DL Open Thread Wednesday, March 13, 2024

I don’t know why this is surprising anymore, but it seems Robert Hur, the Trump-aligned special counsel who said Joe Biden’s brain was scrambled eggs, stretched the truth out of shape in his official report. Transcripts of the interview showed Biden was lucid, if occasionally confused about timelines. Democrats used Hur’s appearance before a House committee yesterday to display supercuts of Trump barfing forth his usual word salad made of fetid lettuce, further blunting the effect of Hur’s perfidy.

Republicans have tried to ram their minority views up the country’s ass by stacking the courts as much as possible with unqualified ideologues, then filing lawsuits in their jurisdictions. That trick just became more difficult, because the Judicial Conference of the United States changed the rules on how cases are assigned. It’s a good first step to reining in the out-of-control federal judiciary, the spearhead of the Christofascist coup.

We all know Trump is for sale, but his recent flip-flop about TikTok is craven even by his standards. Because the company is Chinese, Trump was all for banning it as part of his general Sinophobia – until he had a meeting with a billionaire Republican donor, Jeffrey Yass, who holds a large stake in the firm. Presto! Trump is now against banning TikTok. In other news of Trump money-grubbing, it seems he tried to get Elon Musk to buy his TruthSocial site. Trump apparently misunderstood Musk’s modus operandi: Take a popular social media platform and make it unpopular. He doesn’t want one that’s unpopular already.

Republican Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado, who previously said he wouldn’t run for reelection but would serve out his term, changed his mind. He’s leaving next week, narrowing the slim GOP majority. “A lot of this is personal. That’s the problem,” Buck said. “Instead of having decorum — instead of acting in a professional manner — this place has really devolved into this bickering and nonsense.” He just now noticed?

Pope Francis over the weekend called for Ukraine to negotiate peace with Russia. NATO’s secretary general and several heads of European states told him to go fuck himself. Well, not in those words, but the message was the same – no peace through capitulation.

Gaza gets all the attention, but it’s not as if it’s the only place in the world where American fecklessness has brought on humanitarian disaster. A lot closer to home, Haiti’s prime minister Ariel Henry resigned, leaving the country with no elected officials and rival gang leaders vying for nominal control. If you think that doesn’t involve the U.S. because we’re not selling anyone there high-tech weapons, check out the guns those gangs carry. Where do you think they came from?

The floor’s yours.