Biden Pardons Biden. As well he should have:
The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election. Then, a carefully negotiated plea deal, agreed to by the Department of Justice, unraveled in the court room – with a number of my political opponents in Congress taking credit for bringing political pressure on the process. Had the plea deal held, it would have been a fair, reasonable resolution of Hunter’s cases.
No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong. There has been an effort to break Hunter – who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.
Thus keeping alive Hunter’s hopes of one day becoming Ambassador To France. Like Charles Kushner:
President-elect Donald Trump said on Saturday he would nominate Charles Kushner, the New Jersey real estate developer and his son-in-law’s father whom he pardoned in 2020, to be the ambassador to France.
While Trump ran toward headlines, Kushner, by comparison, avoided them, until 2004. That year he pleaded guilty to federal charges including 16 counts of “assisting in the filing of false tax returns, one count of retaliating against a cooperating witness and one count of making false statements to the Federal Election Commission,” a federal prosecutor in New Jersey announced.
The details of the case were eye-popping, even for a state known for political scandals.
“Kushner further admitted he devised a scheme to retaliate against a cooperating witness and her husband by having a prostitute seduce the husband and covertly filming them having sex,” the federal prosecutor wrote in a statement at the time, announcing Kushner’s guilty plea.
Just trying to keep things in perspective…
‘Brain Rot’. Oxford’s ‘Word Of The Year’ is two words. Which perhaps buttresses the selection. Here’s the rationale:
Our experts noticed that ‘brain rot’ gained new prominence this year as a term used to capture concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media. The term increased in usage frequency by 230% between 2023 and 2024.
The first recorded use of ‘brain rot’ was found in 1854 in Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden, but has taken on new significance in the digital age.
BTW, must’ve missed that last year’s winner was ‘rizz’. I suspect that knowing its meaning places you in the ‘susceptible to brain rot’ demographic. Looking at the other finalists, I would have chosen ‘dynamic pricing’, a euphemism for ‘ripping people off’, which is, come to think of it, two words.
Kash Patel: QAnon Sympathizer. I don’t think he’s gonna past muster, but who knows? One thing is certain–He shouldn’t pass muster:
In the middle of the Thanksgiving holiday stretch, Donald Trump announced what might be his most extreme and controversial appointment yet: Kash Patel for FBI director. There are many reasons why this decision is outrageous. Patel is a MAGA combatant who has fiercely advocated Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and who has championed January 6 rioters as patriots and unfairly persecuted political prisoners.
Patel is also a fervent promoter of conspiracy theories. At the end of Trump’s first presidency, when he was a Pentagon official, he spread the bonkers idea that Italian military satellites had been employed to turn Trump votes to Joe Biden votes in the 2020 election. And he has falsely claimed that the Trump-Russia scandal was a hoax cooked up by the FBI and so-called Deep State to sabotage Trump.
Appearing on Grace Time TV in September 2022, Patel said of the QAnon community, “We’re just blown away at the amount of acumen some of these people have.” He added, “If it’s Q or whatever movement that’s getting that information out, I am all for it, every day of the week.”
Trump’s nomination of Patel is clearly designed to destroy the FBI. Patel has no other qualifications.
‘The End Of Democratic Delusions’. Interesting think-piece from George Packer:
But every election is a reminder that the country is narrowly divided and has been for decades, with frequent changes of control in the House of Representatives. Now that Trump has won the popular vote and the Electoral College, the majoritarian illusion, like the demographic one, should be seen for what it is: an impediment to Democratic success. It relieved the party of the need to listen and persuade rather than expecting the dei ex machina of population and rule changes to do the work of politics.
The mood in America, as in electorates all over the world, is profoundly anti-establishment. Trump had a mass movement behind him; Kamala Harris was installed by party elites. He offered disruption, chaos, and contempt; she offered a tax break for small businesses. He spoke for the alienated; she spoke for the status quo.
Democrats have become the party of institutionalists. Much of their base is metropolitan, credentialed, economically comfortable, and pro-government. A realignment has been going on since the early ’70s: Democrats now claim the former Republican base of college-educated professionals, and Republicans have replaced Democrats as the party of the working class. As long as globalization, technology, and immigration were widely seen as not only inevitable but positive forces, the Democratic Party appeared to ride the wave of history, while Republicans depended on a shrinking pool of older white voters in dying towns. But something profound changed around 2008.
OK, I’d have to excerpt far too much to capture Packer’s overview. Including why the so-called Trump Reaction is not as strong as it appears to be. Please just read it. OK, one more excerpt, which rings true to me:
A few weeks before the election, Representative Chris Deluzio, a first-term Democrat, was campaigning door-to-door in a closely divided district in western Pennsylvania. He’s a Navy veteran, a moderate on cultural issues, and a homegrown economic populist—critical of corporations, deep-pocketed donors, and the ideology that privileges capital over human beings and communities. At one house he spoke with a middle-aged white policeman named Mike, who had a Trump sign in his front yard. Without budging on his choice for president, Mike ended up voting for Deluzio. On Election Night, in a state carried by Trump, Deluzio outperformed Harris in his district, especially in the reddest areas, and won comfortably. What does this prove? Only that politics is best when it’s face-to-face and based on respect, that most people are complicated and even persuadable, and that—in the next line from the Fitzgerald quote—one can “see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
Why We Need LEOBOR Reform. Even when cops beat the shit out of someone, and even when government has to pay out to the victim, the public is kept in the dark:
But a tradition of police and government secrecy in Delaware makes it impossible to fully evaluate what accountability came from this situation.
The public is unable to see police records, like dashcam video, to view exactly what happened that night and use that information to evaluate both the officers’ conduct and whether they lied in official reports to justify serious felony charges against the woman.
That’s because Delaware public records law has been interpreted by state attorneys in a way that gives police departments legal backing to hide police reports, body camera footage and most other records detailing and justifying their actions. Limited information may become available for specific court proceedings, but that is not the case in Caldwell’s situation and many others.
The city of Dover rejected a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Delaware Online/The News Journal to view footage of this incident and review relevant reports.
The office of Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings evaluates appeals of such public record request rejections under the state’s public record law. The office has, in recent years, endorsed police departments’ hiding all so-called investigatory documents in perpetuity and regardless of the situation.
A rare essential article from the News-Journal. Maybe I’ll keep my sjubscription for another week or so…
What do you want to talk about?