You can’t argue with this.
Here’s a recent example of that essential work.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
You can’t argue with this.
Here’s a recent example of that essential work.
In a 5-3 vote, the Wisconsin Supreme Court yesterday threw out yet another Trump legal challenge to the election. Such actions by courts around the country have become so routine as to be hardly worth noting, though if one is counting, there have been 46 such losses by Trump and his allies.
What I want to highlight is the incredulous tone of the majority opinion issued by justice Brian Hagedorn of both the merits of the challenge and the asked for remedy.
The Wisconsin Voters Alliance and a group of Wisconsin voters bring a petition for an original action raising a variety of questions about the operation of the November 3, 2020 presidential election. Some of these legal issues may, under other circumstances, be subject to further judicial consideration. But the real stunner here is the sought-after remedy. We are invited to invalidate the entire presidential election in Wisconsin by declaring it “null”—yes, the whole thing. And there’s more. We should, we are told, enjoin the Wisconsin Elections Commission from certifying the election so that Wisconsin’s presidential electors can be chosen by the legislature instead, and then compel the Governor to certify those electors. At least no one can accuse the petitioners of timidity.
Such a move would appear to be unprecedented in American history. One might expect that this solemn request would be paired with evidence of serious errors tied to a substantial and demonstrated set of illegal votes. Instead, the evidentiary support rests almost entirely on the unsworn expert report of a former campaign employee that offers statistical estimates based on call center samples and social media research.
This petition falls far short of the kind of compelling evidence and legal support we would undoubtedly need to countenance the court-ordered disenfranchisement of every Wisconsin voter. The petition does not even justify the exercise of our original jurisdiction.
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Comparing the Biden and Obama administrations
It was inevitable that people would compare the Biden administration to Obama’s to address the question as to whether the Biden presidency was merely going to be a third Obama term. While there are undoubtedly going to be great similarities (they are both solid members of the Democratic Party establishment after all), one way to measure the degree of closeness is to compare appointees made so far. Ryan Grim has made such a careful person-by-person comparison and concludes that although Biden is no progressive, his choices are more progressive than Obama’s, and that he has created a bit more distance from the Robert-Rubin/Goldman Sachs/Wall Street wing of the Democratic party.
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Service dogs aid many people, not just those with sight deficiencies, and as such are allowed into many areas that do not allow animals. But recently there has been an increase in the numbers of people who say they need the presence of emotional support animals that are not service dogs to overcome their anxieties, such as when they fly. This has resulted in airlines being faced with having to make ad hoc decisions as to whether to allow them or not.
The appearance, disappearance, and reappearance of the triangular steel monoliths that began in one site in Utah and spread to other places and initially seemed like it was people just having fun has taken a slightly darker turn in California where another one had been erected on top of a mountain.
A group of young men claiming to be Christians have posted a video of themselves tearing down a mysterious monolith that had appeared atop a California mountain and replacing it with a cross.
The monolith had been built near the town of Atascadero and sparked huge interest after the appearance of a similar silvery metal-faced monolith that had been discovered in the deserts of Utah.
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In case you were not aware, Rudy Giuliani is still pushing to overturn the Michigan results and there were hearings in the Republican-controlled state legislature for four hours on Wednesday where he brought in witnesses who alleged widespread fraud. One of them was someone named Melissa Carone who said that she worked as a contractor for Dominion Voting Systems, the company that manufactured the voting machines and that has been accused by Trump lawyers of working in cahoots with Hugo Chavez (who died in 2013) and the CIA to electronically switch Trump votes to Biden votes as part of their plan to turn the world Communist. Or something like that. It is hard to keep up.
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I keep seeing more and more examples of cartoonists using the name Bob to make a cartoon funnier, especially if the character so named is a bit of a doofus. Why this perfectly good name has been singled out for this dubious recognition is a mystery. Here are some recent ones.
In an extraordinary development, it appears that there’s an investigation by the justice department into allegations that people have been trying to bribe pardons for themselves from Trump.
An alleged “bribery for pardon” scheme at the White House is under investigation by the justice department, according to a court filing unsealed on Tuesday.
The heavily redacted document does not name Donald Trump or other individuals and leaves many unanswered questions, but comes amid media reports that the US president is considering sweeping pardons before he leaves office next month.
It shows that the justice department investigation alleges that an individual offered “a substantial political contribution in exchange for a presidential pardon or reprieve of sentence”.
Two individuals acted improperly as lobbyists to secure the pardon in the “bribery-for-pardon schemes”, as the document puts it. The names are blacked out.
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After a dip in the numbers for the Thanksgiving weekend (numbers tend to drop during holidays, possibly because people postpone going to see doctors and hospitals may delay reporting their data), the number of hospitalizations and deaths came roaring back.
Our daily update is published. States reported 1.4 million tests, 196k cases, and 2,733 deaths. There are 100,226 people currently hospitalized with COVID-19 in the US —the first time hospitalizations have exceeded 100k. pic.twitter.com/8QSKujBGao
— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) December 3, 2020
Hospitalizations topped 100,000 for the first time and the daily number of deaths reached 2,733, just slightly below the peak of 2,769 reached back on May 7th. This rise is too soon after the holidays to have been caused by all the travel and getting together for the holiday. That grim reckoning is coming in a week or two.
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In a surprise move, attorney general Bill Barr has said an interview with the Associated Press that the department of justice has found no evidence of widespread fraud in the last election, at least not enough to overturn the results.
His comments are seen as a big blow to Mr Trump, who has not accepted defeat.
…“There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results,” Mr Barr, who is seen as a top Trump ally, told AP News on Tuesday, referring to the assertion that ballot machines were hacked to give more votes to Mr Biden.
…Mr Barr said that the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland Security have investigated that claim, “and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that”.
…Reacting to his comments, Trump campaign lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis said in a joint statement: “With the greatest respect to the Attorney General, his opinion appears to be without any knowledge or investigation of the substantial irregularities and evidence of systemic fraud.”
The reason that this is a surprise is not because what he is saying is untrue but that he said it at all, since it goes completely counter to what Trump has been saying. Barr has up to now seemed to have seen himself as more of Trump’s personal lawyer rather than the nation’s top law enforcement official, often going to great lengths to use the department to support some of Trump’s most extreme claims. He could have just kept quiet on the election fraud issue and need not have weighed in on this matter publicly.
So why did he, since he had to know that this would anger Trump who sees anyone who disagrees with him as disloyal? After all, Trump fired Christopher Krebs for saying that this election was the most secure ever. As Democratic senate leader Chuck Schumer wryly noted after Barr’s statement, “I guess he’s the next one to be fired.” Maybe Barr is hoping for that to happen, because like so many people who have been deeply tainted by their proximity to Trump, he is trying at the last minute to salvage something of his tattered reputation.