The staff is laying a foundation so that when Trump - an arrogant, oblivious nitwit with the attention span of a five-year-old - inevitably comes out of it the obvious loser - they will already have the base primed to believe that that somehow reflects poorly on… Biden.
The Supreme Court basically just ruled that it’s perfectly acceptable for officials to accept and even ask for bribes, just so long as they wait a few weeks after the service for which the bribe is meant to pay.
Seriously. That’s exactly what this ruling in effect says - that bribes are only bribes if they’re paid before the service is rendered, and if they’re paid after, that’s perfectly fine.
They called it a gratuity to try to divert attention from the bludgeoningly obvious fact that it’s just a postdated bribe.
This is what this country has come to. In the face of an ever-growing failure of the government to represent the will of the people because their influence has been bought and paid for by moneyed interests, the Supreme Court is legalizing bribery.
Of course, it’s certainly not a coincidence that one of the institutions that’s been bought and paid for is the Supreme Court itself.
I don’t see any possible way it couldn’t. Every official is going to expect a “gratuity” in exchange for approving a contract, and every contractor who expects to succeed is going to go into every deal with the understanding that they’re going to be expected to pay a “gratuity” after the deal is finalized.
The upshot of it all can only be wholly institutionalized pay-to-play, with only the ultimately entirely meaningless requirement that the payment has to be deferred instead of up front.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down part of a federal anti-corruption law that makes it a crime for state and local officials to take gifts valued at more than $5,000 from a donor who had previously been awarded lucrative contracts or other government benefits thanks to the efforts of the official....
So as near as I can tell, the Supreme Court’s goal is to create some vague illusion that corruption is not to be tolerated by making it a crime if and only if people with a specific interest in a specific ruling or piece of legislation offer a substantial amount of money or something of equivalent value while clearly communicating their intent to buy the influence of an official and said official then accepts the bribe, clearly announces their intent to act according to the bribe-payer’s wishes solely because they’ve been paid to, then does so.
And in literally ALL other cases, it somehow won’t count and will be entirely legal.
Yes - it’s pretty much a given, cynically, that a corrupt court is going to rule that corruption is legal.
As I often do, I wonder if this is going to be one of the things that future historians will point to as a notable event in the days leading up to the collapse of the US.
Curiously enough, I didn’t delete it. I was just scanning back through my posts when I saw “deleted by creator” on one of them, and since I know I haven’t deleted anything, I came to see what that was all about.
There’s an option to undelete, so I did that, though unfortunately that means that yours is now the post without context. Sorry. 😅
Of course he wants immunity for cops - he dreams of the day when he’ll have his own murder squads and be able to simply have anyone who might dare to oppose him killed.
The whole “politically motivated” complaint is such a brazenly dishonest diversion that it just astonishes me that people use it, much less get away with it.
Alito told a filmmaker posing as a conservative activist that ProPublica “gets a lot of money” to dig up “any little thing they can find,” suggesting the reporting was politically motivated.
How does that even matter?
The simple fact of the matter is that, whatever their motivations might be, people either are or are not going to find evidence of corruption, and the one and only thing that determines that is whether or not such evidence exists.
Alito, were he so inclined, could’ve very easily have made it so that nobody, no matter how determined or for what reason, could’ve uncovered evidence of his corruption. All he had to do was not be corrupt.
If there was no corruption there could be no evidence of corruption, and then even the most sinister and underhanded attempt to make him look bad would fail.
On the other hand, if there is evidence there to be found, then the motivations of the people who uncover it are entirely irrelevant - the ONLY thing that matters is what they uncovered.
Seriously, how does the assertion that something like this is “politically motivated” even have the illusion of credence? How is it met with anything other than a blank look and a “So what?”
“Since the start of 2024, almost 200 Palestinians have been killed by the ISF, compared with 113 and 50 killed in the same periods in 2023 and 2022 respectively,” the statement from the UN rights chief’s office said....
Israel has rather obviously been using the attention on Gaza as cover for stepping up their efforts in the West Bank, even going so far as distributing automatic weapons to the illegal settlers, with which the settlers then entirely unsurprisingly went on a murderous rampage.
Just another aspect of the profound evil of Zionism.
Seriously - how can any person be so brazenly and thoroughly warped?
I can only assume that, like so many of the fabulously wealthy, she’s profoundly mentally ill, such that she really can’t grasp the enormous human cost that fulfilling her petty, selfish and ultimately pointless desires would entail. It can only be the case that she genuinely can’t grasp the fact that the millions of people who would be made to suffer or die for this are actual people - actual beings with lives and loved ones who are every bit as important to them as hers are to her.
It’s either that or she’s genuinely evil, in the purest sense of the word, and on a scale the world has rarely seen.
So which is it Ms. Adelson? Are you insane or simply evil? There’s absolutely no doubt - none at all - that it’s one or the other.
There are two main ways in which people can try to further a political position they’ve taken - they can either argue for the position or they can attempt to discredit those who argue against it.
If the position they’re trying to further is so illogical or immoral that they can’t frame any arguments in its favor, then attempting to discredit its opponents is the only thing they have left.
It’s so bizarre to me that a politician saying that the grotesquely corrupt psychopath in charge of an apartheid nation that’s carrying out a genocide on one front and an incremental land grab on another while they also try to provoke yet another nation into attacking so they can play the victim as they continue their egregious crimes “should resign” is a newsworthy event.
We actually live in a world in which politicians are expected to be dishonest, amoral and corrupt fuckwads and the few in Washington who aren’t are outcasts even in their own party. And we just accept that. It’s insane.
…a revolt from the far right over the exclusion of restrictions they had sought to abortion access, transgender care, and racial diversity and inclusion policies at the Pentagon.
That’s all just smoke and mirrors - emotive fodder to feed to the base to obscure their actual goal, which is simply to serve Russian interests by denying aid to Ukraine.
The strategy’s simple and obvious - insist on tacking on (entirely irrelevant) things that the Democrats will never vote for, then self-righteously vote against the bill when those things are inevitably not included.
And the goal is simple and obvious too - to conjure up a justification for voting against the aid that they can sell to the base, since, Tucker Carlson’s efforts notwithstanding, the base isn’t yet ready to join the MAGA politicians in swearing fealty to Russia.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry has been drawing up plans to try to weaken its Western adversaries, including the United States, and leverage the Ukraine war to forge a global order free from what it sees as American dominance, according to a secret Foreign Ministry document....
Russia is seeking to subvert Western support for Ukraine and disrupt the domestic politics of the United States and European countries, through propaganda campaigns supporting isolationist and extremist policies…
And it’s certainly not a coincidence that those isolationist and extremist policies are being actively promoted by the MAGA Republicans.
I continue to wonder how it is that anyone holds to the belief that the election was stolen when every single actual investigation - even by Trump’s most determined supporters - into every single accusation regarding it has failed to provide sufficient evidence to support the claim.
I mean - yeah - obviously it’s some combination of a desperate desire to believe and affirmation through the constant barrage of bombastic headlines over stories that don’t actually say anything of substance, but isn’t there an upper limit to credulity? It just seems ro me that any reasonable person has to conclude that even to the extent that there was near certainly some fraud, it still wasn’t and couldn’t have been sufficient to change the results.
And yeah - I know that a lot of these people simply aren’t reasonable, but it seems that the number of people who (claim to) believe that the election was stolen far exceeds the number of people who could possibly be that unreasonable, even in this benighted country in this benighted century.
Just another of those instances in which I find myself looking around in dismay, wondering how it is that I came to be in a world that’s so blitheringly insane, and how it is that seemingly no one else recognizes how insane it is.
Trump–Biden Debate Conspiracies Have Already Flooded the Internet (www.wired.com)
Supreme Court overturns ex-mayor’s bribery conviction, narrowing the scope of public corruption law (apnews.com)
The high court’s 6-3 opinion along ideological lines found the law criminalizes bribes given before an official act, not rewards handed out after....
Supreme Court wipes out anti-corruption law that bars officials from taking gifts for past favors (www.latimes.com)
The Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down part of a federal anti-corruption law that makes it a crime for state and local officials to take gifts valued at more than $5,000 from a donor who had previously been awarded lucrative contracts or other government benefits thanks to the efforts of the official....
block this account if you haven't already (files.catbox.moe)
Trump Tells Faith Conference If He Took Off Shirt They’d See ‘a Beautiful Person’ With ‘Wounds All Over’ From Defending Religion (www.mediaite.com)
Trump’s New Promises: ‘Immunity’ for Cops, an Iron Dome, Cheaper Bacon (www.thedailybeast.com)
ProPublica Reporter Defends Work After Samuel Alito Accuses Outlet of Politically Motivated Coverage (www.democracynow.org)
Putin says Trump conviction ‘burns’ idea of US as leading democracy (www.theguardian.com)
More than 500 Palestinians killed in occupied West Bank: UN rights chief (news.un.org)
“Since the start of 2024, almost 200 Palestinians have been killed by the ISF, compared with 113 and 50 killed in the same periods in 2023 and 2022 respectively,” the statement from the UN rights chief’s office said....
One of the world's richest women will support Trump if he promises to back Israel annexation of the West Bank (nymag.com)
Name and shame: Pro-Israel website ramps up attacks on pro-Palestinian student protesters (www.reuters.com)
Nancy Pelosi says Israel's Netanyahu 'should resign' as prime minister over Hamas war (www.nbcnews.com)
Ukraine Aid Bill Clears Critical Hurdle in the House as Democrats Supply the Votes (www.nytimes.com)
Secret Russian foreign policy document urges action to weaken the U.S. (www.washingtonpost.com)
Russia’s Foreign Ministry has been drawing up plans to try to weaken its Western adversaries, including the United States, and leverage the Ukraine war to forge a global order free from what it sees as American dominance, according to a secret Foreign Ministry document....
Was the 2020 election stolen? Job interviews at RNC take an unusual turn. (wapo.st)
Prospective hires say agreeing with Trump’s false election claim appears to be a new litmus test for being hired by the party