US Politics: Biden Hood - Prince of Plebs

[Ran]

10 minutes ago, HoodedCrow said:

How is running a ridiculous recount not an attempt to steal an election well after the fact?

It cannot and will not "steal the election", because the result was certified and Biden was sworn in.

It is part of the political theatre that seems to be leading the conclusion that the modern GOP is laying ground work for denying certification the next time a Democrat wins the election, however, so still very bad. Worse, even.

 

 

[argonak]

3 hours ago, Martell Spy said:

Val Demings to run for Senate against Rubio
The Orlando Democrat was on Joe Biden’s shortlist as a possible running mate in 2020.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/18/demings-running-for-senate-rubio-489137

 

 

That'll be an interesting race to watch.  Rubio has always seemed like an empty suit to me (compared to Ted Cruz, who is a sleazy coward of a slimeball who only pretends to be empty headed), but Florida is still leaning red, and they'll have plenty anti-voting shenanigans to play against the democrats this time.  But maybe she'll give him a run for his money.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

15 minutes ago, argonak said:

That'll be an interesting race to watch.  Rubio has always seemed like an empty suit to me (compared to Ted Cruz, who is a sleazy coward of a slimeball who only pretends to be empty headed), but Florida is still leaning red, and they'll have plenty anti-voting shenanigans to play against the democrats this time.  But maybe she'll give him a run for his money.

Rubio is absolutely an empty suit with no substance. I remember having to write a paper on him in college before he was elected to the Senate. AT the time many thought he was going to be a star of the Tea Party movement. I argued based on his history that he was a fraud who would return to his mainstream Republican roots once in office. Seems like that was pretty accurate.

I don't root for people to publicly humiliate themselves, but it was pretty funny watching the Rubiot9000 leak oil all over the debate stage in 2016.

[Fez]

In lighter news, turns out there's a bit of truth to the Diamond Joe stuff...

ETA: 

 

[DMC]

4 hours ago, Martell Spy said:

Val Demings to run for Senate against Rubio

I like how she ran for Senate and Nikki Fried is running for governor.  Both will probably lose, but splitting it up that way give the Dems the best chance to win.

[Zorral]

Quote

"This sucker's quick," he told reporters.

I'd entirely forgotten (on purpose as quickly as possible) the tRump in  Truck photo op.

This is as different as one get, except for that campaign video New Mexico candidate, ex CIA, due to doxxing her identity, Valerie Plame. She still lost the primary though, to Attorney Teresa Leger Fernandez. But damn that was a good video, since we knew Plame really was trained to do that.

[Zorral]

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/capitol-rioters-trump-defense-comes-up-again-and-again-will-it-make-a-difference

"A few weeks after his arrest for allegedly storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, the man known as the “QAnon Shaman,” Jacob Chansley, floated an idea that dozens of others have tried — that Trump himself deserved some of the blame for his actions. "

Quote

 

Chansley’s attorney wrote that his client had been consistent “in his assertion that but for the actions and the words of the President, he would not have appeared in Washington, DC to support the President and, but for the specific words of the then-President during his January 6, 2021 speech, the Defendant would not have walked down Pennsylvania Avenue and would not have gone into the U.S. Capitol Building.” 

That argument did not work. 

In a memo explaining his order to keep Chansley detained pending trial, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth said it wasn’t necessary to question Chansley’s sincerity. 

“Even taking defendant’s claim at face value, it does not persuade the Court that defendant would not pose a danger to others if released,” Lamberth wrote. “If defendant truly believes that the only reason he participated in an assault on the U.S. Capitol was to comply with President Trump’s orders, this shows defendant’s inability (or refusal) to exercise his independent judgment and conform his behavior to the law.” 

Nonetheless, the so-called “Trump defense” continues to resurface as alleged participants in the Capitol riot wend their way through the legal system. 

And even though the tactic may not get the defendants entirely off the hook, lawyers with whom TPM spoke, including defense attorneys for the accused, say there’s an upside to roping Trump into the case — including, potentially, a lighter sentence. 

“Legally, these are unprecedented cases,” Chansley’s attorney, Albert Watkins, told TPM last week. “And as a result, while the judge may not be compelled to emotionally embrace, as a matter of opinion, the effect or the impact of the words and actions of the former President as being a cause, there is going to necessarily be a legal compulsion to address that reality as part of an evaluation of culpability.” 

‘The Law Doesn’t Recognize It’ 
Blaming Trump for directing a defendant to take criminal actions on Jan. 6 — the “public authority” defense, in which the defendant points out that an authority figure told them to commit a crime —  is a legal long shot. 

“It doesn’t matter if they were answering his call in terms of their own guilt or innocence,” said Harry Litman, a former U.S. attorney and deputy assistant attorney general, referring to Trump. “The law doesn’t recognize it as an excuse. Whatever brought them there, whatever they were spurred on to do, social media postings or whatever, they’re equally guilty under the federal statutes.” 

 

 

[IheartIheartTesla]

South Carolina will now allow (rather, force) death row inmates a choice between being executed by electric chair or by ....wait for it.....a firing squad. This is because there is a shortage of lethal injections.

Thank you to SC for being exactly what I expect it to be.

[Wilbur]

In today's news from the Arizona Re-Re-Re-count, The Mighty Karen's press conference delivered only a single piece of news.  And it wasn't from Senate President Karen Fann, who basically said nothing new or interesting.

Instead, one of the Cyber Ninja subcontractors admitted that the earlier claim - that the Maricopa County Supervisors had deleted files from the subpoenaed hard drives - was, in fact, false.

Rather, the auditors didn't understand how a multi-layered storage structure worked, so they failed to look for the files in the correct directory, and when they didn't find them at first glance, they announced that Maricopa County had deleted them.

State Senate Republicans then made false claims about deleted directories, based on the incompetent work of the Cyber Ninja Crew.

So it is just business as usual, with false claims built on incompetence, in the Cyber Ninja Show at the Maricopa County Fairgrounds.  My tax dollars at work.

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/legislature/2021/05/18/arizona-audit-senate-meeting-maricopa-county-recount-tuesday/5139031001/

[Zorral]

There is a precedent to some degree in pardoning those who seem to demonstrate impaired faculties of judgment, as with the Whiskey Rebellion in the first years of Washington's administration.

https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/whiskey-rebellion-trials/

Quote

....Two of these ten men, John Mitchell and Philip Vigol (or Weigle), were convicted due in large part to William Rawle’s expanded definition of treason that combining to defeat or resist a federal law was the equivalent of levying war against the United States and therefore an act of treason. This set a precedent for treason that was used five years later in the aftermath of Fries’s Rebellion in Bucks County. Mitchell and Vigol were the first two Americans convicted of federal treason in American history. On November 2, 1795, Washington pardoned both Mitchell and Vigol after finding one to be a “simpleton” and the other to be “insane.” While these pardons unofficially ended the saga of the Whiskey Rebellion, the government’s use of military force to repress this “rebellion” and questions concerning the legitimacy of these “treasonous” acts remain controversial and are still debated among historians.

 

[Zorral]

14 minutes ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

death row inmates a choice between being executed by electric chair or by ....wait for it.....a firing squad.

Have we ever done firing squad executions in this country, outside the military, in the earlier decades?

[A Horse Named Stranger]

33 minutes ago, Zorral said:

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/capitol-rioters-trump-defense-comes-up-again-and-again-will-it-make-a-difference

"A few weeks after his arrest for allegedly storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, the man known as the “QAnon Shaman,” Jacob Chansley, floated an idea that dozens of others have tried — that Trump himself deserved some of the blame for his actions. "

 

Long story short your legal system is not going to recognize the Nürnberg/Nuremberg defense as legit.

[Wilbur]

7 minutes ago, Zorral said:

"There is a precedent to some degree in pardoning those who seem to demonstrate impaired faculties of judgment, as with the Whiskey Rebellion of the pre-Constitution and nation days."

https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/whiskey-rebellion-trials/

...after finding one to be a “simpleton” and the other to be “insane.”

Let that be a precedent, I want to enjoy seeing that announcement on Facebook about the current crew.

[Maithanet]

14 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Have we ever done firing squad executions in this country, outside the military, in the earlier decades?

Yes, many states allowed firing squads back in the day.  Firing squads are still technically legal as an option (I believe the condemned has the choice) in MS, UT, OK and now SC.  According to wikipedia, only Utah has actually carried out an execution by firing squad for a civilian offense in the past 50 years. 

[S John]

Personally, if I was going to be dead at the end of the day either way I think I’d rather be executed by firing squad than risk a botched injection.

Bad optics for sure, but if you’re going to kill people at least get it right.

 

[Zorral]

1 minute ago, S John said:

Personally, if I was going to be dead at the end of the day either way I think I’d rather be executed by firing squad than risk a botched injection.

Bad optics for sure, but if you’re going to kill people at least get it right.

 

Wasn't it that Norman Mailer's criminal protagonist, Gary Gilmore, whose story Mailer wrote in The Executioner's Song, who was the one-and-only-and-in-Utah? requesting firing squad?

I think I would too, particularly if blindfolded.  But then one has to hope the shooters are better are shooting than doing injections.  In this country, despite the avalanches of guns. people aren't particularly skilled at using them by-and-large.  That's why autos, I guess?

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

17 minutes ago, S John said:

Personally, if I was going to be dead at the end of the day either way I think I’d rather be executed by firing squad than risk a botched injection.

Bad optics for sure, but if you’re going to kill people at least get it right.

 

Can I at least please be executed by trying to prove I am the one human who can defeat an elephant unarmed?

And to close out this thread, this is Murika:
 

 

[Fragile Bird]

I think one of the reasons why there’s an issue with chemical executions is because some drug manufacturers don’t want to be associated with lethal injections. The fact that too many people have turned out to be innocent a few years after their deaths has definitely been a factor, enough to give drugs a bad name.

[IheartIheartTesla]

Firing squads arent particularly humane either, you have to hit the heart and the people firing often miss. The argument for a lethal injection is it at least mimics a medical procedure, while the firing squad essentially....looks violent.

At any rate, I would be remiss in not pointing out that Edison was one of the key movers towards getting the electric chair accepted as one of the forms of execution in NY state, to show the perils of AC (developed by ...the guy in my profile pic). That too is not particularly humane (the first execution was gloriously botched leaving the prisoner in agony before it eventually worked). They should just do away with the whole thing

[JGP]

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

Can I at least please be executed by trying to prove I am the one human who can defeat an elephant unarmed?

And to close out this thread, this is Murika:
 

 

 

But to really close out this thread [crosses fingers] this is America too: