;)
Thursday
Jun202024
The Conversation -- June 20, 2024
** Charlie Savage & Alan Feuer of the New York Times: "Shortly after Judge Aileen M. Cannon drew the assignment in June 2023 to oversee ... Donald J. Trump's classified documents case, two more experienced colleagues on the federal bench in Florida urged her to pass it up and hand it off to another jurist, according to two people briefed on the conversations. The judges who approached Judge Cannon -- including the chief judge in the Southern District of Florida, Cecilia M. Altonaga -- each asked her to consider whether it would be better if she were to decline the high-profile case, allowing it to go to another judge, the two people said. But Judge Cannon, who was appointed by Mr. Trump, wanted to keep the case and refused the judges' entreaties. Her assignment raised eyebrows because she has scant trial experience and had previously shown unusual favor to Mr. Trump by intervening in a way that helped him in the criminal investigation that led to his indictment, only to be reversed in a sharply critical rebuke by a conservative appeals court panel. The extraordinary and previously undisclosed effort by Judge Cannon's colleagues to persuade her to step aside adds another dimension to the increasing criticism of how she has gone on to handle the case.... Ultimately, Judge Cannon is not subject to the authority of her district court elders." Read on. ~~~
~~~ Marie: Right from the get-go, I was urging the district's chief judge to tell Judge Aileen to step aide as she had bit off more than she could chew. Turns out the chief judge tried, but Aileen wouldn't hear of it. Now, Roger Stone is suggesting he just might have Aileen's home phone number and he knows she's about to dismiss the charges against Trump. (Story linked below.) Maybe Roger's not just blowing smoke.
Are You Better Off Now Than You Were Four Years Ago? Chris Hayes reminded us last night that today -- June 20 -- is the fourth anniversary of Donald Trump's first infamous "super-spreader" rally. Politico (Oct. 31, 2020): "... Donald Trump's campaign rallies between June and September may have caused some 30,000 coronavirus infections and more than 700 deaths, according to a new study by Stanford University economists." One victim of the June 20, 2020, rally "which saw at least eight Trump advance team staffers in attendance test positive for coronavirus," was Herman Cain, a former GOP presidential candidate who died in late July 2020. "He was a very special person, and I got to know him very well," [Trump] said, "And unfortunately he passed away from a thing called the China virus."
Anthony Faiola & Stefano Pitrelli of the Washington Post: "Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the former Vatican ambassador to the United States and the pope's most ardent internal critic..., has called Pope Francis a liberal 'servant of Satan,' demanded his resignation and suggested the Vatican's Swiss Guards arrest the 87-year-old pontiff. Now, after receiving years of withering verbal attacks, Francis appears to have struck back against ... Viganò.... The Vatican's disciplinary body, the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith, issued a formal decree, made public by Viganò on Thursday, assigning the senior cleric to a penal canon trial. The charges: the 'crime of schism' and 'denial of the legitimacy of Pope Francis.' Such trials are exceedingly rare, and the move underscores a recent effort by the Vatican to take more formal action against a gaggle of archconservatives who have sought to undermine Francis's papacy from the inside. Conviction could lead to Viganò's defrocking and excommunication."
Abbie VanSickle of the New York Times: "The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a tax on foreign income that helped finance the tax cuts ... Donald J. Trump imposed in 2017 in a case that many experts had cautioned could undercut the nation's tax system. The vote was 7 to 2, with Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh writing the majority opinion. He was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., and the court's three liberals. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote a concurring opinion, joined by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., and Justice Clarence Thomas dissented, joined by Justice Neil M. Gorsuch.... In the majority opinion, Justice Kavanaugh wrote that the tax fell within the authority of Congress under the Constitution. Many tax experts had warned that striking down the tax could have wide repercussions. Such a move could have threatened to fundamentally change how income is defined, block efforts to tax billionaires' wealth and undermine enforcement for all sorts of other taxes, which amount to billions in revenue for the government." A CNN report is here. ~~~
~~~ Marie: My question: does Gorsuch earn an all-expenses-paid luxury vacation for siding with Clarence & the Billionaires?
Joe's New Deal CCC. Kate Yoder of Grist: "Within weeks, the nation will deploy 9,000 people to begin restoring landscapes, erecting solar panels, and taking other steps to help guide the country toward a cleaner, greener future. The first of those workers were inducted into the American Climate Corps on Tuesday during a virtual event from the White House. Their swearing-in marks another step forward for the Biden administration's ambitious climate agenda. The program, which President Joe Biden announced within days of taking office in 2021, is a modern version of the Climate Conservation Corps, the New Deal-era project that put 3 million men to work planting trees and building national parks." Thanks to RAS for the link. MB: The New Deal CCC was the "Civilian Conservation Corps."
Lara Jakes of the New York Times: "Mark Rutte, the departing prime minister of the Netherlands who has guided more than $3 billion in Dutch military support to Ukraine since 2022, on Thursday clinched the last assurance he needed to become NATO's next secretary general. On Thursday, President Klaus Iohannis of Romania dropped his bid to lead NATO, making it all but certain that Mr. Rutte, 57, would be formally elected to a four-year term at the helm of the Atlantic alliance. That could take place as soon as next week, ahead of a high-level NATO summit in Washington in July. The Netherlands is a founding member, and Mr. Rutte would be the fourth Dutch official to become the organization's top diplomat."
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Justin Grieser of the Washington Post: "Summer is arriving a bit earlier than usual this year.... Thursday's summer solstice -- the longest day and shortest night of the year in the Northern Hemisphere -- is the earliest in 228 years, since 1796, when George Washington was president.... In most years, the summer solstice occurs on June 21. That's when Earth's North Pole reaches its maximum tilt toward the sun, and the sun appears at its northernmost point directly over the Tropic of Cancer, 23.5 degrees north of Earth's equator.... The main reason for the early solstice is that human calendars aren't perfect.... During leap years such as 2024, the solstices and equinoxes occur about 18 hours and 11 minutes earlier than the previous year. Then, during successive non-leap years, the seasons begin 0.24219 days later than the previous year (approximately 5 hours and 49 minutes)."
Kelsey Ables of the Washington Post: "Protesters sprayed part of Stonehenge with orange paint Wednesday, calling on the British government to take action on climate change a day before thousands are expected to flock to the 5,000-year-old site in southern England to celebrate the summer solstice. A video shared Wednesday by Just Stop Oil, the environmental activist group responsible, shows two people running toward the monument and unleashing the orange paint. People nearby shout 'No' and 'Stop him,' as others try to pull the protesters away." MB: Defacing the past to save the future??? Damned outrageous. ~~~
Will Steakin of ABC News: "In recent weeks, House Ethics Committee investigators have conducted a string of interviews behind closed doors with numerous women who were witnesses in the yearslong Justice Department sex trafficking investigation into Rep. Matt Gaetz, multiple sources familiar with the committee's work tell ABC News.... One woman, who ABC News is not identifying, told the committee that a payment from Gaetz was for sex, while others have said they were paid to attend parties that Gaetz also attended and that featured drugs and sex, multiple sources told ABC News." (Also linked yesterday.)
Presidential Race
Kara Voght of the Washington Post: Jill Biden is back on the campaign trail, currently working the senior circuit: "As campaign audiences go, the Seniors for Biden-Harris event was the right kind of venue for the wife of America's oldest-ever president to gin up excitement for a potential second term for her husband. The roughly 200 attendees, in various stages of graying, listened attentively in rows of chairs -- or, occasionally, wheelchairs and scooters. Jane Fonda, the 86-year-old actor and activist who's practically synonymous with graceful aging, had introduced the first lady.... Republicans' attacks on the president's age are an effort to 'devalue our wisdom and dismiss our experience,' [Biden] said. Trump's flirtations with cutting seniors' entitlement programs threaten 'the Social Security we've earned.'... Over five stops in four states -- Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nevada and Arizona -- Biden preached that 'age is a gift.'... That 'Joe isn't just one of the most effective presidents of our lives in spite of his age, but because of it!'"
Shawn McCreesh of the New York Times: At a rally in Racine, Wisconsin, Tuesday, Donald Trump was thinking out loud about his upcoming debate with President Biden. "He repeatedly mused about the potential scenarios, lowering expectations that he would dominate Mr. Biden and then, as if he couldn't help himself, raising them again.... Mr. Trump, 78, has spent months casting the 81-year-old Mr. Biden as a husk of a man who can barely walk or formulate complete sentences.... If [Biden should do well in the debate], it's only because Mr. Biden will be 'pumped up,' he told his followers, suggesting that the president would hoover up a pile of cocaine beforehand.... [Also, Trump claimed] he'll be up against multiple adversaries at once -- not just Mr. Biden but both of CNN's moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, who, Mr. Trump added, were constitutionally incapable of treating him fairly. 'I'll be debating three people instead of one half of a person,' he said."
David Edwards of the Raw Story: "Roger Stone ... revealed a plan to have the former president re-take the White House with the help of judges who are prepared to act despite the election results. Liberal journalist Lauren Windsor caught Stone revealing the plan on an undercover video. 'At least this time when they do it, you have a lawyer and a judge -- his home phone number standing by -- so you can stop it,' Stone explained in the video. 'We made no preparations last time, none ... There are technical, legal steps that we have to take to try and have a more honest election. We're not there yet, but there's things that can be done.'... Stone suggested to Windsor's colleague, Ally Sammarco, that U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon would soon dismiss the charges against Trump for allegedly mishandling classified documents." (Also linked yesterday.)
Michael Podhorzer in Weekend Reading: "By shielding Donald Trump from standing trial before a jury in two of his felony cases, Trump's three appointments to the Supreme Court, along with the even more MAGA Justices Alito and Thomas and Judge Aileen Cannon, have already irreparably interfered in the 2024 election. Most importantly, when we finally do get the immunity ruling in the days or more likely weeks ahead, it will set the stage for a historic crisis. We will face an irreconcilable showdown between the normal operation of the criminal justice system (which should find Trump in pretrial and trial proceedings for his January 6th crimes over the next five months) and the normal functioning of presidential elections (which should find him campaigning full-time during those months)." Emphasis original.
Leah Litman in a New York Times op-ed: "For those looking for the hidden hand of politics in what the Supreme Court does, there's plenty of reason for suspicion on Donald Trump's as-yet-undecided immunity case given its urgency.... Every passing day further delays a potential trial on charges related to Mr. Trump's efforts to remain in office after losing the 2020 election and his role in the events that led to the storming of the Capitol; indeed, at this point, even if the court rules that Mr. Trump has limited or no immunity, it is unlikly a verdict will be delivered before the election.... Mr. Trump's lawyers put together a set of arguments that are so outlandish they shouldn't take much time to dispatch.... In 1974, [when Richard Nixon claimed he was immune from a subpoena by the special prosecutor]..., [the t]otal elapsed time [from when the case reached the Supreme Court]: 54 days." Nixon lost, 8-0. MB: Litman doesn't put it this way, but Jack Smith brought the immunity case before the Supremes on December 11, 2023: six months or 192 days ago.
Josh Gerstein of Politico: "A rift is emerging among the Supreme Court's conservatives -- and it could thwart the court's recent march to expand gun rights. On one side is the court's oldest and most conservative justice, Clarence Thomas. On the other is its youngest member, Amy Coney Barrett.... If the court adheres to a strict history-centric approach, as Thomas favors, it will likely strike down a federal law denying firearms to people under domestic violence restraining orders. But Barrett recently foreshadowed that she is distancing herself from that approach. If she breaks with Thomas in the gun case, known as United States v. Rahimi, and if she can persuade at least one other conservative justice to join her, they could align with the court's three liberals to uphold the gun control law.... The dispute over the historical approach -- part of a legal philosophy known as originalism -- also could have implications for Donald Trump's pending bid to have the high court declare him immune from prosecution...." ~~~
~~~ digby is cautiously optimistic. "This fight is breaking down to Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch vs Barret[t] while Roberts and Kavanaugh are being 'cagey.'... Barret[t] used to be all-in on 'originalism' but she seems to have changed her mind. (It would have been nice if she could have done that before Dobbs...)... In that weird trademark case last week over a t-shirt that said 'Trump so small,' ... [Barrett wrote], '... 'In my view, the Court's laser-like focus on the history of this single restriction misses the forest for the trees.... I see no reason to proceed based on pedigree rather than principle.'"
Corporations are people, my friend. And, like people, they can be two-faced. Judd Legum & others at Popular Information list 25 corporations that promote support for the LGBTQ community at the same time they have made donations that total $18 million since the last election to virulently anti-gay politicians.
Annals of "Journalism," Ctd. Anna Isaac & Stephanie Kirchgaessner of the Guardian: "Will Lewis, the Washington Post publisher, advised Boris Johnson and senior officials at 10 Downing Street to 'clean up' their phones in the midst of a Covid-era political scandal, according to claims by three people familiar with the operations.... The advice is alleged to have been given in December 2021 and January 2022 as top officials were under scrutiny for potential violations of pandemic restrictions, a scandal which was known as 'Partygate'. The claims suggest Lewis's advice contradicted an email sent to staff at No 10 in December 2021 which instructed them not to destroy any material that could be relevant to an investigation into the flagrant breaking of Covid lockdown rules by Johnson and officials who worked for him.... Lewis, the sources alleged, made some of the requests personally as he was carrying out work as an informal adviser to Johnson from late 2021 to July 2022." ~~~
~~~ Marie: Sorry, Will, you cannot simultaneously be a journalist and a government advisor. These jobs are mutually-exclusive.
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Louisiana. Rick Rojas of the New York Times: "Gov. Jeff Landry signed legislation on Wednesday requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in every public classroom in Louisiana, making the state the only one with such a mandate and reigniting the debate over how porous the boundary between church and state should be. Critics, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, vowed a legal fight against the law they deemed 'blatantly unconstitutional.' But it is a battle that proponents are prepared, and in many ways, eager, to take on.... 'If you want to respect the rule of law,' [Landry] said, 'you've got to start from the original law giver, which was Moses.'" The AP's report is here. MB: ~~~
~~~ Marie: I hate to tell Jeffy, but Moses is a fictional character. Also, too, I wonder if the Louisiana law makes clear which version of the Ten Commandments is to be posted. There are three. The only one that actually describes the listicle as the Ten Commandments is one that contains orders like, "you shall not boil a goat in its mother's milk." (Exodus 34) See also yesterday's Comments. Forrest M. doesn't seem all that worried about the new law inasmuch as he's not so sure Louisiana schoolchildren can read. I checked, and sure enough, Louisiana rated 47th among the states in education. Oh, but it has the worst crime rate. So maybe it would be a good idea, after all, to read the "shall not steal/shall not kill" commandments to the kiddies.
New Jersey. Nick Corasaniti & Tracey Tully of the New York Times: "New Jersey's senior U.S. senator ison trial, charged with taking bribes in exchange for political favors. A federal judge has declared the state's method of conducting primary elections fundamentally unfair. And on Monday New Jersey's attorney general charged one of the state's most formidable Democratic power brokers with racketeering. A state famous for explosive political prosecutions like Abscam, Bridgegate and Bid Rig has over the past year lived up to a reputation for scandal that has left six in 10 residents convinced that New Jersey's politicians are either somewhat or very corrupt.... But there are also signs that recent political upheaval might offer a history-changing silver lining: a tipping point that leads to change.... This month, running on a platform of 'restoring integrity' to New Jersey politics, [Rep. Andy] Kim, [N.J.,] 41, won the Democratic nomination with 75 percent of the vote." A judge-ordered redesign of New Jersey ballots will remove the edge ballot placement gave to party favorites.
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Israel/Palestine, et al.
The New York Times' live updates of developments Thursday in the Israel/Hamas war are here.
Blinken: Bibi Makes up Stuff. Miles Herszenhorn of Politico: "Secretary of State Antony Blinken said U.S. military assistance to Israel is 'moving as it normally would' aside from one delayed shipment of bombs, after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused the Biden administration of withholding weapons. Netanyahu had earlier slammed the Biden administration in a video posted on X Tuesday morning directly addressing Blinken.... Blinken and the White House later denied that the administration is blocking any military assistance with the exception of a shipment containing 1,800 to 2,000-pound bombs that President Joe Biden had paused in early May over concerns that they would be used in urban areas and cause civilian casualties." (Also linked yesterday.) ~~~
~~~ Don't Piss off Big Joe. Barak Ravid in Axios: "The White House canceled a high-level U.S.-Israel meeting on Iran that was scheduled for Thursday after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a video on Tuesday claiming the U.S. was withholding military aid, two U.S. officials tell Axios.... President Biden's top advisers were enraged by the video -- a message U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein delivered personally to Netanyahu in a meeting hours after it was published, two U.S. and Israeli sources say. Then the White House decided to go a step farther by canceling Thursday's meeting." (Also linked yesterday.)
Russia/Vietnam/North Korea. Sui-Lee Wee of the New York Times: "President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia wrapped up a state visit to one ally, North Korea, and moved on to another, Vietnam, arriving early Thursday hoping to shore up crucial partnerships in the region as he wages a protracted war in Ukraine. Mr. Putin's war in Ukraine has left him isolated from the West, and his need for munitions to fight that war has pushed him closer to North Korea and its leader, Kim Jong-un. The two leaders have bonded over their common historical opponent, the United States, and on Wednesday revived a Cold War-era mutual defense pledge between their nations. In Vietnam, by contrast, Mr. Putin met with officials who have recently forged deeper bonds with Washington. But Moscow has long been Hanoi's main source of weapons, and Mr. Putin is keen to hold on to that position."
News Ledes
New York Times: "Donald Sutherland, whose ability to both charm and unsettle, both reassure and repulse, was amply displayed in scores of film roles as diverse as a laid-back battlefield surgeon in 'M*A*S*H,' a ruthless Nazi spy in 'Eye of the Needle,' a soulful father in 'Ordinary People' and a strutting fascist in '1900,' has died. He was 88.... Across six decades, starting in the early 1960s, he appeared in nearly 200 films and television shows -- some years he was in as many as half a dozen movies. His chameleon-like ability to be endearing in one role, menacing in another and just plain odd in yet a third appealed to directors, among them Federico Fellini, Robert Altman, Bernardo Bertolucci and Oliver Stone."
New York Times: "Two fast-moving wildfires in Southern New Mexico that have killed two people, prompted the evacuation of thousands of people and scorched more than 23,000 acres continued to burn out of control on Wednesday, officials said, and it was unclear when firefighters might gain some control. The wildfires, named the South Fork and Salt fires, began earlier this week amid sweltering temperatures, and shifts in the weather on Wednesday may further complicate efforts to contain them. The South Fork fire, the larger of the two wildfires, has burned more than 16,000 acres and destroyed 1,400 structures, according to the Southwest Area Incident Management Team."
New York Times: "From the Midwest to the northern tip of Maine, millions of Americans sweltered under a springtime heat wave on Wednesday that stifled the Eastern portion of the United States for a third consecutive day. As the heat wave moved east, the Northeast felt the brunt of the conditions, stemming from a high-pressure system called a heat dome that scorched the Great Lakes region earlier this week." ~~~
~~~ The New York Times is liveblogging developments here.
CNN is liveblogging North American weather and weather-related disasters, including Tropical Storm Alberto, which made landfall in Mexico.
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Reader Comments (16)
Dems need a strategy, aka voters are amnesiacs:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/13/opinions/trump-convicted-felon-election-biden-lockhart/?dicbo=v2-71z6l3J&hpt=ob_blogfooterold
The link generator link @top right doesn't work (no sponsors for you page comes up) and the code in the HTML allowed doesn't produce valid html because I suspect there's some vital chunks missing. So sorry it's not a clickable, but the link was valid when I commented...
@gonzo: Thanks for the update on the link generator. You're right, and I just eliminated the link to the defunct link generator.
Not sure what you mean by "... the code in the HTML allowed doesn't produce valid html...." Did you try following the little link code "formula" I wrote? It won't be clear to people who are not at all familiar with linking sites, but you seem to know something about it. In my little formula,
URL = Webpage address you are linking, and
text = the text you highlight to create your link.
So, for instance, in the example,
"House Ethics Committee investigators have conducted a string of interviews behind closed doors...." ~~~
URL = https://abcnews.go.com/US/witness-tells-house-ethics-committee-matt-gaetz-paid/story?id=111217102
text = have conducted a string of interviews
Here’s Another link generator.
I went looking for a new one yesterday when I saw that our old standby was kaplooie. I thought it was temporary, but as gonzo mentions, it’s still out of service.
I found a bunch of alternates but this one is the easiest to use. Give it a shot.
If only it were that easy to find a new Supreme Court.
The old SNL did a sketch once called “New Dad”. A replacement dad, complete with his picture in all the family portraits.
Should “something happen”, (wink-wink) to the old Supreme Court Justices (the traitors), we could get a New Justice.
Getting rid of the traitors would also mean new justice in more ways than one, as in actual, as opposed to MAGA justice.
If only.
@Akhilleus: Yes indeed. One of the great thing about the original SNL was its satirical takes on such taboo TV subjects as death. (Yeah sure, TV Westerns had the bad guys dying all the time, but the shotgun deaths were bloodless and the guys looked peaceful and unharmed in death. Even kids understood that the actors who "died" would be showing up in another Western soon; they weren't "really" dead.)
I remember being both amused and shocked by "The Claudine Longet Invitational." Nearly a half-century later, that skit still makes me laugh.
It turns out that, after Longet's lawyers threatened legal action, SNL apologized -- sort of. The apology -- delivered by the pompously-earnest voice-over announcer Don Pardo amounted to, “Sorry if you don’t get the jokes.” (This linked site [at "apologized"] also provides the context for the skit.)
Grist
"The American Climate Corps officially kicks off
This month, the nation will deploy 9,000 people to help guide the country toward a cleaner future.
The first of those workers were inducted into the American Climate Corps on Tuesday during a virtual event from the White House. Their swearing-in marks another step forward for the Biden administration’s ambitious climate agenda. The program, which President Joe Biden announced within days of taking office in 2021, is a modern version of the Climate Conservation Corps, the New Deal-era project that put 3 million men to work planting trees and building national parks."
Marie,
Claudine Longet Invitational…hahaha!!
I never saw this sketch but just the name is hysterically funny. Of course, you’d have to know who she was and the backstory of her “accidentally” shooting her boyfriend, Spider Sabich, himself a pretty famous skier back then. Longet was also very famous, having been married to the incredibly popular Andy Williams, and for their friendship with the Kennedys.
An episode of Seinfeld once riffed on the idea of a second shooter in the JFK assassination, a bit which relied on a Zapruder-like video depicting a possible “Second spitter”, but this came decades after Dallas. The SNL bit about a raft of skiers all being “accidentally” shot by Claudine Longet appeared weeks after it happened. Pretty ballsy stuff. That first SNL season was landmark TV.
We could use a few hundred of those CCC people here in West
Michigan.
It's tourist season and the lake is now closed due to an infestation of
E-coli.
Seems those feedlots can let that effluent seep into the rivers, so then
on into Lake Michigan. And with temperatures in the high eighties
the lake has heated up and is cooking up some E-coli for the
unsuspecting swimmers.
Excuse me if I missed it, but every article I've seen on the Louisiana law requiring the Ten Commandments says "in public schools". Are private schools exempt from this excess?
@Bobby Lee: I couldn't readily find an answer to your question without trying to find and read the actual legislation. The general problem of course is violating the First Amendment's establishment clause, so the issue is with "public" schools -- that is, taxpayer-funded schools.
I did find a pdf of the bill, and I did a search for "private" and found nothing applicable, so it doesn't appear that private-funded school must display the 10 Commandments.
Oh, and it turns out the law does spell out what the legislators have decided the 10 Commandments are, so no worries about boiling goat kids in their mother's milk. Have it, mes amis.
@Akhilleus: Here's Seinfeld's "Magic Loogie."
Seems that Loose Cannon was right.
She was experienced enough...to fuck things up.
It's out of the news cycle now, a week or so old, but a graphis editorial artist up Miz Maries way has a good, and probable, take on Trump and his billion dollar bribe solicitation.
https://www.gocomics.com/jeffdanziger/2024/06/20
Marie,
Hahaha. The “Magic Loogie” bit (we called it a louie as kids, the difference between New York and Boston patois, I guess) is just as funny years later, but still doesn’t have the swaggering guerrilla comedy panache of the Claudine Longet sketch.
Jerry Seinfeld’s attacks on what he calls PC-woke culture as a comedy killer has been greedily slurped up by far-right fascists whose idea of comedy are jokes about black people deserving sickle cell anemia and hoots about left-wing women being godless whores.
If he was so angry about the demise of edgy humor, why is his latest feature film all about…Pop-Tarts? Very avant-garde, Jer. Seinfeld is crazy rich. If he was so pissed about political correctness killing comedy, why not go full Andrew Dice Clay? He can’t be worried about not making money…can he?
Comedy has always served as a platform for questioning authority and orthodoxy. There’s a reason that the only two people in “King Lear” able to speak truth to power were his daughter Cordelia, and his Fool, the court jester. Both were murdered. But not by lefties.
Comedians (certain comedians) have always found ways to take the Mickey out of the status quo. Look at Lenny Bruce. But Bruce, and others like him, weren’t killed (literally in his case) by lefties, they were attacked by the same type of right-wing, sieg-heiling assholes who now celebrate Jerry Seinfeld’s drift to the right. And they don’t spit at people. They shoot them.
And that’s not a show about nothing.
The folks behind the Looseeyanna Ten Commandments Bill don't care whether private schools display the Ten or not. They are clearly setting up a SCOTUS decision when the ACLU et al sue on 1st Amendment grounds. This is "Prayer in School" redux, going after Madeleine Murray O'Hare decades after she offended the bible bangers by getting prayer out.
Until I went to university, every classroom I was in had a picture of the Pope, a crucifix, and whomever the school was named for (St. John Baptist DelaSalle, St. Peter, the Sacred Heart), in three diffeent states. None of those states cared what the nuns or brothers hung on the wall. And in none of those states, at those times, as far as I know, were there any religious artifacts on display in the public schools.
This is just the Xianists looking for a fight, not a real interest in the souls of the kiddies. Especially since kids can smell hypocrites a mile away.
Re: the Ten Commandments command now in place in the unconstitutionally religiofied state of Louisiana, the demand that the little tykes be transfixed by the (sort of) central tenets of one specific religion.
The excuse given is that it’s not about religion at all. Nope. It’s about HISTORY (we’ve always done it this way—a phrase Grace Hopper, U.S. Navy rear admiral and renowned computer programmer, once famously called “The most dangerous phrase in the English language”) and—ready for this one?—MORALS! Because the kiddies need to understand that MORALS are wicked important, and they should look to the Dear Leader as the avatar of morality, but pay no attention to the felony convictions, rape, sexual assaults, decades of lies, business fraud, and theft. All librul lies!
We gotta git them kids MORAL.
So there.
Oh, okay. Well, now that you’ve explained that it’s not just an attempt to destroy the constitutional requirement that no state religion will be adopted…AND that you’re all wicked concerned that everyone be moral, like Trump, your god on earth, I’m sure everyone will be perfectly fine with it.