DL Open Thread: Friday, August 11, 2023
1: “What Crooked Joe Biden, who can’t string two sentences together, has done to our once great Country […] OUR COUNTRY IS BEING DESTROYED BY A MAN WITH THE MIND, IDEAS, AND I.Q. OF A FIRST GRADER.”
2: “I think that Crooked Joe Biden is not only dumb and incompetent, I believe he has gone MAD, a stark raving Lunatic […] HE IS A MENTAL CATASTROPHE THAT IS LEADING OUR COUNTRY TO HELL!”
3: “Deranged Jack Smith has just asked for a trial on the Biden Indictment to take place on January 2nd., […] Only an out of touch lunatic would ask for such a date.”
It doesn’t get emphasized often enough, but Trump is insane and not competent to be President. He might even be ineligible to serve:
Two Federalist Law Professors Say Trump Can’t Serve As President:
Two prominent conservative law professors have concluded that Donald J. Trump is ineligible to be president under a provision of the Constitution that bars people who have engaged in an insurrection from holding government office. The professors are active members of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group, and proponents of originalism, the method of interpretation that seeks to determine the Constitution’s original meaning.
The professors — William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas — studied the question for more than a year and detailed their findings in a long article to be published next year in The University of Pennsylvania Law Review.
“When we started out, neither of us was sure what the answer was,” Professor Baude said. “People were talking about this provision of the Constitution. We thought: ‘We’re constitutional scholars, and this is an important constitutional question. We ought to figure out what’s really going on here.’ And the more we dug into it, the more we realized that we had something to add.”
He summarized the article’s conclusion: “Donald Trump cannot be president — cannot run for president, cannot become president, cannot hold office — unless two-thirds of Congress decides to grant him amnesty for his conduct on Jan. 6.”
There is, the article said, “abundant evidence” that Mr. Trump engaged in an insurrection, including by setting out to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election, trying to alter vote counts by fraud and intimidation, encouraging bogus slates of competing electors, pressuring the vice president to violate the Constitution, calling for the march on the Capitol and remaining silent for hours during the attack itself.
“It is unquestionably fair to say that Trump ‘engaged in’ the Jan. 6 insurrection through both his actions and his inaction,” the article said.
Steven G. Calabresi, a law professor at Northwestern and Yale and a founder of the Federalist Society, called the article “a tour de force.”
The provision in question is Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Adopted after the Civil War, it bars those who had taken an oath “to support the Constitution of the United States” from holding office if they then “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
If Trump has lost the Federalist Society, where will he ever get his RWNJ judges from? Let’s hope we never have top find out.
Mark Your Calendars For January 2, 2024. In Pencil. Too bad January 6 falls on a Saturday:
Prosecutors have proposed a Jan. 2, 2024, start date for Donald Trump’s election interference trial, according to court documents released Thursday.
That date, Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith said in a filing, would give enough time for both parties to review discovery and hash out any pretrial legal matters while still being expedient for the sake of the public.
“It is difficult to imagine a public interest stronger than the one in this case, in which the defendant—the former President of the United States—is charged with three criminal conspiracies intended to undermine the federal government, obstruct the certification of the 2020 presidential election, and disenfranchise voters,” Smith said.
He also shot down claims from Trump’s legal team that the Speedy Trial Act is only intended to protect the rights of the defendant, saying the policy clearly states that a speedy trial is also in the vested interest of the public.
Especially in an Election year, when the defendant is running for President, in large part to avoid jail time.
Yes, Global Warming Is Key Cause Of Hawaii’s Devastation:
Rising global temperatures and drought have helped turn parts of Hawaii into a tinderbox ahead of one of the deadliest fires in modern US history, with these conditions worsened by strong winds from a nearby cyclone.
Katharine Hayhoe, the chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy, said that global heating is causing vegetation to dry out, priming it as fuel for an outbreak of fire. “Climate change doesn’t usually start the fires; but it intensifies them, increasing the area they burn and making them much more dangerous,” Hayhoe tweeted.
Nearly a fifth of Maui, the Hawaiian island where the fires have occurred, is in severe drought, according to the US Drought Monitor. The island has experienced other serious fires in recent years, with blazes in 2018 and 2021 razing hundreds of homes and causing the evacuation of thousands of residents and tourists.
Experts say that wildfires in Hawaii are now burning through four times the amount of area than in previous decades, in part due to the proliferation of more flammable non-native grasses but also rising global temperatures.
Is This Why Phil Mickelson Sold What Passes For His Soul To The Saudis? There are degenerate gamblers, then there is FIGJAM (stands for ‘Fuck I’m Great, Just Ask Me, h/t to our very own Al for sharing that with me). A billion dollars? $100 million in gambling debts? They let him keep gambling b/c he sucked at it:
Billy Walters, a Las Vegas businessman, professional gambler and convicted felon, alleges in a new book that Phil Mickelson bet more than $1 billion on sports and tried to place a $400,000 wager on the 2012 Ryder Cup in which he participated.
In a soon-to-be-released book titled Gambler, Secrets of a Life at Risk excerpted Thursday by the Fire Pit Collective, Walters details how he first met Mickelson at the 2006 AT&T Pebble Beach pro-am and how two years later they entered into a gambling partnership that would last five years.
Mickelson could bet more money on games, Walters said, because he had less of a reputation as a sharp gambler. They combined for years of large bets across sports.
Walters writes that Mickelson would regularly wager $100,000 or $200,000 on football, basketball and baseball. He alleges that Mickelson’s total gambling losses were close to $100 million.
Walters also details specific gambling records of Mickelson’s from between 2010 and 2014. According to the excerpt, Mickelson made 3,154 bets in 2011 alone—averaging almost nine wagers per day. He placed $110,000 bets to win $100,000 a staggering 1,115 times.
Speaking of Mickelson and LIV, know where they’re playing this weekend? Bedminster CC. Sound familiar? Grifters gotta stick together.
What do you want to talk about?
Find myself on the side of the Federalists professors, it’s clear that Trump promoted and approved of the the insurrection and failed to do anything about it other then cheer it on. I seem to remember a brief clip of him watching the event on TV, to say he approved is far too mild. I also see a crises of political and legal cowardice, yes this is unheard of, yes it’s troubling to say the least but this is time when all concerned need to step forth and say and do the right thing.
So two profs on the Federalist side of the aisle do a deep dive and come up with a logical conclusion. They probably weren’t in line to become judges anyway, and their view isn’t likely to affect the opinion of most of the society’s members.
We’ll be waiting until after the next election for two of the current pitiful crop of Rethug candidates to declare that Trump really wasn’t eligible to become president.
Presented without comment:
https://twitter.com/patriottakes/status/1690124497137905664
Seems more likely that she likes gays. I’ve suspected all along that her whole schtick is trying to make up for whatever happened on that volleyball team.