Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh Join John Roberts and the Liberals to Uphold the Biden Administration's Persistent Unconstitutional Censorship of Americans

I forgot: Hello everyone! Welcome to Wednesday. Wednesday comes from "Wotan's Day," Wotan being the German name for the Norse god Odin. He had a lot of similar names: Odin, Wotan, Woden, Othin.

The Romans called the day Wodansday because they considered Odin, for some reason, to be the Germanic analogue of Mercury.

Via Google:

Old English Wōdnesdæg 'day of Odin', named after the Germanic god Odin or Woden, the supreme god; translation of late Latin Mercurii dies, Odin being equated with the Roman god Mercury. Compare with Dutch woensdag .

How does that work? I dunno, they seem completely different to me. Mercury was the messenger god, and Odin was the god of... hmm, apparently he's the god of wisdom, poetry, magic, and death. A Reddit guy explains they have some similarities in the lesser-known parts of their portfolios:

That being said, Odin and Mercury do have a few things in common. They are both associated with magic, words and language, knowledge, trickery and disguise, and traveling between different realms.

It's strange to have the father-god not be a god of war or the sky.

But that was Thor. Tyr/Tiw was the god of war, from where we get "Tuesday."

So Odin would have to have a different portfolio.

This guy, a sort of comparative mythology researcher, thinks the strangeness of Odin is due to him not being originally part of the Norse pantheon. He's an import, this guy says, a late addition, a god picked up from some shamanistic Scandanavian tribe and combined into the Norse pantheon, and given the backstory that he's the father of Thor.

On to the "very disappointing" news from the Supreme Court, as Matt Gaetz called it.

Amy Coney Barrett is a problem. She will haunt us for 50 years, like Sandra Day O'Connor.

She and her fellow liberals ruled that those bringing the lawsuit against the government for violating the First Amendment's prohibition against censorship lacked, get this, standing to bring the suit.

Kavanaugh, of course, is also a weak sister.

We fought for this guy?

Why are we nominating liberals to serve for life on the Supreme Court?!?!

In Murthy v. Missouri, the Court's decision underscores the stringent requirements for establishing standing in federal court regarding social media censorship claims. Justice Barrett's opinion highlights that neither the individual plaintiffs nor the state plaintiffs demonstrated a sufficiently concrete injury directly traceable to the actions of federal officials. "The need for a concrete and particularized injury cannot be overstated," wrote Barrett. "Speculative or generalized grievances do not meet the threshold for judicial intervention."

Justice Alito, in dissent, painted a stark picture of government overreach, describing the alleged coercion as a "far-reaching and widespread censorship campaign" against Americans expressing certain views on social media. This division within the Court reflects the ongoing debate over the role of government in regulating speech on digital platforms and the extent to which private companies' actions can be attributed to state influence.

Sean Davis, founder of The Federalist, reacted strongly to the ruling, tweeting, "The Supreme Court's ruling and opinion on the widespread federal government campaign to censor and banish accounts that shared factual information about ongoing government operations is an abomination that ignores both the facts and the law. I never thought I would see the Supreme Court rubber stamp the most egregious and illegal censorship campaign in American history, but here we are. What a joke."

They have not released the ruling on presidential immunity yet and, based on this ruling, I'm not at all hopeful.

But liberals are worried, for the moment, so maybe I'll take some solace in that.

Speculation is building about the possibility of the Supreme Court delivering a favorable ruling to former President Trump as he claims immunity from prosecution.

Even the current conservative-majority court would balk at finding that all presidents have unconstrained immunity, most experts believe.

But some kind of caveat-laden ruling that tosses the arguments about Trump's legal exposure back to lower courts remains a strong possibility.

That scenario is enough to alarm many liberals.

Eric Holder, who served as attorney general in the Obama administration, sounded a warning during a recent interview with Nicolle Wallace of MSNBC.

Holder alluded to the prospect of the justices ruling that a president can be prosecuted for private acts but not for "official" acts undertaken in the course of his duties.

In Trump's case, this pertains to alleged offenses in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. A mixed ruling would mean lower courts would be asked to adjudicate which of Trump's actions fit into either official or nonofficial category.

In practical terms, such a process would almost surely extend the case beyond November's election. If Trump wins the election, he could simply instruct the Justice Department to abandon its prosecution of him -- a move that would elicit howls of protest.

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 01:03 PM | Comments (365) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Pro-Terrorist Fire Alarm Puller Jamaal Bowman Blown Out in Primary

Bowman's term in Congress was marked by crazed angry shouting at his colleagues.

And supporting Hamas, of course.

The weekend before, he declared "We are gonna show AIPAC who the f*** we are!"

He had fellow terrorist-supporting Skwad member Big Booty Latina show up to dance around like a flea on molly. She was Bowman's hypeman. She was a spazzy little Flava-Flav.

He had 360,000 twitter followers, while his opponent only has 6,000. But Twitter is not real life.

He went on unpopular, unfunny, off-putting TV clown Stephen Colbert's show. Oddly, Colbert did not deliver the votes.

He lost by 30+ percent.

The New York Times knows who to blame: The Jews. Funny, that's exactly who Jamaal Bowman blames. It's like the NYT is right on the same mental frequency as the 9/11 Truther, terrorist-supporting conspiracy theorist Jamaal Bowman.

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 12:03 PM | Comments (361) | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Morning Rant: Minimalist Edition

Hubris is a behavior that insults the natural order and oversteps the limitations of our knowledge. That definition is spot-on when it comes to the vile, cruel, insane, and, frankly evil behavior of the trans-industrial complex. They believe they are gods who can remake humanity...how else can one interpret the belief that they can turn a woman into a man or a man into a woman? Those characteristics are elemental and immutable, and the arrogance that suggests that they can be manipulated with a scalpel and some hormones is lunacy.

And shockingly it is even worse, because their targets are not adults whose psychiatric illness manifests as body dysmorphia.

No...they want our children.

Biden admin official pressured medical experts to nix age limit guidelines for transgender surgery: court doc

Adm. Rachel Levine, the assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services, feared that the World Professional Association for Transgender Health's late 2021 guidelines would make it difficult for American transgender youth to obtain access to the procedures, according to email excerpts between WPATH members included in an Alabama court filing.

WPATH guidance recommended age minimums of 14 for hormone treatment, 15 for mastectomies, 16 for breast augmentation and 17 for genital surgeries.

That guidance is awful enough. The typical 14-year-old is a mushy-brained collection of competing emotions, driven by a rapidly changing physical body coupled with the profound changes in the unimaginably complex biological systems creating adult behavior. To assume that a child in the midst of this is capable of coherent and logical analysis of his place in the world reveals an absolute ignorance of biology, normal human emotion, and to top it off...the law! No 14-year-old child has the legal capacity to enter into contracts or legal agreements, so the idea that he can agree to life-destroying medical treatment is an affront to Western jurisprudence.

But that's not enough for the Devil's imps who have wrested control of America's sanity. They want no age restriction. What is their goal...the mutilation of toddlers? Because that is the arc of their thinking, and it is a terrifying glimpse into their evil, sociopathic world.

The Greeks saw Hubris as leading inexorably to the appearance of Nemesis, the goddess of vengeance, who humbles the offender.

There is no punishment cruel enough for those who demand that their horribly warped world-view be visited upon innocents.

[Crossposted at CutJibNewsletter]

Posted by: CBD at 11:05 AM | Comments (166) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Mid-Morning Art Thread

Interrupted Whetting
Jose Ferraz de Almeida Junior

Posted by: CBD at 09:30 AM | Comments (322) | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Morning Report — 6//26/24

Good Morning Kids. On a somewhat positive note I suppose, Jamaal 5-Alarm Bowman, late of the so-called "Squad" has been shown the fire exit in the NY District 16 primary yesterday. Aside from being an anti-semite, he's as rabid an anti-American radical and racialist as you can imagine. And sadly because that is part and parcel of what the Democrat Party is, I don't think his ouster at least in terms of the party itself is going to make much difference, except that it will attempt to keep the Jew-baiting and racialism on the down-low insofar as it, and their allies in the media, are capable of doing that. The candidate who defeated him, or whom the constituency voted to replace him is not exactly a flag-waving, patriotic American to say the least.

Latimer’s coalition of well-funded backers included the United Democracy Project, a super PAC affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) that spent a staggering $14 million in the race, and a cryptocurrency group called Fair Shake that bankrolled another $2 million worth of spots.
The race quickly developed into a referendum on the Israel-Hamas war and Bowman’s public comments about the Jewish state and followers of that religion.
Last week, in an interview with WNYC’s Brian Lehrer, Bowman accused Israel of committing “genocide” in Gaza. . .

. . . Over the weekend, Politico quoted Bowman as saying that Jews had “segregated” themselves from the rest of Westchester, and had “made a decision to do that for their own reasons,” drawing the ire of South Bronx Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) . . .

. . . But perhaps the nadir of Bowman’s campaign came the Saturday before primary day, when he vowed to “show f–king AIPAC the power of the motherf–king South Bronx” during a manic rally alongside fellow “Squad” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
In Bowman’s concession speech Tuesday night in Yonkers, he doubled down on his stance, telling supporters: “We will continue to fight for a free Palestine, and God help us that we live in a better world where when we say ‘Free Palestine’ it is not antisemitic.”
The lawmaker also made a point of shouting out “the Muslim community from Yonkers to San Francisco to Dearborn, Michigan to St. Louis to Chicago to Long Island to New Jersey [who] surrounded me this entire race with protection, with love, with gratitude and they helped us raise more money than we ever raised

It is a sad commentary that my co-religionists who still bitterly cling to the illusion and myth of the Democrat Party as a force for good without seeing the true evil of who and what they are and always have been, regardless of past injustices from the right, which are indeed a thing of the past. Leftism is evil. Forget the Squad, look at what the Biden Junta as well as liberals in Hollywood and elsewhere are doing and to still support this is madness. You really think replacing Bowman with George Latimer is going to make a damn bit of difference in changing the trajectory of this nation. the anti-semitism notwithstanding, what of every other issue, or do you still bitterly cling to the madness of global warming, transgenderism, DEI, open borders, and socialism? And that goes for all you libs, Jew and Gentile.

It's not merely the politician, it's the policies. Maybe I'm pissing in the wind by hoping for a massive miraculous awakening of those who've been sleepwalking for decades.

ABOVE THE FOLD, BREAKING, NOTEWORTHY
• As I write this, we await the Supreme Court's ruling on the so-called Chevron deference (or doctrine). It concerns the power of federal agencies to interpret laws and promulgate them into regulations that affect nearly every American in one way or another. It's not sexy, but it could end up being the most significant case the court will rule on this year—maybe in any year. 
  There's One Big POINTY Reason (and Dozens of Others) to Hope the Supreme Court Shoots Down Chevron
  
• Polling suggests at least a fifth of mail-in ballots in 2020 were tainted by fraud, compromising the legitimacy of an election that came down to a few thousand votes in a handful of states.
  49 States Are Now Supplying ‘Non-Citizens’ With Voter Registration Forms.
  
• From the Weather Underground and Black Panthers to Antifa and Black Lives Matter.
  Democrats: The Party of Political Violence

Posted by: J.J. Sefton at 06:57 AM | Comments (368) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Daily Tech News 26 June 2024

Top Story

• Fearless Fund's founder has resigned, and it's a sad reflection on the VC world for Black women. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Is it, though?

  Still, it is being sued by a politically conservative group called the American Alliance for Equal Rights (AAER) over its charitable grants program. AAER is challenging the fund's right to provide $20,000 in small business grants to Black women, claiming the program violates the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which bans the use of race in contracts.

  Oh.

  The case is not going particularly well for Fearless Fund. As TechCrunch recently reported, earlier this month an appeals court ruled against Fearless. It upheld a preliminary injunction that prevents the firm from making grants to Black women business owners. The firm told TechCrunch at that time it is weighing its options on how to proceed.

  Shockingly, it turns out that racism is not only bad, but sometimes illegal. And while larger funds don't care about quaint notions like right and wrong, they do care about lawsuits potentially involving massive damages:

  Still, as we previously pointed out, the sad fact is that big names in the tech ecosystem have not exactly come out swinging in support. CEO Simone told Inc. earlier this year that the fund had lost nearly all its partnerships aside from two, JPMorgan and Costco. Even Mastercard, who sponsored the now-contested Strivers Grant, has publicly never commented on the lawsuit.

  You hate to see it. Wait, not hate. The other one.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM | Comments (173) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Overnight Open Thread - 06/25/2024
[Roger Ball]

Cautiously delving into the non-aviation world of things, I risk scorn from the HORDE by straying out of my lane. But I think it’s important for the HORDE to know that I am at least somewhat multi-dimensional.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 10:00 PM | Comments (377) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Elephants Gone Wild Cafe

NYC
by Mania de Praeter

These poor fools do not know that river otters are evil.

You might say this particular bat-boy was bred to fetch sticks.

Freaky illusion.

Surfin' dog.

Boaters flocking around.

Moose and her kids swim across a lake.

The Netherlands in 1918.

Young Republican In Training.

Wait for it....

Have you tried the new improved self-rocking babies?

Rescuing a dying street dog.

Oh my: Saving a dog from a collapsing sidewalk just seconds before it washes away in a flood.

Hand-puppet Bohemian Rhapsody.

Street skiing.

Twerking kitten.

Soccer volleyball, the sport of the future.

Speaking of Top Gun.

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 07:32 PM | Comments (385) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Quick Hits

Fresh news on the "51 former intelligence officials" psyop.

"Intelligence" contractors and staffers need to get their publications pre-cleared by the CIA before they can submit them for publishing.

Former Acting Director of the CIA Mike Morrell-- who went to work for the Hillary Clinton front group Beacon Strategies after covering up and lying about the Benghazi slaughter -- demanded an expedited review for the "hallmarks of Russian disinformation" letter, so he could get it out in time for Biden to repeat the lie in his 2020 debate.

The CIA granted this unusual request for expedited review, in order to aid him in his Big Lie.

Among the people involved in getting this lie out to the public as soon as possible? Trump's CIA Director Gina Haspel, who has always been a Deep State leftwing operative, and one of the main reasons people like me say "Trump is terrible at picking people to appoint to top jobs."

Jeff Carlson
@themarketswork

This is insane. Five former CIA Directors colluded to alter the outcome of the 2020 election by falsely claiming Hunter's Laptop was Russian Disinformation.

Now we find the active CIA Director was also involved.

How can this be seen as anything other than a Deep State Coup?

House Judiciary GOP
@JudiciaryGOP

MAJOR BREAKING NEWS: New Information Shows CIA Contractors Colluded with the Biden Campaign to Discredit Hunter Biden Laptop Story

A Muslim group is screaming about a test question about terrorism.

This group claims that branding ISIS a terrorist group is "US and Zionist propaganda" against Muslims.

A New Jersey middle school has apologized for a teacher's exam which referred to The Islamic State, aka ISIS, as a "terrorist organization."

According to The Post Millennial, the Schuyler Colfax Middle School teacher's multiple-choice quiz question (below) stated "It is a terrorist organization that commits acts of violence, destroys cultural artifacts, and encourages loss of life in order to achieve its goal of global rule under strict Sharia law."

Answers included The Shining Path, al Qaeda, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), and (the correct response) Islamic State.

The group Teaching While Muslim posted on Instagram that the question was "NOT okay on a million levels" and claimed "We have seen anti Muslim & anti Palestinian sentiments, teachers, and content in our schools over and over again."

So you're claiming that ISIS represents Muslims, so that any statement about them is a smear against Muslims?

Okay then -- I'll take you at your word.

It went to allege the 7th grade teacher's question was "factually inaccurate" and another example of "US and Zionist propaganda."

"[The teacher] has failed his students and must be held accountable for this misinformation," TWM continued. "How many educators are bringing their prejudice and hate into their classrooms?"

The "misinformation" that ISIS is a terrorist organization.

...

It asked "how are your Muslim students supposed to foster self-worth [...] with educators embodying this level of hate and prejudice?"

...

The Post Millennial report notes the U.S. State Department has considered ISIS (and its predecessor AQI) a "foreign terrorist organization" for the last 20 years.

This group is now demanding terrorist, I mean Muslim, "represenation" on the school boards so that they can redesign the curriculum and "undo the harm" caused by stating that, factually, ISIS is a terrorist organization.

Get ready for a shock -- USAToday is publishing verifiably false claims about the wonders of transgender butchery.

The opinion section at USA Today published an article titled "I'm the parent of a trans daughter. There's nothing conservative about blocking her care." The author, Sean Madden, claims "I was a registered Republican for decades" and is now a director of GRACE (Gender Research Advisory Council & Education), a non-profit organization that aims to "advocate for and empower the transgender community." Madden begins, "I write . . . to provide some insight into our family's experience with gender-affirming care and hopefully to correct some of the most egregious misinformation about it." As an attempt to refute critics, Madden argues:

"For adolescents approaching the onset of puberty, puberty-blocking medicines may be appropriate for delaying the development of secondary sex characteristics not matching their gender identity, an intervention that is fully reversible."

Yet the article linked as the source does not actually confirm the claim. Here is what the link says:

"Researchers say the results bolster the evidence that short-term use of puberty blockers does not cause permanent damage to the ovaries and uterus. However, they noted that because the study was conducted in rats, additional research would be needed to confirm the findings in humans."

The study in question is a Ph.D. dissertation submitted to the University of Northern Colorado. The student gave gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonists (colloquially called "puberty blockers") to young female rats for four weeks, or saline to the control group. The study concluded that, weeks after stopping the administration of the hormone agonists, the female rats' reproductive organs showed normal (albeit delayed) development.

There are a few things worth noting about the study. First, the rats received the puberty-blocking drugs for only four weeks, whereas children prescribed such medications in the course of "gender-affirming care" take them for much longer....

Second, although the female rats' reproductive organs recovered after they stopped receiving the puberty blockers, there were still consequences on their fertility; they had significantly smaller litters. The study notes that one rat on puberty blockers did not achieve pregnancy, which "suggests some individual variation in fertility after GnRHa withdrawal" and "an increased sample size may have detected a significant impact of the puberty blocker on future fertility," and this "raises some fertility concerns that should be considered by transgender individuals." Aside from fertility, the rats who received puberty blockers showed reduced voluntary running on a wheel and increased body mass.

So this is a lie. No child takes "puberty blockers " for four weeks, so any claims about the non-damaging nature of these experimental drugs must be limited by the caveat, "if you only take them for four weeks." And even then, children will suffer irreversible damage.

And also: Children are not rats, though the Frankenstein left does like performing experiments on them, from seeing how they'll react to puberty blockers to seeing what masking them up for a couple of years might do to their long-term socialization and speaking abilities.

Oh no! Hunter Biden's law license has been suspended in Washington, DC!

How can he continue providing foreign oligarchs with the great (checks notes) energy business advice that he's famous for?

Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, has had his law license suspended in Washington, D.C. following his recent conviction on firearm charges in Delaware. The District of Columbia Court of Appeals announced the suspension on Tuesday, emphasizing the immediate effect of the decision.

The court's ruling states that Biden "is suspended immediately from the practice of law in the District of Columbia pending resolution of this matter." The court has directed the Board on Professional Responsibility to initiate a formal proceeding. This proceeding will determine whether Biden's offense involves moral turpitude, a crucial factor under D.C. Code 11-2503(a), which could influence the final outcome regarding his ability to practice law in the district.

...

The suspension of Biden's law license in D.C. marks a significant development in his legal and personal struggles. It remains to be seen how the Board on Professional Responsibility will rule on the matter and what the long-term consequences will be for Biden's legal career.

LOL, are you being snarky?

The only thing that is going to put a dent in Hunter Biden's earnings is the eviction of his demented pervert father from the White House.

Hunter Biden is again trying to get his gun conviction dismissed.

Hunter Biden's attorneys are once again requesting a dismissal of his conviction on federal gun charges in Delaware and a new trial. This has turned into something of a soap opera at this point because his lawyers already made this request once, before turning around and withdrawing the appeal less than an hour later. This time, Hunter's team isn't even attempting to claim that he was incorrectly convicted and was actually innocent. They are filing the appeal based on what they claim was a procedural error by the court. They originally filed an appeal with the 3rd US Circuit Court challenging his prosecution. The court rejected the appeal before the trial began, but Hunter's attorneys are saying that the court failed to issue a standard mandate returning the case to the lower court in a timely fashion.

[CNN:]

His lawyers claim that the trial court did not have jurisdiction over his case because of appeals that he had filed challenging his prosecution. The defense team says that the conviction must be wiped away because, even though the appeals court had rejected the appeals by the time the trial started, it had not issued what's known as a "mandate" -- the procedural maneuver that effectively notifies a lower court of ruling made by a higher court in an appeal.

Biden's lawyers are pointing to the absence of a mandate sending the case back to the trial court after the 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals handed down rulings rejecting two of his appeals in late May.

This sounds like a rather silly objection at first glance. Hunter Biden was not denied his opportunity to challenge his prosecution on these charges. The appeals were filed and they were considered by the 3rd Circuit and rejected. But the defense team may unfortunately still have a chance of prevailing here. The state is supposed to dot all of the i's and cross all of the t's when ensuring that citizens have every opportunity to defend themselves against prosecution. This was obviously just a procedural error that didn't affect the outcome, but it was still an error nonetheless.

Yeah, I don't know about that. The problem is that Hunter Biden didn't make this objection previously -- you know, when the court could have corrected its minor procedural error. I don't know the term for it but courts tend to dismiss claims when the party has not acted in a timely matter. Here, Biden let this error sit and stood for trial, and only brings it now after the trial, after millions of dollars have been spent on the trial.

That sounds a lot like sandbagging -- holding back a Secret Objection to a procedural error as an emergency hatch in case the trial goes against you. Whether or not this error was minor (and it seems minor), I think his appeal will be rejected for failure to bring the matter up when the courts could have corrected it by a simple, free change of paperwork.

I think I'm thinking of the doctrine of laches, or estoppel by laches:

Laches is a doctrine in equity whereby courts can deny relief to a claimant with an otherwise valid claim when the party bringing the claim unreasonably delayed asserting the claim to the detriment of the opposing party. The doctrine is also commonly referred to as estoppel by laches.

"Laches" derives from what is sometimes called "Law French." The Normans changed the old Anglo-Saxon law to their French norms.

late Middle English (in the sense 'slackness, negligence'): from Old French laschesse, from lasche 'loose, lax', based on Latin laxus . The current sense dates from the late 16th century.

Lache currently means "coward" in French, but I bet it was originally in the old sense of "coward" -- one who uses underhanded means in a fight.

Under pressure from the left -- Jimmy Dore, for example, is always talking about this -- Biden has struck a deal with Julian Assange.

Assange has been held in a British jail for five years. This deal was only struck now to appease lefties who are skeptical or hostile towards Biden.

Assange got out of prison due to Biden's poor polling in Michigan.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is set to plead guilty to a felony charge in a deal with the U.S. Justice Department. This agreement will free him from prison and resolve the prolonged legal battle over the publication of classified documents.

Key Details:

Assange, who has been imprisoned in the UK for the past five years, left a British prison on Monday and is expected to plead guilty in a U.S. federal court in the Northern Mariana Islands on Wednesday.

The deal involves Assange admitting to an Espionage Act charge of conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified national defense information.

WikiLeaks celebrated the deal, expressing gratitude to supporters and emphasizing Assange's commitment to exposing government corruption and human rights abuses.

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 06:32 PM | Comments (185) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Corrupt Judge Merchan, Hand-Picked to Assist Alvin Bragg in Framing Trump for a Non-Crime, Partly Lifts the Gag Order

Partly.

And he's doing this because he knows his order is just more lawless election interference and will not survive review by the Supreme Court.

Judge Juan Merchan has partially lifted the gag order he imposed against former President Trump -- weeks after the jury found him guilty on all counts.

Trump and his legal team have been fighting the gag order since it was imposed upon him at the start of the trial, but had ramped up their efforts when it concluded last month. The former president and presumptive Republican nominee's legal team had argued the gag order should be lifted before the June 27 presidential debate.

Merchan's gag order barred Trump from making or directing others to make public statements about witnesses with regard to their potential participation or about counsel in the case -- other than Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg -- or about court staff, DA staff or family members of staff.

Merchan on Tuesday partially lifted the gag order because the trial has concluded.

Trump is now able to speak about protected witnesses and jurors.

Trump is still blocked from commenting about individual prosecutors, court staff and their family members. That portion of the gag order will remain in effect until Trump's sentencing on July 1.

Oh, so the Regime says he can comment on jurors and witnesses, but he still may not comment on Regime Operatives.

Who could have seen that coming?

Trump should continue appealing. This is Soviet.

Thanks to fd.

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 05:46 PM | Comments (112) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Why Is This Year's Presidential Debate So Early?

Steve Huntley of John Kass News (dot com) points out that never in history have we had a presidential debate in the beginning of summer. (Summer just started on the 21st.) They're always in the fall, or late August at the earliest.

So why is this one so early?

An easy answer is "because Democrats have turned Election Day into Election Half-Year and so voters need to see the candidates before they begin voting." Which could start, who knows, in July for all know.

But... why would Democrats want a debate to impact voters' decisions? Surely they would prefer if debates were held in September, after most votes had already been cast. Too late for Democrat voters to change their minds.

Huntley speculates:

A debate between the two parties' presidential candidates this early has never happened before. Never.

The explanation is that the Biden campaign, worried about his sagging poll ratings, wants to reassure voters about his age and mental acuity, contrast himself with Trump, and remind Americans that the stakes have never been higher. Meaning the evil orange man might get returned to the White House, and America needs to know how awful he is.

Really, the country needs to hear more Democrat reasons to hate Trump?

...

Let's consider another possible motive, one perhaps animating Democrat leaders and party faithful who behind the scenes must be verging on panic over the increasing public perception of Biden as a senile old fool, an 81-year-old man who's doddering, decrepit, feeble in mind and body.

...

Influential Democrats might see it as the last chance to save the party in November.

These movers and shakers might figure that if Biden has a crippling debate performance of disconnected ramblings, meaningless utterances, angry outbursts and undeniable mental decline, there's still time to persuade him to drop out and for the national convention in late July to produce a replacement.

...

After another recent disastrous poll, analyst Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight declared, "Dropping out would be a big risk. But there's some threshold below which continuing to run is a bigger risk. Are we there yet? I don't know. But it's more than fair to ask."

Suppose the debate turns into a humiliating embarrassment for Biden. Democrats might find themselves at Silver's "there."

...

Or maybe you think this scenario of pushing Biden aside might be too cynical or Machiavellian. If so, let's revisit a simple truth: The Democrats' and the hard left's lust for power and their obsession with destroying Trump know no bounds.

Hm. Let me consider this.

Okay, I've considered it. Huntley offers a reason why Democrats might want an early debate, to finally build up the case to pressure Joe Biden to drop out.

But "Democrats" did not agree to to this debate -- Joe Biden did.

How does it help Joe Biden to have an early debate which can give Democrats more ammunition to persuade the party to force him out?

No, I think the conventional wisdom here is right: Biden saw his poll numbers dropping, felt the panic from Democrats and billionaire donors, and figures that he can "reset" the election by... talking about January 6th and Trump's frame-up trials some more.

As if we haven't heard about all that!

But remember, Democrats always claim that the problem isn't their policies, it's just "messaging" and the public's failure to realize how wonderful they are. If they just said the same things louder and more often...

Joe Biden is busy prepping for his debate.

[NYT:]

At Camp David, a movie theater and an airplane hangar have been outfitted with lights and production equipment to create a mock debate stage. At least 16 current and former aides, summoned from Washington and Wilmington, whiz back and forth on golf carts to join President Biden in strategy sessions.

...

Some are returning to the fold just long enough to help Mr. Biden prepare: Brian Deese, who left the administration as director of the National Economic Council in 2023, is expected to visit Camp David to help Mr. Biden refine his pitch that the American economy is recovering.

Uh-huh. He's been making that pitch for (checks notes) three years.

As you may have heard, among Biden's preparation: Standing for 90 minutes. He needs to build up the strength to merely stand for 90 minutes.

Though I do wonder, is that just Biden's inner circle leaking that to lower expectations for Biden?

How much lower do they want them?

In more debate tidings: From Archimedes, Jake Tapper is being sued for defamation for up to $1 billion dollars, and a judge has found that the plaintiff has introduced sufficient evidence of actual malice to go to trial.

Remember, the media benefits from a liberal Supreme-Court-declared "law" that you can't sue the media for defamation unless you can prove they acted with "malice," which is either knowledge that what they were reporting was false, or reckless disregard for whether it was false or not.

I sure hope Trump throws this in Fake Jake's face.

The first presidential debate is scheduled for Thursday, and, as of right now, the Biden campaign claims their candidate will show up. I'm not so sure, but I guess we'll see. Interestingly enough, one of the moderators in the debate, Jake Tapper, is the subject of a defamation lawsuit that could cost the network $1 billion.

You may not have heard about it yet, but the Florida First District Court of Appeals recently ruled that plaintiff Zachary Young can pursue punitive damages, along with economic and emotional damages, in a civil trial against CNN. According to Newsbusters, the total damages sought could approach or exceed $1 billion because of Tapper's comments defaming Young's efforts to aid individuals in Afghanistan during the botched withdrawal in 2021.

[Newsbusters:]

For that outcome to be remotely in the cards, Young needed to prove malice and according to the ruling, he's done exactly that. "Young sufficiently proffered evidence of actual malice, express malice, and a level of conduct outrageous enough to open the door for him to seek punitive damages," Judge L. Clayton Roberts wrote in the court's ruling.

The court felt the high bars for actual and expressed malice were met because of internal CNN messages that were extremely vicious toward Young. Correspondent Alex Marquardt, the "primary reporter" expressed in a message to a colleague that he wanted to "nail this Zachary Young mfucker" and thought the story would be Young's "funeral." On that declaration of wanting to "nail" Young, CNN editor Matthew Philips responded: "gonna hold you to that cowboy!"

Alongside Marquardt, CNN senior editor Fuzz Hogan, who's a member of CNN's internally lauded "Triad" of editorial, legal, and standards/practices oversight personnel, described Young as "a shit."

I sure hope Trump throws this in his face, too: Tapper whines sanctimoniously about Trump challenging the results of an election, but Jake Tapper previously wrote a book accusing George W. Bush and Republicans of "plotting to steal the presidency."

Props will not be allowed at the debate, so unfortunately Trump cannot just bring this book to the debate and place it on his podium facing the cameras.

By the way, Team Trump, if you bring up the title, Tapper will reply the editor chose the title or some b***shit like that. Be prepared for that, and be prepared to respond that he could have objected if he didn't like the "editor-suggested" title. No author is forced to accept an editor-recommended title.

Tapper himself chose the title because he's a hard partisan selling to a hard partisan audience and he knew a hard-partisan title would help sell books. (Although he doesn't really sell books.)

I thought of a way for Trump to use Tapper's and Bash's bias against them: When they step in to debate Trump and rescue Biden for the third or forth time, he should turn to Biden and ask, "Are you okay with this? Do you need rescuing by reporters? Are you not man enough to debate me yourself?"

And throw in: "If you're hoping this debate will make the public think you're mentally on-the-ball, allowing two partisan Democrat reporters to keep saving you won't help you make that case."

Turn their helpfulness towards Biden into a liability for him. Keep bringing it back to Biden inviting them to help out a Well Intentioned Elderly Man with a Poor Memory.

Tom Elliot has posted a thread of some of former Democrat aide and former spokesman for Handgun Control, Inc. (literally the name of the organization) Fake Jake Tapper.

Below, a couple of the best bites.

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 04:33 PM | Comments (394) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Right In Time for the Election, Biden's Crooked Surgeon General Declares That Gun Violence is a "Public Health Crisis"

Are illegal aliens committing gun crimes a public health crisis, or nah?

Is Hunter Biden a public health crisis? I mean, he's definitely a One-Man Health Crisis. But is he a public health crisis?

Biden has to shift the terms of this election away from immigration, crime, inflation, and his galloping dementia and towards issues that he fares better on.

Thus he has his septuagenarian wife shilling for abortion at 38 weeks plus.

It's abortion week for the Biden-Harris campaign. Well, every week is abortion week with the Biden administration but especially this week. Abortion is one of the issues that President Biden delegated to Kamala Harris. Unlike other issues she is supposed to be working on, like securing the southern border, Kamala has enthusiastically embraced abortion as her top concern.

Jill Biden is joining her in spreading the word about the need for unlimited, 24/7 abortions in the United States. Last week Jilly from Philly was scaring senior citizen voters about the bad Orange Man and this week she is singing the praises of abortion to voters.

They are targeting rural voters and black voters in their abortion outreach. For its part, the DNC is spending a low seven-figure budget on an outreach campaign aimed specifically at female voters in swing states who are considered less likely to vote.

The Democrats are pinning their hopes on abortion saving Biden's sinking campaign. It worked well for them in the 2022 mid-term elections so they are returning to that playbook. What else do they have to run on? The Biden administration has been a disaster.

As you well know, Biden has repeatedly attempted to steal trillions from productive taxpayers to give to his unproductive voters, repeatedly attempting to create Presidential Law that layabout Gender Studies majors will have their loans forgiven with the shortfall made up by industrious carpenters and HVAC workers.

The courts just checked this newest unconstitutional assertion of tyrannical authority.

Federal courts have delivered a significant setback to President Joe Biden's efforts to overhaul student loan repayment. On Monday, two rulings from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down essential elements of the administration's proposed changes, citing overreach and lack of congressional approval.

Congressional approval? Say, doesn't the Constitution say something about that vis-a-vis the lawmaking power...? In fact, I think it says Congress shall make the laws, not the Executive.

The rulings specifically target the Education Department's efforts to streamline income-driven repayment (IDR) plans and the introduction of a new, more generous repayment option. These components aimed to ease the financial burden on borrowers by capping monthly payments and potentially reducing the total repayment amount.

The decisions follow last year's Supreme Court rejection of Biden's ambitious plan to forgive $400 billion in student debt, which had faced staunch opposition from conservative lawmakers and groups. The recent rulings further complicate the administration's attempts to deliver on campaign promises to address the student debt crisis.

...

Critics argue that the administration's approach lacks transparency and bypasses legislative processes. "This is a clear case of executive overreach," said Representative Virginia Foxx (R-NC), chair of the House Education and Labor Committee. "These matters should be decided by Congress, not unilaterally by the executive branch."

...

The issue of student debt remains a polarizing topic, with Democrats pushing for comprehensive relief measures and Republicans advocating for more measured approaches. The recent court decisions underscore the contentious nature of the debate and the complexities involved in navigating the legal and legislative landscapes.

Now Biden is attempting the standard Democrat deflection on crime: Don't blame us for not punishing criminals, blame the Republicans for not supporting our efforts to steal guns from law-abiding non-criminals!

And apparently now this is a Medical Science (TM) issue, so you can't question the Experts.

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has declared gun violence a public health crisis and suggested a range of gun control measures, drawing criticism for what is seen as a partisan approach under the guise of public health.

Key Details:

Dr. Vivek Murthy's 32-page advisory calls for increased funding for firearm violence prevention research and several gun control measures.

Recommendations include safe storage laws, universal background checks, red flag laws, and an assault weapons ban.

Critics argue that Murthy's approach is inherently political and bypasses the democratic process.

Kind of a theme of the Biden Administration, eh?

The people trying to "save democracy" sure seem to be doing their level best to destroy democracy.

...

"I've long believed this is a public health issue," Murthy said in an interview. "This issue has been politicized, has been polarized over time. But I think when we understand that this is a public health issue, we have the opportunity to take it out of the realm of politics and put it into the realm of public health."

See? It's not a political issue, it's a Science (TM) issue, and the Science (TM) says it's time to grab your guns.

Critics, however, see this approach as inherently political. The notion of "taking it out of the realm of politics" and "putting it into the realm of public health" is seen as an attempt to circumvent the democratic process. In America, such measures are defined as policies, which are political by nature and must go through legislative scrutiny.

...

The advisory's critics argue that by framing gun control as a public health issue, Murthy is seeking to bypass the political process and impose regulations without the necessary democratic debate. This approach, they contend, undermines the very foundation of American democracy where such significant policy changes must be subjected to thorough political discourse and legislative action.

...

Murthy's advisory reflects a broader trend within the progressive movement to label politically contentious issues as public health crises, thereby seeking to advance an agenda without engaging in the rigorous political process. This strategy, critics argue, is not only deceptive but also dangerous, as it could set a precedent for bypassing democratic norms.

"Could"?

They're also censoring people for what they claim are either reasons of public health -- if you oppose experimental surgeries for children, you're causing transgender people to kill themselves -- and for reasons of "hygiene." We can't have the national discourse polluted and sickened by dangerous, mind-corrupting misinformation or even "malinformation" (true information which suggests a conclusion that the Regime disapproves of).

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 03:22 PM | Comments (361) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Puck: Inside the Woke Coup at the Washington Post

Oh, I forgot: Welcome to Tuesday. The word "Tuesday" derives from "Tiw's Day."

Old English Tīwesdæg 'day of Tīw', a Germanic god of war and the sky; translation of Latin dies Marti 'day of Mars', the god Tīw being equated with the Roman god Mars. Compare with Swedish tisdag.

A key difference between Mars and Tiw is that Mars was the god of garlic knots and Tiw the god of cheesy bread. Their eternal feud lives on in the struggle between Domino's and Papa John's.

By the way, the bundling of two letters together as in "æ" is called a ligature, because the two letters are tied to each other by a, yes, ligature. As an illegal alien may use, for example, to strangle an American 12-year-old girl to death.

Dylan Byers confirms: ousted incompetent woke Executive Editor Sally Buzbee started up the "investigation" into her successor.

The hit piece attempted to link the would-be incoming executive editor with the British phone-hacking scandal. Dylan Byers reminds everyone that this was one of the most heavily-investigated scandals in British journalism history, and Winnett was never named as one the guilty parties.

Nevertheless, the "Posties" smeared him as responsible for it. They even -- and this is amazing -- refused to publish his answers to their questions, claiming that he never responded.

He did. They just didn't publish those responses.

You can imagine the reasons why.

The Post newsroom had been on edge for days over the shake-up, and a new, somewhat nebulous plan to build a "third newsroom" of soft content to grow the Post's audience. Lewis had amplified those anxieties by delivering hard, unvarnished truths about a business that had lost $77 million the previous year: "Your audience has halved in recent years," he told his journalists. "People are not reading your stuff. I can't sugarcoat it anymore."

...

By that point, Buzbee had also told colleagues about the infamous meetings where, in her telling, Lewis had tried to dissuade her from publishing stories that included accusations about his involvement in a British phone-hacking scandal--a tale that the carrier pigeon would lay on the doorstep of the Times, metastasizing the crisis. (Lewis has denied pressuring Buzbee, and denied any wrongdoing in the hacking affair.) Buzbee's smoke bomb expertly preyed upon all the Post newsroom's most delicate triggers--latent concerns about Lewis's journalistic ethics and his refusal to address questions about the hacking scandal to their satisfaction--and some journalists began to wonder whether the contretemps may have played a role in her resignation.

Within days of Buzbee's ouster, some Post journalists decided to take matters into their own hands. During a meeting of the foreign desk early that week, led by Post international editor Doug Jehl and his deputy Jennifer Amur, journalists discussed a plan to investigate both Lewis and Winnett to see if they could unearth unflattering information about the two men's history in the U.K., where they once worked together as journalists at the Sunday Times and The Telegraph. At least one staffer present at the meeting later brought the issue to Lewis's attention, said it was a shameful reflection on the Post's own ethics--a hit job masquerading as journalism--and encouraged him to take action. Lewis instead referred the matter to human resources.

Gotta tell ya, shameless hit jobs written to advance one's own private interests are what "journalism" is now.

Ya Boi Zach (who has now gone insane and is attacking people for fighting wokeness) had a pithy quote about "journalism" -- every article a "journalist" writes is either a hit piece or a puff piece, and they have already made the decision which it will be before they ask a single question. There is no such thing as neutrally-reported factual stories any longer; they're all propaganda pieces designed to hurt some person or group and advance the interests of another person or group.

It's just all political "war room" propaganda now.

The Post journalists' attempt to investigate their own boss and future editor is their right and privilege--that's how this business works, even if their work had an emotional agenda. The news media loves to cloak itself in a patina of strenuous nonpartisanship, but it is still the product of human beings. The journalists may have also been motivated by another friction between Lewis and Buzbee. On multiple occasions since becoming publisher and C.E.O., Lewis had expressed concerns over the tone of the paper's coverage of the Israel-Hamas War, which he and others inside the paper viewed as having an anti-Israel bias. Lewis had also questioned Buzbee's apparent reluctance to investigate the financing behind the pro-Palestinian protests on American college campuses, which Politico had reported were backed by major Democratic donors. At one point, Buzbee also revealed that her daughter was participating in the protests on her college campus.

Of course.

...

In the days that followed, [Matt Murray, who Buzbee hired to oversee the paper between her ouster and Winnett's arrival] asked former Post managing editor Cameron Barr, now working with the Post on a freelance basis, to oversee its investigations into both Lewis and Winnett. Barr, who had stepped down after being passed over for the executive editor role that went to Buzbee, would now lead a six-person team from his new home in Skipton, on the outskirts of Leeds in the north of England.

Buzbee, who lost her job to Winnett, set off this "smoke bomb." And then, to "investigate" Winnett, they assigned a guy who himself had been passed over for the position.

Everyone directing this has a specific monetary and professional interest in the outcome of the "investigation."

There is no thought whatsoever to giving this "investigation" to a disinterested, not-personally-invested person.

And: Mike Murray, the once-passed-over would-be executive editor, is now being considered for the executive editor job now that he successfully cut the hamstrings of the guy who had been given the job.

It's like "Mirror, Mirror" -- the evil "Posties" only advance through assassination.

...
The first major piece by Barr's team was published last Sunday, on Father's Day. Less than 24 hours earlier, the Times had reported that Lewis and Winnett may have used illegally obtained phone records for articles in the Sunday Times two decades ago. The Post's piece, however, focused squarely on Winnett, their incoming executive editor...

Post reporters first reached out to Winnett on Sunday evening to ask him for comment on the story, just a few hours before it was published. Winnett furnished responses to their inquiries to the Post's P.R. team, which were not included in the Post's report. Instead, a jarring and startling line in the story stated: "Winnett, currently a deputy editor of The Telegraph, did not respond to a detailed list of questions." Post comms chief Kathy Baird declined to comment on the matter.

Was the Post P.R. team gravely incompetent? Were they instead quietly manipulating the situation to side with their newsroom, which was by now nakedly trying to nuke not only Winnett but also Lewis--not only by assigning a team of six to a story with zero national import, but also by leaking their inner turmoil to Politico and the Times in an ostensible attempt to ethics-shame Jeff Bezos off his $500 million superyacht in the Mediterranean?

...

Indeed, it's hard to look back on the recent tumult at the Post and not feel as though, in setting out to save the paper, its reporters inadvertently set it back--which, given the current state of the business, they can hardly afford to do. For all their rage, the Posties seem to have an insufficient understanding of the gravity of their business challenges.

But the activists aren't done yet -- New York magazine wonders if Will Lewis, the CEO who hired Winnett, will be the next to be fired.

Oh, right, we're pretending these people are "voluntarily withdrawing" from high-paying, prestigious jobs to spend more time with their former jobs.

Check out CNN's Chief Deplatforming Officer Oliver Darcy, reporting that morale at the Post has "fallen off a cliff."

Oh no!

"It's as bad as I've ever seen it, truly," one staffer said Thursday, noting that The Post has hit "rough patches" before, but that the stormy atmosphere hanging over the Washington outlet is unprecedented.

Lewis' uncouth dispatching of Buzbee poisoned much of the goodwill he had earned with his employees over the preceding six months ...

Uncouth! What a sassy little skinny-jean bitch.

The "Posties" have formed a whisper network to question whether Lewis, like Winnett, just isn't a good fit with the woke failure Washington Post.

Are the Post and Lewis just not a good fit?

One lingering issue is the difference between how newsrooms are run in the U.K. versus the U.S. Politico Playbook notes that Lewis's Fleet Street attitude seems to be triggering some culture shock at the Post:

A series of emerging revelations, stemming from his announcement Sunday that executive editor Sally Buzbee would be leaving, to replaced by two close Lewis associates, have left the Post newsroom "uniformly horrified," in one reporter's words.

More consequentially, they have revealed that the clash between Lewis' rough-and-tumble sensibilities and the Post's more high-minded culture is even more profound than previously suspected: He can't seem to figure out where his Fleet Street smarts are necessary and refreshing, and where they are toxic and self-defeating.

Inside the Post, the conversation among reporters surveyed Thursday night centered on whether Lewis could continue leading the publication.

Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.

(From Donnie Darko. My brother said that on occasion.)

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 02:20 PM | Comments (227) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Poll: Immigration, Crime Top Issues for Voters

The Democrats made these the top issues of the election.

Polling from Gallup shows that U.S. adults have consistently ranked immigration as a top issue every month since at least November 2023. The polls come as the Biden administration has overseen record numbers of illegal immigrant encounters.

Recent high-profile examples of crimes committed by illegal immigrants has led former President Donald Trump to popularize a new phrase, "Biden migrant crime," when addressing the issue.

"Biden Migrant Crime is out of control and is ravaging America! Last night, two brave NYPD officers doing their job were shot by a Monster Illegal Immigrant who came here illegally from Venezuela last year and was living in a tax-payer funded migrant shelter," Trump wrote on Truth Social earlier this month. "Crooked Joe Biden has trafficked in the worst people from around the world, many with heinous criminal records, and unleashed them into our communities."

Trump called the mother of migrant crime victim Rachel Morin. Biden not only didn't call her, but has not seen fit to say her name.

Another poll from earlier this year shows voters rejecting the media's preferred euphemisms for illegal aliens.

Since 2013, The Associated Press Stylebook has directed writers to only use the terms illegal immigrant, illegal alien, illegal or undocumented in direct quotations. "Acceptable variations include living in or entering a country illegally or without legal permission," the Stylebook states.

However, a poll conducted by RMG Research, Inc. in February showed that 55% of voters said the "best way to describe people who cross the U.S. border without registering with immigration officials" is as "illegal immigrants." Meanwhile, 24% of respondents said the best term is "undocumented migrants."

Bill Maher says that Democrats' stance on immigration will get them "f*cked" on election day. Fun fact, I'm blocked by Bill Maher despite never having written to him or even written about him. (On Twitter, at least.)

Maher also called the Democrats "racist" for not listening to Latinos on the issue, as they support Trump over Biden on border security by 23 points.

Meanwhile, one of the two illegal aliens who murdered 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray simply cut his ankle monitor so he could leave his house to murder a child.

If he was so dangerous we put an ankle monitor on him, why was he in the country at all?

One of the illegal Venezuelan migrants accused of strangling and killing 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray in Texas cut the ankle monitor he was given at the border after the slaying, The Post can reveal.

Johan Jose Rangel Martinez, 21, and Franklin Jose Pena Ramos, 26, were both released into the US with GPS monitoring after illegally crossing the southern border into El Paso, Texas this year.

Rangel Martinez, who crossed the border on March 14, was released from the monitoring program on May 15 because he had no known criminal history and had complied with check-ins, sources said.

However, Pena Ramos, who crossed the border on May 28 -- less than a month before the shocking murder -- removed his ankle monitor two days after Nungaray's body was found in a swampy creek in Houston on Monday, according to sources.

The two migrants were arrested and charged Thursday with capital murder after they allegedly lured Nungaray away from home, then strangled her and callously dumped her body.

Remember, illegal aliens with criminal histories -- or connections to terrorism or human-smuggling gangs -- are simply "losing" their IDs as they approach the border, to prevent a bureaucrat from finding that history. Then they're allowed into the country with a "clean" record.

It gets worse: the two illegal aliens "likely" sexually assaulted her before strangling her to death.

The Texas district attorney whose office is prosecuting the murder of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray in Houston tells Fox News that "the evidence is clear that a sexual assault likely happened."

Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg made the admission Tuesday on 'America's Newsroom' as one of the illegal immigrant suspects in the case, 22-year-old Johan Jose Martinez-Rangel, is set to appear in court this morning. His co-defendant Franklin Jose Peña Ramos, 26, had his bail set at $10 million on Monday.

"The evidence is clear that a sexual assault likely happened. But since neither defendant has actually admitted that, circumstantial evidence will have to prove it," Ogg said. "We are waiting on lab tests now to see if the capital murder charge can be upgraded to one where they are death penalty eligible."

As Trump asked at a rally: What about the American Dreamers? Do they count for nothing?

From Grateful Calvin at Twitchy, an NPR talking point robot pretending to be a journalist claimed that it's not "illegal" at all to illegally enter the country -- pro-tip, the giveaway is right there in "illegally" enter the country.

He then charged standout Fox News reporter Bill Melugin with spreading "racist propaganda," also known as "the true verified facts about migrant criminals."

Bill Melugin
@BillMelugin_

Narrator: Legal pathways to citizenship already exist - and the people who have been in those lines, trying to do it the right way, have been forced to watch millions skip ahead of them, walking across the river to be caught & released, enriching the cartels & overwhelming ICE.

Pablo De La Rosa
@pblodlr

The entire foundation of this man's anti-immigrant propaganda is keeping a straight face as he ignores every immigration law expert in the country and in the world--crossing and turning yourself in is LEGAL, though he and his viewers may have a palpable hatred for it.

Retired ICE Field Director John Fabbricatore corrected this "NPR reporter" -- illegal entry into the country is, get this, illegal.

John Fabbricatore
@JohnE_Fabb

It is not legal. If you cross illegally and then turn yourself in, you are charged with 212(a)(6)(A) Aliens Present without Admission or Parole. Entered without inspection (EWI).

It 100% is illegal entry even in your echo chamber.

It's also not anti-immigrant propaganda--@BillMelugin_
reports on ILLEGAL immigration. Most Americans approve of legal immigration. You like to conflate the issue with your leftist talking points. Its trash.

Illegal immigration is a chaotic drain on the United States. Every crime committed by an illegal alien should not have happened had the Biden administration not allowed it to.

This trash Pablo then claimed that because we don't prosecute illegal border crossers that means it's not a crime and therefore it's "legal."

He ended by attacking Melugin again:

On Melugin, his reporting is racist propaganda by any definition of those terms. It's a deeply editorialized version of reality that communicates negative stereotypes of a minority group, a vulnerable one in this case.

Melugin snapped back:

My reporting is racist propaganda? If that's the case why were you in my DMs this winter asking me for help because, you, as an immigration "reporter", didn't know how/where to find simple ICE deportation data and didn't even know the difference between ER processing & deportation?

Pablo, not once in my more than three years of nonstop coverage, in every sector along the southern border, have I ever seen you out in the field there. Literally not once. You sit in an office and parrot immigration attorney talking points - and have zero understating of what is actually happening on the ground. You get zero engagement on your inflammatory & inaccurate posts because literally nobody takes you seriously. You didn't even have the stones to tag me in this. I will put my reporting against yours any day and every day - and this is the last response I'm ever going to give you. Best of luck!

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 01:23 PM | Comments (285) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Pentagon Conducts An Audit, Claims They Don't Know if They Funded Gain-of-Function Bat Virus Research at Wuhan

Yeah you don't know.

What would you say you do here?

Despite years of warnings that China operates an illicit biological weapons program, the U.S. military remains unable to determine whether it sends American tax dollars to Beijing for research that could make pathogens more dangerous or deadly, the Pentagon's chief watchdog declared in a stunning new warning to policymakers.

"The DoD did not track funding at the level of detail necessary to determine whether the DoD provided funding to Chinese research laboratories or other foreign countries for research related to enhancement of pathogens of pandemic potential," the Pentagon inspector general concluded in a report released this month.

...

The findings show the Pentagon has done little to improve transparency on a critical security issue in the two years since the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, first raised concerns that defense officials could not account for how biological research funds sent to China were being used....

The latest inspector general report also adds to momentum in Congress to formally ban the Pentagon from funding "gain-of-function" research in foreign countries, a goal that has increased in priority now that some members of the U.S. intelligence community like the FBI believe the COVID-19 pandemic began with a virus leak inside a Wuhan lab doing research funded by U.S. tax dollars. Gain-of-research refers to the serial passaging of microorganisms to increase their transmissibility and virulence among other things.

Anthony Fauci has a different definition of "gain of function." It's whatever he says it is, or isn't.

Speaking of Fauci, he finally admitted that school closures weren't an example of Civil Servants Sending Their Best.

Don't praise him for his honesty -- even in this admission, he lies, and pretends he was trying to re-open schools.

Yeah, so was Randi Weingartner.

Former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci has finally conceded that it was a mistake to keep schools closed as long as they were during the coronavirus pandemic.

"How long you kept it was the problem, because there was a disparity throughout the country," he told CBS News in a recent interview promoting his new book. "If you go back and look at the YouTube, I kept on saying, 'Close the bars, open the schools. Open the schools as quickly and as safely as you possibly can.'

(Files missing)

Deborah Birx has already admitted -- bragged, in fact -- that she wrote the "guidances" for re-opening so severely that it justified keeping the schools closed and made any governor re-opening them look like a dangerous maniac.

But initially to close it down was correct. Keeping it for a year was not a good idea."

As was clear at the time and as has been confirmed through academic research, school closures were generally associated with the power of teachers unions above all else.

As noted by Anthony Lynch at National Review, "Lengthy school closures contributed to generational learning loss, reflected in the generational declines in reading and math test scores observed by the National Assessment of Educational Progress's report card. The learning losses particularly impacted minority and lower-income students unable to afford tutors and other online educational resources. Academic rebounding from the lost learning could take as long as five years."

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 12:11 PM | Comments (367) | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Morning Rant: Minimalist Edition

American Exceptionalism was nowhere more evident than in California as it grew into the natural resources, manufacturing, and technology behemoth that powered the country. You name it, and California had it in abundance. Add the incredible physical beauty of its beaches, mountains, deserts, and rivers, and its moniker "The Golden State" was well deserved.

So what happened? Is Chaucer correct?

But at the laste, as every thing hath ende,
She took hir leve, and nedes wolde wende.

How California's Paradise Become Our Purgatory

California has become a test case of the suicide of the West. Never before has such a state, so rich in natural resources and endowed with such a bountiful human inheritance, self-destructed so rapidly.

How and why did California so utterly consume its unmatched natural and ancestral inheritance and end up as a warning to Western civilization of what might be in store for anyone who followed its nihilism?

That's exactly correct..."nihilism," and it is rooted in the cultural miasma emanating from the 1960s rebellion against...what? Tradition? Excellence? Religion's rational control of behavior? Allowing adults to tell children what to do?

Destroying all of those things played perfectly with the progressive desire to rebuild society...after it tears it down. And the idiocy and destructiveness of the 1960s radicals has subsumed the Democrat party, or perhaps that movement exposed the Democrat party's traditional leaning!

Regardless, it found fertile soil in California, and after two generations it has overwhelmed California and turned it into a cesspit of rabid progressive ideas and policies. The fever dreams of the 1960s radicals are now public policy in California, and nothing is too insane!

Sadly it has also embraced the other less savory aspects of progressivism (as if there are any savory aspects!). Racial division, class division, religious division...all are now front and center in what used to be a state whose horizons were limited only by one's imagination. Now it is a sclerotic, bureaucratic nightmare that has rigid social structures promoted and maintained by its government! It is dirty, dangerous, overflowing with the contents of central American prisons, and wholly unfit for traditional American families.

It exports its nonsense to its neighbors, and its federal legislators are infected with the lunacy of the state government. Observe any of the nuttier bills put forth in the United States Congress and the odds are that it comes from or is supported by the California Congressional delegation!

Is it time to force California to grow up? Yes, but it needs to fail before anything substantive can be done. Luckily, the people of California are casually going about their business as if nothing is awry, and that will hasten its downfall. The good people are leaving, and soon California will be left without a middle class...just the robber barons in their gated estates and an ocean of workers... many illegal... supporting them.

Hopefully the rest of the country won't have to pay for the bail out, but I'm not holding my breath!

[Crossposted at CutJibNewsletter]

Posted by: CBD at 11:00 AM | Comments (331) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Mid-Morning Art Thread

Kissing Ceremony
Konstantin Makovsky

Posted by: CBD at 09:30 AM | Comments (421) | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Morning Report — 6//25/24

Good Morning Kids. So the Sponge-brain Shits-Pants Junta has struck a deal with Julian Assange who engineered one of the largest breaches of US governmental secrets in history. From nearly two hundred years behind bars to five and change. And since the deal allows the time he served in a UK prison as time served he'll essentially skate.

You've got to believe he has info floating around that would prove quite embarrassing to quite a few operatives not only in the Biden crime family, but in Kalorama as well as the Deep State intel mandarins that took down Trump in 2020.

And speaking of the Deep State, we have this unsurprising if not disgusting revelation about Paul Ryan:

The issue is important because Ryan knew the partisan origins of the Steele dossier and chose to not reveal that to the investigators. He prefered that the investigators get caught up in the document and in his mind, hopefully come up with the conclusion that the sleazy allegations were true, and not Russian drunkard stuff which is apparently how the invented trash got put together.

He had the smoking gun proof that the Steele Dossier was total garbage and yet he sat on it and allowed Trump to be crucified and put the nation through hell as a result.

And here we are suffering the repercussions of a failed coup and then a successful one. And here comes 2024.

In the early 13th century, amid an upsurge of religious dissent, Pope Innocent III launched a campaign to eliminate a heretical sect in southern France known as the Cathars or Albigensians (after the town of Albi). To put an end to the challenge to his authority, the pontiff enlisted the military aid of an expansionist dynasty of French monarchs, the Capetians, who were eager to bring the restive border region of Languedoc under their control. As many as a million people died in the resulting bloodbath. In the siege of the Cathar stronghold of Beziers in 1209, papal legate Arnaud Amalric famously instructed the mob of soldiers and irregulars under his command: “Kill them all, God will know his own.” And so they did. Amalric’s subsequent account of the sack of Beziers reads: “Our men spared no one, irrespective of rank, sex, or age, and put to the sword almost 20,000 people.” 
Over the course of half a century, Catharism collapsed, first gradually, then suddenly. A few decades later, almost nothing of this once-vibrant culture remained. Catharism became a memory; as a living idea, it had ceased to exist. 
A common refrain regarding Israel’s war in Gaza—echoed most recently by the IDF’s spokesman, Adm. Daniel Hagari—is that the Jewish state’s objectives are unrealistic, because “you can’t kill an idea.” Hamas’s brand of Islamism, critics of the war insist, can only be effectively combated from within, through cultural change within Palestinian society. It can’t be defeated by foreign or non-Muslim forces. But history shows the opposite: Ideas have often been extinguished. Some died natural deaths; many were suppressed by rivals. Others, like Catharism, were violently eradicated. Outsiders have often eliminated ideas, sometimes along with the civilizations that nourished them, as with the destruction of many indigenous societies in the Americas in the wake of European conquest. 

Well there it is. It's not about wiping out Hamas or the "idea" of Hamas. It's about wiping out Islam itself, which has spilled oceans of blood in a nearly 2,000 year quest to conquer the world.

ABOVE THE FOLD, BREAKING, NOTEWORTHY
• In February, Air Force serviceman Aaron Bushnell self-immolated in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC. A recent profile of the 25-year-old, who died hours after setting fire to himself while screaming “Free Palestine,” reveals a disturbed backstory replete with radicalism and activism. It’s a cautionary tale about where falling prey to ideological narratives can lead.
  Self-immolating serviceman Aaron Bushnell is an alarm for the online radicalization of American kids
  
• At some point you can’t help but connect the dots; no matter how hard you may try to look away.
  Time To Admit It: Democrats Are The Party of Sexual Perverts

Posted by: J.J. Sefton at 06:54 AM | Comments (400) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Daily Tech News 25 June 2024

Top Story

• The RIAA and major music labels have filed suit Suno and Udio - the company responsible for "BBL Drizzy" whatever the hell that is* - for copyright infringement because the AI systems learned from copyrighted works just like every musician for the last three hundred years. (The Verge)
  
  The RIAA claims this case is "straightforward" and presented as evidence a song they produced which sounds suspiciously like Johnny B. Goode - allegedly, because I can't confirm it right now because it won't load.
  
  But AI only produces what you tell it to, and very likely this is similar to the New York Times' suit against OpenAI where they claimed ChatGPT would reproduce NYT articles, which is true only if you essentially feed it the article as a prompt.
  
  I've had enough of these rent-seeking assholes. A take off and nuke the entire site from orbit on all their houses.
  
  * I found it. If you imagine a one-hit-wonder 70s funk band that released a second song that never charted, and that song had a B side, and that B side was chosen over the only other song they had which was recorded at 5AM after an all-night marijuana taste-testing session, BBL Drizzy sounds like that rejected song's cousin from the country that was kicked in the head by a chicken when it was young.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile, Facebook has started tagging photos as "Made with AI". (Tech Crunch)
  
  Only problem is they are doing this whether the photos were made with AI or not.
  
  Maybe sic them on the RIAA and let them fight to the death.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:28 AM | Comments (94) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Monday Overnight Open Thread (6/24/24)

Posted by: Misanthropic Humanitarian at 10:00 PM | Comments (553) | Trackbacks (Suck)