeting was described by a person familiar with it and corroborated by planning documents.

That’s Leo and Singer using the actual U.S. Supreme Court building, not to mention access to one of the justices, to fundraise for Republicans and their causes. Those causes include legal challenges—to voting rights, to abortion rights, to marriage equality, to environmental and consumer protections—that will work their way through the courts to be decided by Thomas and the other justices Leo put there.

Speaking of those cases, the court will consider at least four this session in which Thomas benefactor Harlan Crow has an interest. In case you’re wondering, no, Thomas hasn’t recused from any of them. Crow is the billionaire Texan who is BFFs with Thomas and has shown his friendship over the years via hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of largesse, everything from paying the private school tuition for Thomas’s ward to sweetheart real estate deals to providing luxury trips.

AccountableUS research details four cases pending at the court in which Crow has an interest through his real estate firm, Crow Holdings, and a subsidiary founded by Crows’ father, Trammell Crow Residential. Those cases include Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, CFPB v. CFSA, Moore v. United States, and Acheson Hotels, LLC v. Laufer. These are all cases in which big corporate money—or millionaires and billionaires—are fighting everything from environmental protections to the tax code to the Americans with Disabilities Act. Either directly through his businesses or indirectly through the complex web of dark money in which he is enmeshed, Crow is involved in these cases, and Thomas will be participating in deciding them.

Finally, last week Thomas also continued his ongoing crusade against the First Amendment protections granted in 1964’s New York Times v. Sullivan, another landmark civil rights era precedent he wants to see overturned. The court refused to hear a case, Blankenship v. NBC Universal, challenging the Sullivan precedent. In 1964, the court established that a public official could not recover damages in a defamation action absent a showing of actual malice. That made it much harder to sue the media, creating an “elevated standard,” Thomas said in his statement on Blankenship. The court “usurped control over libel law” in Sullivan, Thomas wrote, which he claimed was not based “in the original meaning of the First Amendment.”

Gee, now why would Thomas want to impose free speech limits on the press?

Thomas continues to thumb his nose at the very idea of behaving ethically on the court, even as the evidence of his corruption piles up. He’s particularly disrespecting Roberts, who continues to insist that everything is just peachy at the court. The justices, he told the Senate earlier this year, all subscribe to the court’s Statement of Ethics Principles and Practices, the tepid and unenforceable guidelines the Supreme Court has in place of an actual code of ethics.

After a session in which Thomas is likely to vote to strike down decades of precedent on behalf of his rich, powerful, and highly partisan friends, Roberts might have to rethink that whole ethics issue.

Q: How can such roly-poly people be so crooked?  A: When you're a Supreme Justice you don't have to run away from your bad deeds.  Nobody is going to hold you to account.

'I would vote for Biden even if he was dead': PA Republican weighs in on possible Trump nomination

Kerry Eleveld for Daily Kos

Daily Kos Staff

Monday, October 09, 2023 at 11:37:58a MDT 

 

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On Sunday, NBC “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker interviewed swing-state voters. Specifically, she spoke with a handful of voters from Pennsylvania about their thoughts on a very likely 2024 presidential rematch between President Joe Biden and four-time indictee Donald Trump.

In a video clip tweeted by Tennessee Election Commissioner Chris D. Jackson, Welker asks if any of these voters would consider staying “at home on Election Day?” One older gentleman quickly says, “No,” explaining, “I love American democracy too much that Biden and Trump, if it's a Biden-and-Trump race, then I would vote for Biden even if he was dead,” adding, “And I’m a Republican.”

Now if this man (or most other Republican voters) could only get his political party to listen to him.

AT LEAST ONE REPUBLICAN GETS IT: Even if the guy behind those shades is stone cold dead.

ALDOUS J. PENNYFARTHING: Sen. Fetterman zings GOP: 'America is not sending their best and brightest to Washington'

Thursday, October 12, 2023 at 12:19:34p MDT

While Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania may not boast the sartorial resplendence of, say, Jacketless Jim Jordan or disgraced former whatever-that-was Donald Trump—whose chichi Queen-meetin’ duds appeared to shrink in real time before our infinitely astonished eyes, threatening to pop his skull off his torso like a wonky Kirkland champagne cork—it’s fair to say he’s a more serious legislator than every current Republican member of Congress.

Granted, it’s not a high bar, but Fetterman’s style, such as it is, certainly must give Republicans fits. They’re continually getting owned by a guy who looks like he just spent the day bowling with Willie Nelson’s roadies. He may not be a sharp dresser, but he sure as shit has a sharp tongue. And that ample sass was on full display Wednesday night on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”

RELATED STORY: Sen. John Fetterman gives moving speech at disability hearing

After praising Fetterman for his excellent meme game, Colbert asked if it can be awkward running into the resultant smoldering heaps in the halls of Congress. After all, he never had that problem with Dr. Mehmet Oz, whose proud New Jersey guts he left on the abattoir floor after unceremoniously dispatching him last fall.

Watch:

COLBERT: “Is it awkward to be in the Capitol and then run into people that you have put up a devastating meme about, because you’ve got excellent meme game. But then you have to see these people in the cafeteria.”

FETTERMAN: “Ah, no, it’s … you all need to know that America is not sending their best and brightest to Washington, D.C. Like, sometimes you literally just can’t believe these people are making the decisions that are determining the government here. It’s actually scary, too. And, you know, before the government almost shut down—I mean, it came down to a couple hours. I was in my office, and they finally came over from the House, and they’re like, okay, well, this has to be unanimous in the Senate, and out of 99 of us, if one single one of us would have said no, the whole government would have shut down. That’s how dangerous that is to put that kind of power in one tent, because you have some very ... less gifted kinds of people there that are willing to shut down the government just to score points on Fox.”

Of course, it’s somewhat ironic that the man who’s perhaps most responsible for Congress’ current dysfunction has gone out of his way to criticize Fetterman’s clothing. Last month, as Rep. Matt Gaetz was preparing to shove ex-Speaker Kevin McCarthy out to sea on an ice floe, he joined convicted criminal and well-known fashion plate Steve Bannon to discuss Fetterman’s clothing choices.

Here’s how that went:

BANNON: “Congressman Gaetz, I can tell you from my sources around Washington, D.C., they’re blaming you [for the impeachment inquiry]. They’re saying McCarthy was rattled by you. He knew you were going to make the speech today, he knew it was going to be powerful, he knew you would put him on notice, and put him on the clock, and this is why he ran out and made the hostage video. Your response and observations, sir.”

GAETZ: “First of all, that is the best dressed we have ever seen John Fetterman. His shirt had both buttons and the entire pant was not elastic. There were elastic features, but it was not exclusively elastic. And so, I don’t know what tent store he bought that muumuu at, but it appears to be new and I am grateful that he is really upping his game in that regard ...”

BANNON: [Giggles with glee while curb-stomping irony to death with his dandruff-mottled joggin’ Crocs.]

RELATED STORY: 'Do your job, bud': There's a lot to learn from Fetterman's takedown of Gaetz

And then there’s the X (formerly known as Twitter) account of RNC Research, which represents the party of former Rep. Louie Gohmert—who once asked if the National Forest Service could change the moon’s orbit to fight climate change. (It can, of course, but it’ll run into miles of red tape and face fierce resistance from the powerful and entrenched original-moon-orbit lobby.) Those super-geniuses responded with this: 

For the nontweeters:

John Fetterman, completely unironically: "America is not sending their best and brightest, you know, to Washington, D.C."

“Completely unironically?” Well, yeah. He can say such things entirely unironically. Did Fetterman force Fitch to downgrade the U.S. government’s credit rating? Did he bring us within a hair’s breadth of shutting the government down (yet again) for no good reason? Does he fight against urgently needed climate change legislation? Or support giving the already obscenely wealthy every tax break they ever wanted, and then some?

No? Then what the fuck is RNC Research even talking about? His hoodie?

Republicans have no ideas and nothing substantial to run on. They’ve replaced coherent policy with pointless chaos—and it shows. Fetterman is just stating the obvious, and doing so with an impish glint in his eye.

Maybe in 100 years or so, baggy shorts and hoodies will be de rigueur on the floor of the Senate, and then our government will be able to focus on the really important issues—like staying open. That said, it’s becoming ever-more obvious that good-faith Republicans will never come back into style.

RELATED STORY: Republicans ignore national security to go DressCon 1 over Fetterman's casual attire

It's a bird.  It's a plane.  Who is that hoodied man?  I don't know about you-all, but I haven't had a hero of Fetterman's stature since Barack Obama.

 

"Gym" Jordan: Could the GOP find anybody worse?

Nick Anderson for Comics

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Thursday, October 12, 2023 at 11:23:40a MDT

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Trump's comically absurd economy revisionism

By Kerry Eleveld for Daily Kos

Daily Kos Staff

Tuesday, October 10, 2023 at 7:12:19a MDT

  

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Former President Donald Trump delivered a ringing endorsement of his successor's post-COVID economy during a campaign event in New Hampshire Monday.

"We had the greatest economy in the history of the world, we had COVID, and then I built again—rebuilt it again," Trump said in a display of comically absurd revisionist history. "The stock market was actually higher than it was pre-COVID. It was pretty amazing."

Indeed, that is amazing since the economy was in the toilet when Trump left office. Trump was also long gone before the economy began recovering the roughly 10 million jobs it shed during his final year in office. All in all, Trump ended his White House tenure with a net loss of about half a million jobs, while President Joe Biden has created north of 13.5 million jobs to date.

 

 

 

The White House

@WhiteHouse

Our economy gained 336,000 jobs last month, for a total of nearly 14 million jobs created under President Biden. That monthly average is higher than any President on record – by far.

 

 

That bar graph pretty much says everything you need to know. Still, Trump's cultists almost universally believe 45 was crushing it as president, as Sarah Longwell, host of “The Focus Group” podcast, has noted. And they almost surely believe he "rebuilt" the flourishing post-COVID economy that in reality came to fruition under Biden.

Sure is nice of Trump to rave about Biden's economy.

ALDOUS J. PENNYFARTHING: Former Pence aide defends former boss, calls Trump a phony Christian

Olivia Troye

Aldous J. Pennyfarthing

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Wednesday, October 11, 2023 at 12:59:59p MDT

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While it’s always been glaringly obvious that Donald Trump is a fake populist and fake Christian, it’s still nice when Republicans—especially those who worked in his administration—come forward to confirm it. Somehow, Trump’s rabid evangelical supporters have still failed to pick up on the fact that Trump mispronounces the books of Bible (almost as if he’s never read the thing), claims he’s never done anything that would require God’s forgiveness, and once asked an adult film star to spank him with a copy of Forbes—instead of, say, Aquinas’ “Summa Theologica,” as any real Christian would surely do. 

And his tired “man of the people” shtick was always a bit hard to swallow, given that the one major piece of economic legislation he signed as pr*sident was a tax law that primarily enriched him and his wealthy friends. (And, of course, to keep the grift going, he lied to his supporters’ faces about who would benefit.)

RELATED STORY: Trump's comically absurd revisionism on the economy

So it was particularly refreshing when Olivia Troye—who worked for former Vice President Mike Pence as a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force before resigning in protest of Trump’s unholy monkey fuck of a COVID strategy—recently appeared on “The View” to defend her former boss and point out that Trump isn’t particularly respectful of his own voters. And why would he be? They’re sentient, flesh-and-blood humans not named Donald Trump.

Asked why so many people still have a blind loyalty to Trump despite, well, everything, Troye revealed that Trump actually has nothing but contempt for the millions of gullible marks he pretends to love like his own daughter. (Well, maybe not like his own daughter. That would be weird. Though it would make for one of the most entertaining Penthouse Forum and/or Farmers’ Almanac letters ever.)

TROYE: “Well, I think it speaks to an unfortunate state of the Republican Party. It’s certainly not the party that I want it to be, and it’s not the party that I believe that it has been in the past. I think he has done a great job of sort of marketing himself as the champion for all of these people who are behind him in this movement. But we’ve sat in these meetings. What is so frustrating and angering to me is the fact that he has nothing in common with any of his supporters. And I detest the way he speaks about them. Like, when he would talk about them in meetings, it was so disparaging to them. And I think about my own family members who, by the way, are very unhappy with me. I’ve got a lot of family members who are still Trump supporters. They are very upset that I am a Trump critic. I think about them, and I’m like, I hate the way you speak about them sometimes behind closed doors.”

That’s fun to hear, right? If only she’d provided more details. Can you give us some examples, Olivia? Or at least tell us what percentage of these comments involved the reshoring of America’s long-shuttered Soylent Green factories?

Ah, but Trump isn’t just a phony man of the people. He’s a phony religious fanatic, too. 

JOY BEHAR, CO-HOST: “He’s been going after your boss. He goes after Mike Pence since the insurrection when, according to testimony from former White House aides, Trump said he deserved the ‘Hang Mike Pence’ chants. Now you know both of them very well, and poor Mike Pence is polling at 5%. I mean, that’s a sort of a sad number. So why doesn’t he just take Trump on, because he’s not going to win if he just stays neutral or stays away from it.”

TROYE: “I wish he would, honestly. I have been wanting him to take Trump on from day one, especially on Jan. 7 of 2021. I wanted him to be out there saying this is everything that we’ve lived. You know, I have tremendous respect for former Vice President Mike Pence still. I worked very closely with him. He and Trump could not be any more different. They are very different people. I can tell you that while Mike Pence gets a lot of criticism, I know he’s got some more very conservative views on certain issues, he really believes his faith, and I think that’s what guides him. … He’s got some more very conservative views, especially, you know, women’s rights. I wish he would move … to the middle. But I do believe that he is a man of faith, and I think he does follow his faith, whereas I can’t figure out what faith Trump actually subscribes to, if there is any ...”

BEHAR: “The almighty dollar is what he worships.”

TROYE: “Valid point, valid point. It’s all about the grift.”

Well, yes. Trump and Pence are different people. If they were the same person, there’d have been no need to graft Pence to Trump’s rectum for four years until the anti-rejection drugs wore off. But she respects this motherfucker? Really? Casper the Friendly Milquetoast? For four years, the only difference between Mike Pence and a tetherball was that tetherballs are typically more of an off-white.

Okay, so while she deserves credit for pointing out the obvious, she still likes Pence. That said, she has harsh words for some of the other top GOP jabronis. Troye also weighed in on the current GOP speaker battle and Jim Jordan’s prospects for unifying the party: “I think putting a cat in charge would be more unifying than Jim Jordan, to be honest. And that’s saying a lot, because I’m allergic to cats.”

While it’s easy to pile on former Trump administration officials for speaking out—or writing books—after it was too late to do anything about Trump’s well-documented, um, “eccentricities,” Troye deserves credit for bailing before the 2020 election and actively working to get Joe Biden elected.

For that, she can be forgiven for “respecting” Mike Pence. I guess. Maybe. We’ll see.

A blast from the past - back when Mike Pence was Trump's loyal VP.  And he still denies evolution.