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A shocking decision…not

Monday, March 4, 2024

Was there anyone on the planet that thought the Supreme Court wouldn’t reverse the Colorado court’s action taking Trump off the ballot? Some of the many organizations filling my inbox with solicitations for money certainly pretended that they thought it could happen, but I don’t for a moment think any of them truly believed it.

The only surprise to me is the fact that the liberal members of the court signed onto this opinion, which as I understand it, basically means that an insurrectionist need not fear repercussions unless Congress takes up the issue, even if that Congress is filled with insurrection supporters.

Maybe the fact that the liberals joined in is a hopeful sign. Maybe a deal was made. Maybe the court fascists said: “You vote to keep Trump on the ballot, and we’ll vote to hold that he’s not immune from criminal prosecution. Sure, it’s obvious that he’s not immune in any reasonable interpretation of the constitution, but the constitution means whatever we say it means.”

Update: This is interesting. It appears that the sane members of the court originally planned to dissent in part, but ended up not doing so. Joe Patrice, at Above the Law, speculates that we might see why when the immunity decision finally comes down.

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The experts agree…

Sunday, February 25, 2024

Okay, I admit that I still get some guilty pleasure reading the Palmer Report. While the conclusions they draw don’t always flow from the facts, the facts they report are usually just that: facts. Today they relate another fact, also reported over at Hullabloo:

You don’t have to be a medical expert in order to piece together that Donald Trump is showing worsening signs of dementia. He no longer knows who the people around him are, in his political and personal life. He can’t figure out what the current period of time is. He sees the name “Donald Trump” on the teleprompter and doesn’t understand that he’s that person. And his brain keeps shorting out mid sentence, causing him to start randomly babbling about the last word he heard himself say.

But if you want confirmation of what you think you’re seeing, it turns out an expert in the field very much agrees. Dr. John Gartner, a psychologist and former professor at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, says that “Trump appears to be showing gross signs of dementia.”

Dr. Gartner points to Trump’s frequent use of non-words, known as “phonemic paraphasias,” as a medical indicator of how advanced Trump’s dementia is. Trump typically makes up fake words that sound similar to real words, as he tries and fails to remember what the real words are.

The cited symptom isn’t the sole symptom, as anyone who is paying attention would know. It is, however, according to Gartner, a sign of “moderate to severe stages of Alzheimer’s”. The sad fact is that not everyone is paying attention, and much of the media is making no attempt to bring this state of affairs to their attention, preferring instead to concentrate on the senility from which Joe Biden is not suffering. It is to be hoped that as the days go on, particularly given the pressure from his various court cases,that his condition will further deteriorate to such an extent that even the mainstream media will pay sustained attention to it.

I wonder though. I remember that shortly after Reagan was elected I watched one of his press conferences and it struck me that he wasn’t all there mentally. During one of his debates with Mondale in 1984 he wandered off into an irrelevant anecdote that actually caused a bit of comment, but it quickly receded and he declined further into his senility as his second term progressed. Of course they were successful in keeping it all under wraps, because after all, who needs a functioning president if the people who pull his strings can still get all they want. In the end, all he has to be capable of doing is signing his name where they tell him to, and if he has trouble with that, they can always guide his hand. It never became an issue with Reagan, but it’s also the case that his condition wasn’t as advanced while he was in the White House as Trump’s condition appears to be.

It may be a bit of a different story if the man has to run for president while in the grip of senility, because he has to go out in public, at least sometimes. Of course, he’ll refuse to debate and will avoid all but friendly media, but the press will not question whatever lame excuses they put forward for his actions. But it will become more and more difficult to make the issue about Biden as Trump’s public displays become more numerous and less open to bullshit explanations. Plus, give the Biden folks credit, they are tweeting out videos of all Trump’s senile moments (on Truth Social too) and that has to have at least some affect on other coverage.

I suppose that from a potential VP’s point of view, it is an enticing prospect. Assuming they steal the election fair and square this time, the VP could simply wait until January 21st and then invoke the 25th Amendment.

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A sure bet

Tuesday, February 20, 2024

I wrote a few weeks ago about the church in New London that god chose to strike down. It was a former Congregational Church, but they sold the historic structure to the Engaging Heaven Ministries back in 2015 for $250,000.00.

We learn today that the City of New London has put a $244,646.00 lien on the property to cover the costs the city has incurred (doubtless there are more to come) cleaning up the mess:

Mayor Michael Passero on Monday said the lien was not “an aggressive move” by the city, but rather a way to protect the city’s interests.

“When (Engaging Heaven) pays us, the lien comes off,” he said, adding the ministry was informed about the lien before it was imposed.

Passero said the city would likely pull the owed amounts from various capital project accounts.

“And as we get paid back, we’d reimburse those accounts,” he said.

… James Levesque, founder of the Engaging Heaven Ministries group, which operates churches in West Haven, Montana and Florida, previously said the ministry was prepared to reimburse the city for all costs related to the collapse.

Levesque, who met with city officials earlier this month, could not be reached to comment on Monday at his ministry’s Madeira Beach, Fla., headquarters.

Levesque assured the city, immediately after the fire, that he had insurance on the building, but somehow the insurance company has failed to take an interest in the situation. My guess, also, is that his other “ministries” are structured in such a way that none will have any legal liability for his operation in New London.

Passero isn’t stupid, so he doubtless knows that he’ll never see a dime from Engaging Heaven. The holy man is a grifter, like 99% of the people who operate churches these days. My guess is that Passero feels it’s good politics not to say out loud what he surely knows. The New London Day, from which the quote above is garnered, has also been a bit reticent about calling a grifter a grifter. So, you heard it here first. If, by some miracle, Engaging Heaven comes through, I’ll print a retraction, but I’m not terribly worried.

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You heard it here first

Monday, February 19, 2024

In what should come as no surprise a panel of experts polled by the Los Angeles Times opines that while Biden is a respectable 16th best in the list of presidents, Trump is dead last:

Trump’s position at the bottom of our rankings, meanwhile, puts him behind not only Buchanan and Johnson but also such lowlights as Franklin Pierce, Warren Harding and William Henry Harrison, who died a mere 31 days after taking office.

Trump’s impact goes well beyond his own ranking and Biden’s. Every contemporary Democratic president has moved up in the ranks — Barack Obama (No. 7), Bill Clinton (No. 12) and even Jimmy Carter (No. 22).

Being as this is reported by the mainstream media, the Times goes on to cast doubt on the conclusions of its own selected experts, but not to the extent of casting doubt on the conclusion about Trump.

I take this occasion to point out that I reported Trump’s dismal standings in this blog many years ago, on December 20, 2015 to be exact:

It’s official. The American Historical Society announced today that it had taken a poll of its members, and there was surprising unanimity: Donald Trump is the worst president in American History. Well, actually, Donald Trump will be the worst president in American history, once he’s sworn in.

“There was a bit of debate about whether we should declare him the worst before his inauguration”, an Historical Society spokesperson said, “but in the end, we reached consensus that there was really no reason to wait, since he was such a clear winner….er… loser”.

Trump replaces George W. Bush as the Society’s worst president ever. Bush, unlike Trump, was not a unanimous pick for the highly coveted award. A history professor from Bowdoin College held out for Franklin Pierce, stating that while he saw the merits of the argument for Bush, as a matter of institutional pride, he felt it was important to stick up for a Bowdoin alum. That same professor was recently quoted as saying that “next to Trump, Pierce looks like Lincoln”.

The professors pointed to a variety of reasons for their unanimous decision. “We’ve had mentally ill presidents in the past”, one pointed out, “but you can argue that Lincoln’s occasional depression was part of what made him great, and while Andy Jackson was a bit of a megalomaniac, he simply can’t compare to Trump. ”

Another pointed out “that there’s no indication that any other president ever solicited payments from foreign powers, something that the constitution forbids, Trump has been pretty open about it, and then there’s the whole collusion with Russia thing prior to the election. It appears that a foreign power will have something on the president of the United States, and that as a result he may be forced to do its bidding, though I do admit that if the collusion did come out, it’s quite likely that Congress would do nothing about it.”

Many also felt that using the presidency for personal enrichment was a bit tacky, to say the least. Others pointed out that while there have been ill prepared presidents in the past, no prior president has ever lacked so much of the basic knowledge needed to do the job. “This guy makes George W. Bush look like a genius”, noted one historian.

Others pointed out that while most former presidents, with the possible exception of George Washington, sometimes told a lie, Trump will be the first president who has never told the truth.

I hereby confess that I made it all up. But it all turned out to be true, didn’t it, including the part about Republicans not giving a damn about him subverting the constitution and kowtowing to Putin, and now the experts agree.

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Good day, yesterday

Wednesday, February 14, 2024

So, the Democrat won convincingly in New York yesterday, cutting the Republicans’ razor thin majority in the House down even more. It was supposed to be close, but wasn’t. 2022 was supposed to be a Republican wave, but wasn’t. In fact, it appears to be the case that Democrats have outperformed the polls quite a bit over the past few years, which makes you wonder whether the polls themselves are as accurate as they once seem to have been.

There are, no doubt, several pollsters, such as Rasmussen, whose polls are designed to achieve results that can then be used by pundits to pontificate about the dismal fate of the Democrats. I was polled by Rasmussen recently, and I could tell by the way the questions were phrased that the point was to try to get results in line with Republican talking points.

I also wonder whether the methodologies used to select poll respondents are able to get a representative sample of the population as a whole. On line polls can’t help but being skewed, and I’m not sure it’s possible to get a representative sample by telephone these days. In any event, it seems clear that one can’t necessarily put one’s faith in polls these days.

Getting back to yesterday’s election, from what I’ve read it appears that the Democrat attacked the Republicans effectively on the immigration issue, making sure people were aware of their hypocrisy in refusing to vote on the Senate bill because the very stable genius told them not to do so. He made Trump the issue, and it worked. Every Democrat running for office this year should make Trump the issue.

The Republicans have put themselves in an awkward position in all but the districts that are chock full of idiots, of which, unfortunately, there are still quite a few. But in any district in which the electorate is somewhat rational, they are now faced with a choice. Embrace Trump, and keep the MAGA types, but lose a hefty proportion of the independents. Or, alternatively, keep your distance from Trump and try to appeal to the independents by lying about your intentions to pursue a “moderate” agenda, thereby losing the Trumpers. It’s a situation they created for themselves. Back in 2021 they should have dumped Trump down the memory hole like they did to Bush in 2008. Sure, he would have refused to be dumped, but if they were consistent about it they could have accomplished it. In fact, if they’d done the right thing and convicted him after he was impeached, he’d be disqualified from running and they could just run another nut case that they could sell more easily to the low information types.

Anything can happen, and there’s no doubt the Republicans are planning on stealing as many states as they can, but my money is on Biden at this point, though the media will continue to work hard to both sides the senility issue, emphasizing meaningless slips by Biden while ignoring Trump’s obvious mental decline, which, to be fair, is not that steep, since the starting point was not that high.

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Fun reading

Tuesday, February 6, 2024

Just got finished reading the decision in United States v. Trump, which you can read here.

Like some others, I thought that the Republican judge on the panel was holding things up indefinitely, and I still sort of think that the other two judges had to work on her to get her to join in what is definitely a strong decision.

One ironic thing in the decision is that the most difficult issue facing the court, and the one most likely to prevent them from issuing a decision at all, was a jurisdictional argument made by one of the amicus briefs, to the effect that the issue was such that it could not be raised until after the conviction, i.e., that an appeal was not yet in order procedurally. The court spent a lot of time dealing with that issue, and I think it was the only issue raised by anyone that had a chance to prevail over the government’s position. Trump couldn’t argue in favor of it, since he was the appellant, meaning he’d taken the appeal in the first place, and he could hardly argue that the court had no jurisdiction over his appeal. Actually, with Trump and his lawyers you never know.

The rest of the opinion makes long shrift of Trump’s absurd immunity arguments, in that it devoted more ink to them than was logically necessary, though not politically. None of his arguments make sense, particularly the double jeopardy argument that, having been acquitted in an impeachment, he could not be tried again. The argument is absurd on its face, but the court treated it, along with the other frivolous arguments, as if it was a serious issue, but did get in the fact that Trump’s lawyers made the exact opposite argument at his impeachment trial.

I’m fairly hopeful that with the exception of Clarence, the Supreme Court (even Alito) will take a pass on Trump’s inevitable appeal to that august body.

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I’m a Swiftie now!

Monday, February 5, 2024

I just realized that I have not weighed in on what appears to be the most important issue of the day, so I want to make my position clear:

  1. I am positively glad that Taylor Swift won another Grammy even though, so far as I know, I’ve never heard one of her songs. I’m even thinking about checking up on her music one of these days, if I can stop listening to stuff from the sixties and seventies for a while.
  2. I’m rooting hard for the Kansas City Chiefs to win the Super Bowl even though in past years I have prided myself on being among the last to know who won said Super Bowl, which is an indication of how much I care about football generally.
  3. I’m positively in awe of the fact that Taylor Swift has been secretly carrying on psy-op operations for years and has managed to keep it under wraps until just recently. Also, I have to reluctantly hand it to the folks at Fox that did the uncovering. It must have taken a lot of hard working journalism to do it, and who ever heard of the people at Fox committing journalism!

I know these positions are controversial, but I feel I owe it to my readers (if they exist) to be upfront about these things.

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Billionaires against truth

Tuesday, January 30, 2024

Not for a minute do I believe that the billionaires attempting to destroy higher education in this country are truly concerned about anti-Semitism. It’s merely the hook that has been given to them as the result of the war in Gaza. The point is to remodel higher education to turn it into a tool for reinforcing their hold on our political system. What’s truth got to with it, anyway? Right?

Some of the professors at UPenn are fighting back against the push by a billionaire alumni to destroy that institution. After he succeeded in forcing the college president out, he “sent a four-page email to university trustees titled “Moving Forward,” which many professors interpreted as a blueprint for a more conservative campus.” You know…every school should be like Hillsdale.

One of the protesting professors put it succinctly:

Some professors at the university say the attack on Penn is part of a conservative effort, begun by governors such as Ron DeSantis of Florida, to overhaul American higher education — an effort that is now spreading to dozens of universities, including Penn, Harvard, and Columbia University, which are now under investigation by the federal government over reports of antisemitism.

“This is an anti-democratic attack unfolding, not just at Penn, but all across the country, including at public universities in Florida, in Texas, Ohio, and beyond,” said Offner, the president of the university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, a professional faculty organization.

Penn, she said, had become “ground zero of a coordinated national assault on higher education, an assault organized by billionaires, lobbying organizations, and politicians who would like to control what can be studied and taught in the United States.”

It would be nice to see some Democratic politicians coming to the defense of these institutions.

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God sure works in mysterious ways

Monday, January 29, 2024

Here in the New London area lots of people are wondering why God chose to demolish a beautiful stone church that has graced downtown New London since the middle of the nineteenth century rather than, say, a den of iniquity somewhere. But, as they say, he works in mysterious ways. The incident in New London is nowhere near as mysterious, though, as God’s decision to fleece some of his worshippers in Colorado.

I first learned about this on the Onion, where it seemed too crazy to be true, but would the New York Times lie? Mislead, sure, but not outright lie:

A pastor in Denver who said that God told him to sell cryptocurrency that could not be cashed is facing civil charges, along with his wife, for marketing a digital coin that prosecutors said was “practically worthless” and using the proceeds to support a “lavish lifestyle.”

The pastor, Eligio Regalado, and his wife, Kaitlyn Regalado, were charged on Thursday in a civil complaint filed in Denver District Court by the Colorado Attorney General’s Office, the Colorado Division of Securities said in a statement. The agency said that the couple created, marketed and sold a cryptocurrency that they called INDXcoin through a cryptocurrency exchange, which they also ran.

But you can’t blame the guy for taking the money and running! God told him to, as he explained in a video:

Mr. Regalado said that because of problems with the cryptocurrency exchange, investors could not take their money out.

Mr. Regalado also said in the video that he went into the cryptocurrency business because “the Lord” told him to. He said that God had once come to him a dream and asked him to do so, and he accepted that he and his wife spent the funds in “a home remodel that the Lord told us to do.”

But it turns out that he may have misunderstood what God was telling him, as did the investors who took God’s word:

About nine months ago, Mr. Regalado said, the undertaking “started falling apart,” adding that he didn’t know what he was doing.
“One of two things have happened,” Mr. Regalado said, “One: Either I misheard God and every one of you who prayed and came in, you as well, or two: God is still not done with this project and he’s going to do a new thing.”

So, everyone is at fault for the scam, as his “investors” didn’t quite understand what God was telling them to do. Or, alternatively, God lacks the ability to communicate clearly, which, when you think of it, has been a problem for him, given how often Evangelicals tell us that this or that weather event is God’s way of condemning homosexuals, even when he chooses to inflict the storm on a red state. I mean, who knows, maybe God was sending a message to the church in New London that he didn’t like the way they were feeding those homeless bums instead of collecting money to give to the rich.

But not to worry, the Lord will provide:

Mr. Regalado said that he still hoped that investors could get their money back, and that he believed “God is going to work a miracle in the financial sector.”

By the way, besides the home improvement, he and his wife also pocketed about another million dollars, which I’m sure the Lord has now rendered safe from the prying hands of the law.

Cryptocurrency, in my humble opinion, is pretty much a scam overall, but you have to wonder why anyone would have put their money down in this particular scam. You also have to wonder if there’s a single one of those Regalado fleeced that didn’t vote for Donald Trump. I’m sure they’re all still ripe for picking.

UPDATE: Well, it turns out that God did choose to demolish the church in New London. I had reserved judgment on the “Engaging Heaven” church, which bought the building from the Congregationalists that had owned it previously, since I read that they, at least, fed homeless people, but it turns out that, as you’d expect, they’re a bunch of grifters. The City of New London is footing the bill for the cleanup, because the insurance Engaging Heaven was supposed to have (it was required by their mortgage) doesn’t appear to exist. But have no fear, according to their grifter minister, who claims to work miracles (don’t they all?):

Meanwhile, Engaging Heaven is fundraising, which the church does a lot of, off the disaster.
A slick video with soaring music on a gofundme page from Engaging Heaven suggests the church collapse was God’s work.
“What if he wants to use this collapse to showcase the rebuilding of the church in our day like never before,” the video narrator says.

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Grifters Gotta Grift

Thursday, January 25, 2024

Couldn’t resist passing this along. It truly is the case than on multiple levels the Republican Party is just a massive grift. After all, the business plan is to get Fox-addled minds to cast votes against their best interest so the Republicans can deliver for their real constituency, the selfish rich, by sucking money from those at the bottom and sending it up to the top. So it stands to reason that part of that process will also involve separating the marks from their money:

Turning Point USA’s America Fest, held at the Phoenix Convention Center from Dec. 16 to Dec. 19, was a who’s who of conservative TV and internet personalities, interspersed with a smattering of failed candidates and elected officials: Donald Trump Jr., Tucker Carlson, Kari Lake, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Steve Bannon, Glenn Beck, Mike Lindell, ex-Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy, Dr. Ben Carson, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Trump lawyer Alina Habba all graced the stage. But a big chunk of the cash that produced the pre-holiday pow-wow came from two outfits that allegedly swindled the very voters and activists these figures purported to champion.

The event’s sole “Diamond Sponsor”—reflecting the highest level of support—was Fisher Capital, a precious metals dealer that regulators charged in April 2023 with tricking conservative senior citizens into liquidating their retirement accounts and using the cash to buy gold and silver coins at “grossly inflated prices,” with the enterprise falsely warning its victims that the Federal Reserve or Obama-era regulations would soon sever access to their savings. In the rank directly below Fisher Capital was the New Federal State of China, an organization co-founded by Bannon and indicted Chinese financier Guo Wengui.

Just weeks after America Fest wrapped, federal prosecutors identified this group, ostensibly a shadow government seeking to replace the current regime in Beijing, as part of Guo’s alleged criminal conspiracy to deceive his supporters in the Chinese dissident community into investing in a spurious cryptocurrency venture—one which the Justice Department claims in fact funded Guo’s lavish lifestyle.

(From The Daily Beast via Crooks and Liars)

I don’t feel sorry at all for the victims, and I doubt that many of them will learn from the experience.

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