The Hall of Fire

I appreciate Matt Yglesias's comments on an new Washington Post article: "The first twelve grafs of this story are about how Joe Biden didn’t discuss the Hawaii fires with the traveling press pool, then in graf thirteen* you learn about the actual federal disaster response. Eventually you get t...

Virginia's House of Delegates is currently in Republican hands. The next regular election is this November. Earlier this week I saw a couple passing references to Republicans "forcing explicit sexual conduct" on children by posting a sixteen-foot long drawing of a penis labeled "Biden...

ABC reports that a draft version of The Chief's Chief , Mark Meadows's (ghostwritten) book about his time in Donald Trump's White House and subsequent interactions with Trump, was more explicit than the published version about the document that Trump showed off in Mar-a-Lago in 2021 being "a fo...

Tribe and Luttig are both eminent legal minds, and neither are remotely objective about this issue. Tribe is famously liberal and also has pushed a number of questionable legal arguments regarding Donald Trump. So I'll grant that there may be reasons to doubt his objectivity concerning this subject...

In The Atlantic : " The Constitution Prohibits Trump from ever Being President Again " by J. Michael Luttig and Laurence H. Tribe. I haven't read this and have yet to read the paper I previously cited. Tribe and Luttig may be wrong about this, but they are eminent legal minds, and Luttig ...

William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, law professors known to hold conservative and originalist views, argue in a new paper (126 pp. long) titled "The Sweep and Force of Section Three" that the part of the 14th Amendment which prevents insurrectionist former officials from again holdi...

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who didn't vote in his 20s, says that he wants to raise the voting age from 18 to 25. He would allow exceptions for people serving in the military. ( Edited on Aug. 23rd later to add: he would also allow exceptions for emergency responders (police, ...

‘Co-Conspirator 5’: Ken Chesebro and the evolution of Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 strategy I did not realize just how deeply involved Chesebro was. New from CNN: " Kenneth Chesebro, alleged architect of fake electors’ plot, followed Alex Jones around Capitol grounds on January 6th ." When asked...

Not sure where this will belong in the end, but this thread seems likeliest: " MAGA’s Roger Stone pushed elector plot before 2020 race was even called " (MSNBC). I wonder who leaked that Nov. 5, 2020 video of Roger Stone to Ari Melber and why. Would it in some way slow down Jack Smith's pr...

Just Security has made a list of the likely names of the 30 unindicted coconspirators.

Ron DeSantis's campaign conducted some polling of the Republican electorate to test which messages work best to convince voters to choose him over donald Trump. They found that 70% of Republicans disapproved of 2020 Covid lockdowns, but when those actions are described as "Trump's Covid lockdow...

I wonder why the Dept. of Justice dropped the ball there.

I was unfamiliar with "fleets" (mentioned by Cheney above), which are "temporary posts on Twitter that disappear within 24 hours." Some people had noted this passage in Jack Smith's January 6th indictment of Donald Trump: At 2:24 p.m., after advisors had left the Defendant alone ...

" Feds indict paid fundraiser for Rep. George Santos for allegedly impersonating Speaker McCarthy aide " (CNBC). It had previously been reported that the fundraiser, Samuel Miele, "had made calls and sent emails to would-be donors while claiming to be Dan Meyer, McCarthy's chief of st...

Donald Trump says he'll be presenting a public defense next Monday apparently based on the idea that he believes the 2020 election was stolen. I like Josh Marshall's argument here about why that doesn't matter. It's not only that believing a false thing doesn't give you permission to commit crimes. ...

Earlier this evening, Marcy Wheeler (now asleep since it's very late/early in Ireland) wondered whether Cleta Mitchell, Rudy Giuliani, or Boris Epshteyn would be indicted in Georgia. Apparently only Giuliani of those three was? But so were some eighteen others? (Including Trump, so this thread stand...

The annual DCI finals competition for drum and bugle corps were held Saturday in Indianapolis. I watched on a web stream (having seen some of the competitors live about a week before). The top four were as good as any in DCI's 51-year history. In fact, the fourth-ranked corps got the highest score e...

ETA: Ryan Goodman: "P.S.A. 10 indictments does not necessarily mean only 10 individuals charged." That said : "While a cover page of the indictments handed to the judge indicated there were 10, it's likely that only one of those involved the Trump case." We'll know soon enough, ...

Voronwë the Faithful wrote: ↑Sun Aug 13, 2023 10:33 pm But there is nothing tying it directly to Trump. Which highlights a potential problem with both that case and the one brought by Smith. To what extent can Trump be held responsible for what others did in his name.

Bridgegate all over again, eh?