Tuesday, January 10, 2023

News bits: Tales from Twittwerlandia, etc.

MTG gets booted off Twitter for copyright infringement: A Twitter person got a hold of a letter sent by Dr. Dre’s attorney to the lovely MTG. She used one of Dre’s songs in her online propaganda poison and the good Dr. was not pleased that his music was being used without his permission to support fascism. Yikes! Kerfuffle alert!



The letter contains a couple of interesting comments, quoted below.

“One might expect that, as a member of congress, you would have a passing familiarity with the laws of our country.” Ooh, that was snarky. Naughty lawyer. One seasoned observer commented: “Legal snark is my favorite snark!” Bwaaahahahaha!!!

“It's possible, though, that laws governing intellectual property are a little too arcane and insufficiently populist for you to really have spent much time on.” Ouch, gut punch!

“You are wrongfully exploiting this work through various social media outlets to promote your divisive and hateful political agenda.”  That’s called copyright infringement and, as an added bonus, her political agenda is divisive and hateful.

“We’re writing because we think that an actual lawmaker should be making laws, not breaking laws, especially those embodied in the constitution by the founding fathers.” Another gut punch, but a good point. Protection for copyrighted material is actually in the original constitution. Art. 1, Sec. 8: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries (that means copyrights and patents are protected)

The Marjorie is not pleased
Dammit, she liked that Dre song!

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From the Filling the Congressional Swamp With Fascists Files: Here we go, gird up you loins boys and girls. Included in its first official action, the House gutted the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE). The Repubs said they were gonna do that and by golly they did! Newsweek optimistically (😵) comments: 
Three of four Democratic-appointed OCE board members will also be removed due to term limits under the changes, leaving Republican-appointed members in nearly full control of the office before Democrats are able to add new members, which may take months.
There was excitement in the Repub House caucus with the elimination of all concerns for ethics and the rule of law as applied to Repubs in the House. George Santos, the spreader of whopper lies is now off the hook for lying his way into congress. He excitedly exclaimed: Fantastic! MAGA!!

OK, he only said Fantastic! I added MAGA!! to tastefully and artistically emphasize Santos’ understandable excitement at his get out of the slammer free card.


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Corruption in the swamp at the Supreme Court: Business Insider writes about the transition of the super obscure Supreme Court Historical Society (SCHS) to a now much less obscure pay-to-play way for donors to get direct access to Supreme Court justices. This is corporate and fascist partisan moral rot to its very core. Funding for the obscure SCHS quietly accelerated after 2000 when it decided to get aggressive about looking for ‘donors’, a/k/a paying players. BI writes:
In 2000, the SCHS decided it would select new trustees for its board of directors largely based on their ability to provide “financial support” for the organization. [than means setting up a pay-to-play cash harvesting operation]

Before Silverman raised the alarm, the society hadn't attracted much attention — or money — from people outside the legal profession, Insider's review of the nonprofit's trustees throughout the 1990s found. Most of its donors were legal-history buffs and aging philanthropists.

But it wasn't long before new faces started showing up at society events and board meetings.

In 2003, the Ohio real-estate developer Don Wright joined the board of trustees. In 2007, so did Tom Monaghan, the founder of Domino's Pizza. By 2010, they were joined by the GOP megadonor Harlan Crow, the son of the real-estate magnate Trammell Crow.

These new members were part of a wave of right-wing ideologues, corporate representatives, and wealthy conservative power brokers who flocked to the Supreme Court Historical Society over the past two decades, Insider's analysis found, using the little-known group to gain unprecedented access to one of the most elusive and secretive judicial bodies on the planet. The donors leveraged relatively small sums of cash into privileged face time with the very Supreme Court justices who were in some instances deciding cases to which their companies or affiliated advocacy organizations were parties.

An analysis of the society's donors published by The New York Times in late December identified at least $6.4 million in donations since 2003 coming from groups or individuals that argued cases before the court. (The Times had previously reported that one donor, the anti-abortion activist Rob Schenck, claimed to have used the society to infiltrate Justice Samuel Alito's inner circle and gain access to information about a pending decision.)

Insider's investigation into nearly three decades' worth of Supreme Court Historical Society records found that the extensive network of donors and trustees with vested interests before the court was rife with right-wing religious activists and corporations. In exchange for as little as a few thousand dollars in contributions to the nonprofit, these people received easy access to events where Supreme Court justices would be.
The Supreme Court has recently been criticized as biased and conflicted due to the donors who get access to the judges through SCHS social events. Chief Justice Roberts vehemently denies that any conflicts of interest exist. Right. And pigs with wings can fly too.

Chief Justice Roberts is either a corrupt liar or corrupt and stupid. Since he is very, very smart, we can eliminate corrupt stupid as a possibility. What does that leave? Hm. Corrupt liar? Yup, that’s what it leaves.


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Did Joe Biden screw the pooch?: The NYT writes:
President Biden’s lawyers discovered “a small number” of classified documents in his former office at a Washington think tank last fall, the White House said on Monday, prompting the Justice Department to scrutinize the situation to determine how to proceed.

The inquiry, according to two people familiar with the matter, is a type aimed at helping Attorney General Merrick B. Garland decide whether to appoint a special counsel, like the one investigating former President Donald J. Trump’s hoarding of sensitive documents and failure to return all of them.  
The documents found in Mr. Biden’s former office, which date to his time as vice president, were found by his personal lawyers on Nov. 2, when they were packing files at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, according to the White House. Officials did not describe precisely how many documents were involved, what kind of information they included or their level of classification.
One can just hear the howls of self-righteous faux moral outrage from the Republicans in the House. There will be an investigation or two. There probably will be an impeachment or two of Joe for one or more alleged treasons, crimes and/or horrors. One can only hope that Joe didn’t break any laws.  

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