18 Comments

From Hunter's opening statement

"“For more than a year, your Committees have hunted me in your partisan political pursuit of my dad,” Hunter Biden said. “You have trafficked in innuendo, distortion, and sensationalism — all the while ignoring the clear and convincing evidence staring you in the face. You do not have evidence to support the baseless and MAGA-motivated conspiracies about my father because there isn’t any.”

SNAP

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Why do wealthy people think that others want to listen to everything they say? Why would anyone want or need to hear Ackman comment on Biden and Phillips? Media at work...

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Eat the Rich. They go down well with a nice Chianti.

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That an open and shut decision as ludicrous as Presidential Immunity is still delayed occludes any transparency that SCOTUS is apolitical.

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Speculation from usually reliable sources is that one or more Justices are writing lengthly opinions, perhaps as a small minority, urging the Court to grant cert vis-à-vis the DDC immunity ruling, where a consensus vote apparently lines up with the DCC, and that tRump has no chance succeeding on the merits.

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Boy, was I wrong...cert granted, hearings late April...brutal!

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In 2012 in the Michigan democratic primary the”uncommitted” line received 11% of the vote, not much different than the 13% in 2024. President Obama polled 85%. Obama won Michigan in 2012 with 54% of the vote.

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Didn't really touch on this, but it has become critical: I wrote this and I will be pasting everywhere I can. This is critical NOW. Thank you

"Mike Johnson for single handedly jamming Congress on additional Ukraine aid: "

So he could single handedly remove the block. It is time for all of us to make our voice heard. The phone number for Speaker Johnson is freely available but I have saved you the trouble of looking it up. 202-225-2777. I have been calling it a lot. I don't live in LA but he is the Speaker of all the house. Please, you will likely get voice mail but let us fill that mailbox up with pleas for Ukraine, it takes less than a minute. I don't tweet but if you do get to him that way as well.

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Bill Ackman - further proof there is no connection whatsoever between the brain and the billfold, as well as further proof that we need to arrest the Silly Con Valley Bros and incarcerate them for an extended time for their many crimes against humanity.

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Exactly...he's still pumped up for being instrumental in forcing out former Harvard U president Claudine Gay, so he reckons that he can move mountains because billionaire...feh!

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Good morning, David...another stellar snapshot of the currents battering us these days...Nate Cohn, over at the NYT, weighed in as expected with his "spells trouble for Biden" take on the MI *uncommitted* vote at 13%, stating - inter alia - that the Dem primary vote there is usually made up of "older, loyal Democrats", hence - yes - "trouble for Biden". The trouble with that "trouble" take is that a yuuge whack of the *uncommitted* vote came from a considerably younger and well-organized protest vote engineered largely by the various Arab-American communities throughout the state, and was obviously quite successful. Oh, and Cohn did manage to acknowledge that Barack Obama faced a 11% uncommitted in the 2012 primary. Why doesn't this guy just get the f**k outta town, ffs!

And the ever-courageous Turtle not only announced his endorsement of the Orange Insurrectionist, but concurrently said he's "stepping down" as GOP Senate leader...well played, Mitch, that yellow stripe down the back of your suit is quite fetching.

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I was startled by that judge ruling on the "quorum" issue, though not as startled as I would have been had he not been in Texas. If I am not mistaken, the rule (if there is one) about "proxy" voting actually involved real proxies--different people sent to voice the representatives opinion. One can see the danger in this as the chances for even accidental misrepresentation of the representatives views could be high.

That wasn't what was going on in the Covid Proxy rules, was it? Weren't any "out of chamber" votes made directly by the absent representative, electronically though their stand-ins may have actually said the yeah or nay?

This strikes me as an ULTRA example of the danger of "originalist" interpretation of constitutional language in a world where possibilities exist that the founders had no way of even guessing at.

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Sara Huckabee Sanders! There's so much unaccounted for money and

"gifts" floating around in our

erstwhile governors administration it's a daily

header in the newspaper here. But, she's always open,

no matter how much she's says to the contrary, to accepting mega bucks from

the Federal government to

help the different communities in AR. 53 million

is the latest gift to overhaul

aged and broken water systems. This in a state that

had a supposed 2 billion surplus in 2022.

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I’m not sure what happened with Cannon isn’t that she got read the riot act in that ex-parte meeting with OSC last week, then having same repeated albeit implicitly or between the lines in the sur-reply. To wit: she’s not dealing with someone with whom she feels loyalty for putting her on a prestigious lifetime gig but a legit national security risk. And, you know, being loyal to that may not be all that attractive.

Meanwhile I wonder whether her court’s administrative judge didn’t have a heart to heart with her.

In other words, she might be cracking — and yes, emphasis on might. Time will tell.

As for Willis… The underlying complaint re her relationship with Wade came from defense counsel who thinks the case disappears at this point with Willis gone which is, at best, a Hail Mary gambit.

I cannot believe that that an affair between two lawyers on the same side is a basis for having lawyers ever disqualified. Infidelity is not a basis for removal. Too, I’d like to belief that so much of the work’s been done that Willis is easily replaceable. And her likely replacement would be from her team.

Meanwhile, McAfee is doing the right thing: bending over backwards to give defense counsel all benefits of the doubt so when tosses this idiotic application it doesn’t get reversed on appeal.

So, I’m not going worry about all this before Willis is actually removed sorry.

As for Biden and Michigan: likewise not all that worried. It was a protest vote protesting his being the candidate so much as a protest against a policy. More specifically a policy of enabling Israel’s mass killing in Gaza — and said primary being conducted in the state with a huge Palestinian population IIRC.

Now, the vote protesting the presumptive candidate or at least fear that he won’t be a winner in the next election is the one in the Republican primary. That’s a potentially serious protest vote there.

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"I’m not sure what happened with Cannon isn’t that she got read the riot act in that ex-parte meeting with OSC last week, then having same repeated albeit implicitly or between the lines in the sur-reply."

I'll go along with Kurtz here, and agree that gross inexperience, lack of confidence, and surely lack of competence is driving her decisions and conduct from the bench in toto. I believe SC Smith recognizes that, and as long as Cannon's shortcomings don't willfully and deliberately sink his case, he's holding off a major motion sent to the 11th CA...we shall see.

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Lack of experience is the least of it although it’s in the mix. Her bending over backwards for the primary defendant so far I still say her loyalty to Trump is the primary driving force. She’s on the bench because she’s some sort of political animal.

There’s a very subtle message in the piece David quoted Tuesday and it’s a sort of warning that what Trump did is much worse than what he’s charged with so far. Too, sur-replies aren’t all that common, albeit more so when new issues are raised in a reply. However, new claims in a reply are often if not usually just disregarded.

I threw out that ex-parte thing as an interesting, intriguing possibility.

As ever, time will tell.

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My sense is that Jack Smith is doing a heroic effort in actually *educating" *Judge* Cannon in the niceties and intricacies of presiding over a difficult trial where she has had ZERO experience, and who has already been lashed by a higher court for her previous decisions from the bench. Sure, I get that she was a last-minute tRump appointee, and apparently was chosen at random for the MAL docs case,

but she finally does recognize that it's doing her little good to unnecessarily mess with the prosecution in deference to Defendant tRump, and that she probably has seen the error of her ways, and is laboring to get with the program...one lives in hope.

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A wrongfully retaining records rap is one thing, the possibility of the retained materials being used in an improper way is another thing entirely.

Maybe I’m only part correct and she’ll push Smith to finally drop an espionage-like charge and then she’ll really feel pressured.

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