News bits: A DJT X-mas msg; A Repub X-mas msg; The DJT msg redux; Etc.

He posted this blast of lies and hate speech on Christmas day: Trump’s Christmas Message: ‘ROT IN HELL’ 😮

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Other radical Republicans share the Christmas love in similar fashion: GOP Hopeful Blasted for Post Showing Tree Ornaments of Democrats in Nooses -- Derrick Evans—a former Republican state lawmaker in West Virginia convicted of participating in the January 6 siege on the U.S. Capitol—is facing backlash after posting a photo on Christmas Day featuring tree ornaments depicting Democratic leaders hanging from nooses. Evans has since deleted the post, which included figurines of leaders like President Joe Biden, Representative Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris hanging from the tree from a noose tied around their necks. Figures of former President Barack Obama, ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former presidential Chief Medical Advisor Anthony Fauci were also included in the photo.

Where does the GOP get all these haters, traitors, 

crooks, cranks, crackpots and creeps (and weirdos)?

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One source comments on the DJT X-mas day screed: Trump wishes electric car supporters 'rot in hell' in Truth Social Christmas message

Yeah! Go get those nasty electric car supporters, like Elon Musk -- rotten commies . . . . 

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From the Seriously Behind The Times Files: The Guardian just got woke: Will Trump provoke a crisis of legitimacy for the US supreme court? -- Trump shouldn’t be eligible to run again. But America’s highest court may disagree

Bwahahahahaha!! 

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From the Making Them Pull Themselves Up By Their Bootstraps Files: 'Deplorable': Iowa's GOP Governor Opts Out of Summer Food Program for Kids -- Iowa's Republican-led government sparked outrage late last week by declining to participate in a federal program that would have provided low-income residents with $40 a month in additional food assistance during the coming summer.

How it’s done

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From the That Darned Biden Files: Trump moans about Biden ruining Christmas with ‘madness and doom’ -- “It’s hard to have a truly great Christmas when you have a Crooked and Incompetent President who wants to put his Political Opponent in jail, and who has been working hard (for a change!), illegally using all of the levers of Law Enforcement, to do so,” he wrote on Truth Social. “We are in the fight of our lives to save our Country from MADNESS & DOOM. MAGA 2024!!!”

Well, he’s right you know. We really are in the fight of our lives to save our Country from MADNESS & DOOM. But there appears to be some confusion about the source of the MADNESS & DOOM.

News bits: DJT incites holy war; American democracy comments; Radical leftism?

A Christmas gift from DJT to the human species is an incitement to a holy war based on lies. Newsweek reports:

Donald Trump Warns Americans of Undercover Spies Being Sent by the FBI to persecute Christians.

On Thursday night, the former president posted a video to his Truth Social account with the caption “Stopping the Persecution of Christians!” His post says the FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) have adopted an anti-Christian bias and are sending agents to churches as part of that alleged “bigotry.”

“Under crooked Joe Biden, Christians and Americans of faith are being persecuted like nothing this nation has ever seen before,” Trump said in the video.

He went on: “Catholics, in particular, are being targeted and evangelicals are surely on the watch list as well. Over the past three years, the Biden administration has sent SWAT teams to arrest pro-life activists. The FBI has been caught profiling devout Catholics as possible domestic terrorists and planning to send undercover spies into Catholic churches, just like in the old days of the Soviet Union.”

And that nicely exemplifies the corrupt, lying, treasonous monster that tens of millions of Americans are proudly supporting. He even has the arrogant, hypocritical gall to call Biden a crook. If we lose our democracy, we deserve the oppression, corruption and brutal tyranny we are definitely going to get.

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The WaPo published a gerrymandering map and commentary about changes needed for American democracy. It is interesting.

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A favorite American radical right authoritarian propaganda tactic is lying coupled with double standards and hypocrisy. The radical dictator mob falsely accuses political opposition and the left generally of doing what the radicals are doing themselves. The Hill reports about a current example:

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) joined the growing chorus of GOP critics of Colorado’s ruling disqualifying former President Trump from the state’s primary ballot, arguing “radical leftism” has “infiltrated” every institution in the U.S.

Asked on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures” with Maria Bartiromo for his view on the Colorado ruling, Johnson said, “Well, radical leftism has infiltrated every institution in this country, our courts, our education system, government agencies. It’s a real problem.”

The Colorado Supreme Court handed down a bombshell ruling last week saying Trump engaged in an insurrection through his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack. 

Q: Is a court holding that DJT is disqualified from running for office because he engaged in an insurrection on 1/6 radical leftism, or is it within the realm of what a reasonably unbiased court could determine?

Christmas bonus: Ambiguity in American laws

A 2023 legal research paper entitled, The Meaning and Ambiguity of Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment, exemplifies rich sources of ambiguity that plague many or probably most American laws. In this case the law being analyzed is the Constitutional provision that bars people from running for office if they engaged in rebellion or insurrection:

Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment disqualified anyone from serving in the House or Senate, or as a presidential elector, if they had betrayed their oath of fealty to United States and joined the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Whether Section Three accomplishes anything more remains unclear as a matter of history and ambiguous as a matter of constitutional text. Section Three does not expressly (1) apply to future rebellions or insurrections, (2) apply to persons elected as President of the United States, (3) apply to persons seeking to qualify as a candidate for the Presidency, or (4) indicate whether the enforcement of Section Three requires the passage of enabling legislation.

Prior drafts of Section Three included versions that expressly named the office of the President of the United States, expressly banned presidential candidates from qualifying as a candidate, and expressly applied to both past and future rebellions. Congress omitted all of this language from the final version of Section Three. This final language led the best lawyer in the House to assume that the text did not include the office of the President. Although a single member disagreed, their exchange went unreported in the press, leaving open the possibility that less sophisticated members of the public might also read the text as excluding the office of the President. The exclusion would not have been "absurd" since the Electors Clause ensured that only properly constructed slates of electors could vote for the President.

Key framers and ratifiers also expressly insisted that Section Three would not be self-executing. As Thaddeus Stevens explained, Section Three “will not execute itself,” and at least some participants in the ratifying assemblies expressly agreed (no one claimed otherwise). As far as future rebellions were concerned, the historical record reveals both framers and ratifiers dividing over the text’s possible application to future insurrections. In sum, the historical record supports Lyman Trumbull’s explanation of the original understanding and scope of Section Three: The provision was “intended to put some sort of stigma, some sort of odium upon the leaders of this rebellion, and no other way is left to do it but by some provision of this kind.” Whether the public understood the ambiguous text as allowing for anything more remains historically unclear.

No work to date has presented a systematic investigation of the framing and ratification history of Section Three. As a result scholars (and judges) have been working in the historical dark, insufficiently informed about how the draft developed over months of debate, uninformed of the constitutional precedents against which the final draft would be understood, and without any understanding whatsoever of how ratifiers engaged the proposed text. 

For example, since some prior drafts of Section Three expressly limited the provision to the “late rebellion,” [the American Civil War] some scholars claim that the absence of such language in the final draft means Section Three applies to future rebellions. What has gone unrecognized, or undiscussed, is that there were multiple prior drafts of Section Three. Some of these drafts expressly declared that the provision would apply to future rebellions. The final draft, however omits any such reference, rendering the text ambiguous in regard to its application to future rebellions or insurrections.

In that ambiguity, one can see how DJT could avoid being barred from running for president in 2024. I believed that Sec. 3 was self-executing because its language, engaged in rebellion or insurrection, seemed to indicate that. My belief appears to have been wrong if this analysis is right.

Some legal scholars have toyed with the idea that the rule of law itself in essentially contested concept. A 2021 legal research paper, Judicial authority, legitimacy and the (international) rule of law as essentially contested and interpretive concepts: Introduction to the special issue, comments:

Beyond setting the stage, the Introduction makes three claims about the conceptual triangle of the rule of law, judicial authority and legitimacy. The first is that all three are essentially contested and interpretive concepts in the sense of Walter B. Gallie and Ronald Dworkin. In their expositions, the contested and interpretative nature of such concepts is nothing to be ‘solved’, rather the formulation of different conceptions and contestation about them are central functions of such concepts. The interpretive and essentially contested nature points us to the relevant ‘actors’ and to conflicts and trade-offs between contested competencies. Thus the second point is that arguments about the rule of law and judicial legitimacy are often a means of questioning or securing the authority of a particular actor or institution in relation to other actors and institutions. The final point is that transposing concepts from the domestic to the supranational is a constructive endeavor because it entails creating new conceptions and substituting old ones as well as legitimizing new authorities and delegitimizing old ones. Thus, this special issue also cautions against discourses that ultimately are more about legitimation than about legitimacy and more about new ways of ruling than the rule of law.

One can see in American law sufficient ambiguity and an judicial interpretative freedom to convert the US from democracy grounded in the rule of law to an authoritarian state calling itself a democracy operating under the rule of some form of authoritarianism or rule of the dictator and/or powerful elites (autocrat, plutocrats, Christian theocrats, kleptocrats).

Ambiguity in American law is why I see and call out the immorality and evil of mendacious authoritarians speaking and acting in bad faith to get the wealth and power they desperately want. The Constitution and rule of law gets in their way so they have to go, to be replaced by the rule and whims of the powerful.

🎄

Christmas bits: COVID vaccine data; Commentary about the USSC protecting DJT; Etc.

Merry Christmas!

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From the We Already Knew That Files: A cohort study of more than 1.5 million hospital admissions in Canada through the first 2 years of the COVID-19 pandemic has quantified the benefit of vaccinations. Unvaccinated patients were found to be up to 15 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than fully vaccinated patients. A person vaccinated with two or more doses was 12 times less likely for ICU admission and 15 times less likely to die. The authors did not consider socioeconomic status because just age and vaccination status were analyzed.

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Various sources are commenting on the unexplained USSC decision to not hear the issue of whether DJT is immune from crimes committed in office. Most normal people who believe in democracy and the rule of law would find it silly for this to even be an issue. But now America is no longer controlled mostly by normal people. Instead, corrupt, radical authoritarians wield significant power, especially the radicalized and corrupted USSC. The authoritarians are using their power to openly attack and destroy democracy and the pesky rule of law.

A NYT opinion comments (not paywalled off): The Supreme Court Helped Trump’s Delay Strategy. By How Much Remains to Be Seen. The former president’s claim that he is immune from prosecution will now be taken up by a federal appeals court — and could end up back in front of the justices within weeks. The Supreme Court’s decision on Friday not to fast-track consideration of former President Donald J. Trump’s claim that he is immune to prosecution on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election was unquestionably a victory for Mr. Trump and his lawyers. The choice by the justices not to take up the issue now — rendered without explanation — gave a boost to the former president’s legal strategy of delaying the proceedings as much as possible in the hopes of running out the clock before Election Day. 

Another NYT opinion: 

The Supreme Court’s Big Trump Test Is Here 

America is experiencing a creeping sense of déjà vu. Twenty-three years ago, a bare majority of the justices halted a recount in Florida, effectively handing the presidency to George W. Bush. The specter of Bush v. Gore, the case that stands as a marker of how not to resolve searing political disputes. On Friday, the court turned down Special Counsel Jack Smith’s request for fast-track review of Donald Trump’s claim that former presidents have “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for their conduct while in office. But that critical question will almost certainly return to the Supreme Court soon: The D.C. federal appeals court is hearing the case on Jan. 9 and will probably rule shortly thereafter. 

The point is not that getting the underlying legal questions “right” is irrelevant. But when the stakes are this high and the legal questions are novel, the justices have a duty to hand down decisions that resonate across the political spectrum — or at least that avoid inciting violence in the streets. That’s not subverting the rule of law; it’s preserving it.  

A universe in which the court somehow splits the difference — for example, keeping Mr. Trump on the ballot while refusing to endorse (if not affirmatively repudiating) his conduct and spurning his kinglike claim to total immunity — could go a long way toward reducing the temperature of the coming election cycle. Such an outcome could also help restore at least some of the court’s credibility.

As usual for clueless MSM opinionators, the two yahoos who wrote the latter opinion (Steven V. Mazie and Stephen I. Vladeck) refer to the six Republicans on the bench as “conservative.” Sigh. 

These people still cannot see anti-democratic authoritarianism, even when it’s repeatedly hitting them up side the head with a 2x4. Anti-democratic authoritarianism is not pro-democracy conservative, it is anti-democracy authoritarian. As Mark Zuckerberg would comment, dumb fucks. 

The MSM might learn, but

probably not until it’s too late

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The WaPo comments that the Ukrainian military is running out of munitions:

Ukrainian forces are suffering from a shortage of artillery shells on the front line, prompting some units to cancel planned assaults, soldiers said this week, and stoking fears over how long Kyiv’s troops will be able to hold their ground against continuing Russian attacks.

“The guys are tired — very tired,” a member of the 128th Mountain Assault Brigade said. “They are still motivated — many people understand that they have no other choice.”

“But you can’t win a war only on motivation,” he continued. “You should have some kind of a numerical advantage, and with the weapons and weapons systems, it only gets worse and worse. How long can we last? It’s hard to say, but it can’t be long. Everyone understands this.” 

We can thank America's authoritarian, radical right Republican Party for the imminent collapse of the Ukrainian military. Once again, American moral cowardice and untrustworthiness is out in the open for everyone to see and enjoy. Lest we forget, the US promised in 1994 to defend Ukraine's territorial integrity in return for it turning over Russian nuclear weapons. We broke that promise.

Regarding that 1994 promise:

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Ukraine had the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal on its territory. When Ukrainian-Russian negotiations on removing these weapons from Ukraine appeared to break down in September 1993, the U.S. government engaged in a trilateral process with Ukraine and Russia. The result was the Trilateral Statement, signed in January 1994, under which Ukraine agreed to transfer the nuclear warheads to Russia for elimination. In return, Ukraine received security assurances from the United States, Russia and Britain; compensation for the economic value of the highly-enriched uranium in the warheads (which could be blended down and converted into fuel for nuclear reactors); and assistance from the United States in dismantling the missiles, missile silos, bombers and nuclear infrastructure on its territory.

American assurances aren’t worth spit.