Bail Bail And Bail Some More

This is politics - if you want a friend, buy a dog.

Grab 'em by the pussy - stay with Trump

Mock a disabled reporter - stay with Trump

Very fine people on both sides - stay with Trump

Blood coming out of her ... whatever - stay with Trump

Get shitty with a reporter - stay with Trump

Get shitty with a reporter - stay with Trump

Get shitty with a reporter - stay with Trump

and

and

and - stay with Trump

He was rude to me - I'm out.

Candace Owens said Trump's rudeness made her realize he's vengeful, paranoid, lacks humility

• Candace Owens said on her Daily Wire show that Donald Trump was rude to her.
• The conservative firebrand said the experience made her "question him as a person."
• Owens said that Trump is "holding onto a vengeful spirit" and appears to lack a vision for 2024.

Candace Owens, speaking on her Daily Wire show after the midterms, said that former President Donald Trump being rude to her made her question for the "first time" what kind of person he is.

Owens, who once referred to Trump as "the savior" of the free world, described how the former president "actually got upset" with her following an interview with him in which he defended COVID-19 vaccines.

After the interview in December 2021, Owens defended him in an Instagram video, saying that people often forget "how old Trump is" and that he comes from a generation who "came from a time before TV, before the internet, before being able to conduct independent research."

The Daily Beast covered it, headlining the story: "Candace Owens: Trump Is Pro-Vax Because He's 'Too Old' to Understand the Internet."

In her monologue on her Daily Wire show this week, Owen's said she was sharing the "personal story" because "it's something that made me for the first time question him as a person."

The conservative firebrand went on to say that Trump twisted a "completely kind and fair interview."

"That is not being a leader, that is not owning things that you did wrong, that is not owning that you misunderstood something about your base," she said. "That's not growing, that's not developing."

Owens said that was the moment she realized he was "not listening" and made her question if he was becoming "too angry."

Owens said that in previous elections, Trump was "having fun," and "the energy, it was electric." However, she said after the 2020 election, he is in "an angry space" and has become paranoid.

She repeated that "he was so rude to me."

Owens said that there are conversations going on behind Trump's back that deserve to go public. She suggested he is "holding onto a vengeful spirit" and questioned if he has a vision for 2024. "It needs to be more than, 'I'm back,'" she said.

Trump is expected to announce a 2024 presidential bid imminently, but The Guardian reported that some advisors and allies are urging him to delay it.

Owens said there's a sense of "trepidation" in Trump, which, she added, was evidenced in him taking a swing at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis this week. In a flurry of posts on Truth Social on Thursday, Trump called DeSantis an "average Republican governor" and referred to him as "Ron DeSanctimonious."

Trump endorsed more than 330 GOP candidates running for both state and federal offices in this election cycle, but several high-profile candidates lost or badly underperformed in the midterm elections.

Owens said Trump needs to exercise "a little more humility" when he gets something wrong, adding that the midterm results, which saw Democrats maintain control of the Senate, show that Trump and his base are "not sure."

Aside from the usual "conservative" hallmark that they don't care about anything bad that happens, until it happens to them, I think this makes it obvious that she's looking for her next host so as to continue her career as a Political Leech.

Which makes her no different from an awful lot of others. It's just that this seems so blatantly mercenary. She never "believed". She was never committed. She was "all in" only until it went sour. And more accurately, until she recognized her own exposure to risk because people really are getting hip to how bad it is, and how bad it's always been, and what a fucking phony she is.

These parasites seem to take all the shitty things a guy like Trump does and just put them in their pocket, waiting for the right time to bring something out so they have some kind of cover when they bail.

"He was rude to me."

WTF, Candace?

Listen Up

From @DanteAtkins

"Lol we don't need Warnock" is what people say who haven't worked in Congress and don't know how it works. Here are the differences that a 51st Senator can make, just off the top of my head:

• A 51st Dem means no power-sharing in the organizing resolution. Dems have a majority on committees. no more deadlocks, no more discharge petitions for floor votes. That massively accelerates both the legislative process and the confirmation process.
• The individual power of the two chaos muppets (Manchin and Sinema) is drastically reduced. Both of them will now need to be opposed to whatever Dems are trying to do in order to block progress.
• The Senate is a gerontocracy. These guys are not healthy a lot of the time, or not present a lot of the time. We could have a death in a state with a Republican governor. A lot of things could happen. 51-49 versus 50-50 means you can have up to 2 absences/noes.
• A 51-49 majority means that VP Harris won't be required to be in DC to babysit the Senate all of the time, and can actually be a much more effective VP who can be deployed for both policy and campaigning.

So the upshot is, work for Warnock just as hard as you would if you thought Schumer's gavel depended on it. Because as far as you know, at some point in the next two years, it just might.

This Just In

Only about 10% of the Election Denier crowd lost last week. Now, you could say that doesn't sound like a lot, and you'd be right, but on the one hand, most of the idiots who lost were Trump-Anointed Idiots.

On the other hand - yes, Trump is probably heading for the Hall Of Hidden Republicans, as the GOP once again builds their lifeboats and cranks up the Rebranding Transmogrifier.

And of course the Press Poodles are crowing about how Trump's MAGA shit is dead now, so everybody can stop yelling and get things back to normal.

But wait a sec - not so fuckin' fast there, Skeezix.

Trump lost - and lost pretty big - but 85-90% percent of the assholes who say the 2020 election was stolen won their seats.

So how the fuck does that mean "Yay - it's over - we can all relax now"?

These guys play the long game, so they'll take what they can get, consolidate their position as best they can - which is usually pretty gosh-darned good - and continue the Plutocracy Project as planned.

We came close to losing it all. And we are not outa the woods yet - not by a long shot.

Here are the stories (pay wall):

Defeats signal that Americans are weary of Trump’s unfounded claims

Election administrators and voting rights advocates said the rebuke of election deniers seeking state-level office was a refreshing course correction by voters.

The party of Trump pays for being the party of Trump

Election Day has come and gone, and the counting continues without a definitive answer to the question of what the balance of power will look like in the coming two years.

Republican rivals start plotting a post-Trump future

The GOP’s disappointing midterm results spur some donors and party leaders to consider other 2024 candidates

Meanwhile down at Mar-A-Lago, new surveillance video has leaked:

Another Semi-Bright Spot

Today, in ElmoLand, I spied a new feature called "Community Notes".

Seems like a really good idea - trying to get a handle on some of the more egregious bullshit that bad actors are constantly dumping into the information streams.

But I'm not convinced the Twitter staffers will be able to keep up with it because the ones Elmo hasn't fired yet are quitting at a pretty high rate. And if this Community thing is going to work, you kinda need a community - ie: human type people - and not leave it up to automation.

The untended/unmoderated algorithm is what turned sites like Twitter into sewers, and the intervention of actual warm bodies with thinking brains has brought them back to a more tolerable level of vitriol and darkness.

Anyway, I signed up. They say they'll let me know if I get to play. I'm not holding out any great hope, of course. I haven't been sent to TwitMo in a while, but I can be pretty snarky, and I get intercepted regularly by the Tsk-Tsk Bot that tells me maybe I should rethink what I've said in a reply tweet before I send it.

Like the zen master says:

We'll see

Some Good News

Before elections, chop wood and carry water.

After elections, chop wood and carry water.

It's getting clearer that American democracy will live to fight another day.

But we're still in the process of dodging a bullet, and whings are looking much better than they looked a week ago, nobody should be getting happy, fat and sassy.

Here's a good news item from NYT:

(pay wall)

Voters Reject Election Deniers Running to Take Over Elections

With Jim Marchant’s defeat by Cisco Aguilar in Nevada’s secretary of state race, all but one of the “America First” slate of candidates who espoused conspiracy theories about the 2020 election were defeated.

Every election denier who sought to become the top election official in a critical battleground state lost at the polls this year, as voters roundly rejected extreme partisans who promised to restrict voting and overhaul the electoral process.

The national repudiation of this coalition reached its apex on Saturday, when Cisco Aguilar, the Democratic candidate for secretary of state in Nevada, defeated Jim Marchant, according to The Associated Press. Mr. Marchant, the Republican nominee, had helped organize a national right-wing slate of candidates under the name “America First.”

With Mr. Marchant’s loss to Mr. Aguilar, all but one of those “America First” candidates were defeated. Only Diego Morales, a Republican in deep-red Indiana, was successful, while candidates in Michigan, Arizona and New Mexico were defeated.

Their losses halted a plan by some allies of former President Donald J. Trump and other influential donors to take over the election apparatus in critical states before the 2024 presidential election. The “America First” candidates, and their explicitly partisan statements, had alarmed Democrats, independent election experts and even some Republicans, who feared that if they gained office, they could threaten the integrity of future elections.

Mr. Marchant not only repeatedly claimed that Mr. Trump had won the 2020 election, but he pledged that if he were elected, Mr. Trump would again be president in 2024.

“When my coalition of secretary of state candidates around the country get elected, we’re going to fix the whole country, and President Trump is going to be president again in 2024,” Mr. Marchant said at a rally held by the former president in October.

During the 2020 election, it was secretaries of state — both Democrats and Republicans — who stood up to efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to overturn the results. State election officials certified vote tallies over Republican objections, protected election workers from aggressive partisan poll watchers and, in at least one case, refused a personal entreaty from the president.

The next spring, several candidates pushing the false narrative that the 2020 election had been stolen announced their intention to run to be the top election officials in critical states.

Mr. Marchant said in an interview with The New York Times in January that he had been approached by Mr. Trump’s allies to run for secretary of state and had been encouraged to organize a national slate of like-minded candidates.

He quickly cobbled together the “America First” slate, including candidates from states like Michigan, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico. They began touring nationally, holding forums promoting election conspiracy theories, occasionally with leading members of the QAnon movement.

Suddenly, secretary of state races became premier attractions, elevating once sleepy, bureaucratic down-ballot races to the national spotlight. Donations, especially from alarmed Democrats, quickly flooded the races. Nearly $50 million was spent on television advertising in four states — Michigan, Arizona, Nevada and Minnesota — and Democrats had a 10 to 1 spending advantage.

The Democratic Association of Secretaries of State — which in 2019 had just one part-time staff member — had to be built on the fly. Jena Griswold, the secretary of state in Colorado and the chair of the association, hired seven full-time staff members and raised $25 million for the cycle.

“We really believe, and continue to believe, that these races have a tremendous effect on whether this country will continue to have a vibrant democracy,” Ms. Griswold said. “Or be able to have one at all.”

Polling races for secretary of state proved difficult, but concern began to grow among some Democrats as polls suggested that voters did not have democracy at the top of their list of concerns heading into the election.

But candidates like Mr. Aguilar said they heard about democracy issues daily from voters.

“People are tired of chaos,” Mr. Aguilar said in an interview. “They want stability; they want normalcy; they want somebody who’s going to be an adult and make decisions that are fair, transparent, and in the best interest of all Nevadans.”

Mr. Aguilar, a local businessman with deep ties to the Las Vegas business and gaming communities, announced his candidacy well before the primaries. He said that threats to fair elections weighed on him every day on the campaign trail.

“Look, it was scary,” Mr. Aguilar said. “And the burden that I carried throughout the campaign knowing that was pretty extensive.”

Some of the biggest Republican committees and candidates, however, avoided the slate of “America First” candidates. In Nevada, the Republican candidates for governor and Senate never held a rally with Mr. Marchant, and they never mentioned his name in the final few months.

The Republican State Leadership Committee, which is the arm of the Republican National Committee that oversees races for secretary of state, chose only to back Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state in Georgia who famously rebuffed Mr. Trump’s request to “find” him enough votes to overturn the state’s results in 2020.

“Secretary Raffensperger is a principled conservative dedicated to making it easier to vote and harder to cheat, and we congratulate him on his re-election,” Dee Duncan, the president of the R.S.L.C., said in a statement.

Mr. Duncan has not mentioned any of the “America First” candidates in his statements or news releases since the polls closed on Tuesday.

Today In ElmoLand

 Elon Musk is a legacy puke who thinks his bank account proves he's good at everything.

He's not.

Twitter blue check unavailable after impostor accounts erupt on platform

Before Elon Musk took over, the badge was granted to celebrities and journalists verified by the platform to prevent impersonation

Twitter’s relaunched premium service – which grants blue check verification labels to anyone willing to pay $8 a month – was unavailable on Friday after the social media platform was flooded by a wave of impostor accounts approved by Twitter.

The latest move caps a chaotic start for the new subscription service, one of the first major changes made by Elon Musk after taking over the company two weeks ago.

Before his $44bn purchase of the company, “blue check” was granted to celebrities and journalists verified by the platform – precisely to prevent impersonation. Now, anyone can get one as long as they have a phone, a credit card and $8 a month.

But the new service swiftly fell victim to impostors – with users parodying everyone from Pope Francis to George W Bush. The pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Co was forced to apologize after an impostor account tweeted that insulin was free. Nintendo, Lockheed Martin, Musk’s own Tesla and SpaceX were also impersonated as well as the accounts of various professional sports figures.

For advertisers who have put their business in Twitter on hold, the fake accounts could be the last straw as Musk’s rocky run atop the platform – laying off half the workforce and triggering high-profile departures – raises questions about its survivability.

There are now two categories of “blue checks” and they look identical. One includes the accounts verified before Musk took the helm, and notes that “This account is verified because it’s notable in government, news, entertainment, or another designated category” – a message that can be seen by clicking on the checkmark itself. The other notes that the account subscribes to Twitter Blue.

An email sent to Twitter’s press address went unanswered. The company’s communications department was gutted in the layoffs.

On Thursday, Musk tweeted that “too many corrupt legacy Blue ‘verification’ checkmarks exist, so no choice but to remove legacy Blue in coming months.”

Twitter Blue was not available on the platform’s online version, which said signup was only possible on the iPhone version. But the iPhone version did not offer Twitter Blue as an option.

Twitter also once again began adding gray “official” labels to some prominent accounts. It had rolled out the labels earlier this week, only to kill them a few hours later.

They returned on Thursday night, at least for some accounts – including Twitter’s own, as well as big companies like Amazon, Nike and Coca-Cola, before many vanished again.

Celebrities also did not appear to be getting the “official” label.

C'mon Ladies

 By Karen Attiah - WaPo (pay wall)

Opinion - White Southern women are holding us back

Pour one out for us in Texas. We’re really hurting this week. So this newsletter is a little on the short side. …

The state voted overwhelmingly Republican during Tuesday’s midterm elections, even more so than in 2020. Incumbent GOP Gov. Greg Abbott soundly defeated his Democratic challenger, former congressman Beto O’Rourke. Republicans also retained all of the major statewide positions, including Attorney General Ken Paxton — who has long been under legal indictment. Sigh.

Before I begin, I know what many of you think. That Texas should be given back to Mexico. Or at the very least that none of y’all would miss us if we seceded. Yeah, I read your comments on my pieces!

It’s true that Texas’s statewide outcomes seem even more hopeless for Democrats here, considering that a “red wave” slaughter of Democrats did not materialize nationally, as many pundits predicted. But to be honest, it’s hard to feel happy about a smaller-than-predicted national tide, when Texas’s red ocean levels only seem to be rising.

The question a lot of non-Texans are asking is: “Why?” Why would the state reelect the same leadership after our deadly power-grid failure, after the Uvalde school shooting, after the criminalization of reproductive rights?

I don’t have all the answers. Voter suppression is a factor, and there’s the sheer size of the Republicans’ war chest. Voter polarization is a powerful force. It’s tough to overcome all of that.

White men vote Republican; we all know that. But there is another group that consistently supports the GOP’s anti-woman, do-nothing-about-dead-kids stance, and that is White women. Seriously, what gives?

White women (64 percent) voted for Abbott in about the same numbers that White men did (69 percent).

Black women, on the other hand, went 90 percent for O’Rourke. We held it down. As usual.

A similar story played out in Georgia’s gubernatorial race, in which White women overwhelmingly voted for Republican incumbent Brian Kemp and Black women voted for his challenger, Democrat Stacey Abrams:

And, of course, we all remember that a majority of White women voted for President Donald Trump in 2020.

There is a lot of focus in media circles on how Latinos will vote. There has long been an assumption that an increase in the number of non-White voters could dislodge the GOP’s stranglehold on my home state. But the reality is, Southern White women are the lady foot soldiers of the GOP’s agenda. We will not get free until that changes.

There is, of course, a long history of White women serving the conservative agenda of the Southern patriarchy. I mean, the United Daughters of the Confederacy and their funding are a large part of why many Confederate monuments still stand in the United States.

If there was ever a time for White women to mobilize at the ballot box, it should have been the year that Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned abortion rights. I’ve seen and reported on Black women who are fighting for all women’s rights, children’s rights and better education. And yet those favors and efforts are not returned to us. And the polls consistently show that.

White women’s political behavior, especially in the South, makes it difficult, if not damn near impossible for meaningful change to occur. The racists, misogynists and anti-LGBTQ forces in the GOP have been banking on this for a long time — and they are clearly still reaping the rewards.

Justice Matters

Don't forget:

Trump brags about sending the FBI to Florida to make sure DeSantis got elected - along with US Marshals and Meal Team 6 and Mary-fucking-Poppins - or whatever the hell he's on about.

And maybe he did, but I'm betting he didn't. I'm betting it's just more bluff-n-bluster, but also too, he doesn't say that kinda shit without motive.

It's a variation on "I could shoot someone on 5th Avenue". It's a little shocking for normal people, but the effect is to feed the revenge fantasies of the rubes.

It lets them think the unthinkable. For the most part, on the outside, they're going to say it's just metaphorical - "he's just illustrating how great it is that he has our full support".

But ...

Daddy State Awareness Guide, rule 2a:

What sounds like boasting ("I could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose any votes") may be intended to soft-peddle some horrific thing they've done, or intend to do, which makes the "boast" instructive as to what the devotees will be expected to embrace.

So then it becomes a promise to use the power of the presidency to do the usual shitty things that autocrats do - particularly: "punish our opposition".

 Glenn Kirschner - Justice Matters

Trump may be diving for cover by "owning" his actions - walking around saying "Yeah, I did that - what do you think you can do about it?"

• He may be lying
• He may be telling the truth
• He may be throwing this out in front of us in order to cover for some other shitty thing he's done

It doesn't matter. Not to him. He has to disrupt in order to call attention to himself, so the Press Poodles will put him on camera, so he can rouse the rabble to come to his defense.

Without direct media exposure, he withers and dies.

For we the people - we're starving for accountability.

About Those Rights

And then Georgie ran home to his safe space, where he can more comfortably mock people's right to be treated fairly, and to get a commitment to it - in writing.

 By George F. Will - WaPo

(pay wall)

Opinion
50 years later, the bell-bottomed zombie Equal Rights Amendment staggers on

In 1972, a year of disco, hip-hugging bell-bottoms, 36-cents-a-gallon gas and Joe Biden’s first Senate election, Congress sent the Equal Rights Amendment to the states for ratification. This required the assent of three-quarters of them (38) within seven years. A ratification deadline, which has been an organic part of every amendment submitted to the states for a century, is intended to ensure what the Supreme Court calls a “sufficiently contemporaneous” consensus for constitutional change.

Although the ERA (“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged … on account of sex”) has long been dead as a doornail, it is a useful cadaver. Progressives toiling to resurrect it are expending energy they might otherwise devote to achievable mischief. And they are reminding the nation how aggressively they will traduce constitutional, rule-of-law and democratic norms to achieve their goals, however frivolous.

The ERA rocketed toward ratification: Seven states approved it the first week, 19 within three months, mostly without hearings because it was rightly regarded as a constitutional nullity, a “consciousness-raising” gesture: What would it add to the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws” for all “persons”? But by 1975, the momentum to clutter the Constitution with pointless verbiage stalled. So, the amendment’s supporters began their now 47-year, ever-more-sophistical campaign to rig the ratification process.

Although decades later they would assert — without evidence, of which there is none from the Constitution’s text or history — that ratification deadlines are unconstitutional, they got Congress to extend the deadline. Congress, whose members are sworn to “support and defend” the Constitution, extended it 39 months — by a simple majority vote. This, even though the deadline was a component of the amendment, which had to pass both houses of Congress with two-thirds majorities. And even though 30 of the 35 states that had ratified it by January 1977 had referred to the seven-year deadline in their ratification resolutions.

Congress, supinely pandering, extended the deadline — but only for states that had not already ratified it. This was to block additional recissions: Four states, having had second (or perhaps first) thoughts, had canceled their ratifications. The 39-month extension expired in 1982, 123 months after the ERA left Congress, having gone longer (65 months) without an additional state’s ratification than it took to get the original 35 (which by then had shrunk to 30).

Since then, the ERA’s advocates of equality for women have insisted on ever-more-elaborate special treatment for the amendment. They have said the clock can never expire on ratification, and no ratification can be rescinded. Baldly declaring the five recissions impermissible, and that all deadlines are illegitimate, between 2017 and 2020 they got three more states to ratify the ERA. So, they said, the 38-state threshold had been reached, and they demanded that the National Archivist declare the Constitution amended. This he declined to do.

The ERA-as-Lazarus project has had unpleasant experiences in the courts, where law is taken seriously. In 2021, a federal district judge (an Obama appointee) held that the seven-year deadline set by Congress half a century ago was valid, so the three states’ make-believe ratifications, 2017-2020, were without legal effect. This brings to 26 the number of federal judges (14 Republican and 12 Democratic appointees) whose message to the ERA resurrectionists has been essentially: You’re kidding, right?

With a tenacity inversely proportional to their credibility, the ERA’s bitter-enders, who of course subscribe to progressivism’s theory of unlimited presidential power, insist that the ERA is “one signature away” — the archivist’s — from becoming the 28th Amendment. They want President Biden to order the archivist to ignore all the legal folderol and paste the ERA into the Constitution. The archivist who spurned the resurrectionists’ demand has retired, but his likely successor seems equally sensible.

At Senate confirmation hearings for Colleen Shogan in September, she was asked by Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio): “If confirmed, would you continue to abide by the January 2020 [Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel] opinion, as your predecessor did?” She said yes, and that a court order would be the only circumstance under which she would certify that the ERA has been ratified. If she means this, the amendment’s fate was settled long ago.

If any of the resurrectionists were just 21 in 1972 when Congress sent the ERA to the states, they are now 71. Their hip-hugging bell-bottoms are dimly remembered embarrassments, like the ERA.

C'mon, George - you're gonna cite “sufficiently contemporaneous” as the central point of your argument?

• It was sufficiently contemporaneous for the Taney court to rule enslaved people have no rights under the constitution, and have no expectation to be treated fairly. 
• It was sufficiently contemporaneous to deny women the right to vote for 50 years after the 15th amendment.
• It was sufficiently contemporaneous to require women to have their husbands' permission to get a credit card, or buy a car, or a house, or or or.
• It was sufficiently contemporaneous to deny native tribes full citizenship for 230 years after ratification of the Constitution.
• It's sufficiently contemporaneous to allow floods of dark money to contaminate the election process, creating coin-operated politicians who serve the interests of SuperPACs and corporate donors instead of actual people.

I guess now it's sufficiently contemporaneous to issue that stupid Dodd decision that pushes us backwards half a century.

Fake lord have mercy - George Will is a ridiculous person.

Oh, Alex

Sometimes, when I see a guy get really stomped - even if he's had it coming for a really long time - I can muster up a little sympathy for him.

But not for Alex Jones. Never for Alex Jones.

I wouldn't feel sorry for that prick for any reason ever. Not. Fucking. Ever.

Alex Jones ordered to pay $473 million in punitive damages in Sandy Hook defamation case

Nov 10 (Reuters) - Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones must pay $473 million in punitive damages for his defamatory claims about the 2012 Sandy Hook mass shooting, a Connecticut judge ruled on Thursday.

The ruling came a month after a jury in Waterbury, Connecticut, found that Jones and the parent company of his Infowars website must pay more than a dozen relatives of Sandy Hook victims nearly $1 billion in compensatory damages for falsely claiming they were actors who staged the shooting as part of a government plot to seize Americans’ guns.

In a separate order late Wednesday, the judge, Barbara Bellis, temporarily blocked Jones from moving any personal assets out of the country. The ruling came at the request of the plaintiffs, who claim Jones is trying to hide assets to avoid paying.

Jones is now on the hook for a total of $1.49 billion in damages in two Sandy Hook defamation cases that went to trial this year. A third case is pending in Texas.

- more -

$1,438,000,000