Biden Progress, Mar-A-lago Search, Mini-Rage, FBI Attacked, Rushdie Okay

A patient teacher speaks to a misbehaving child named Donald:

And Michael Jay throws some Kim Carnes at him:

@stilloneblackmansopinion All those FBIs…#parody #creatorsofcolor #votethemout #busted #maralago #bluewave #gopisdead #voteblue ♬ original sound – StillOneBlackMansOpinion

  • At Whatever, John Scalzi discovers a day, this very week in our history of self-governance, that is not only not cringeworthy, but is meaningfully encouraging.
     
  • Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger began this week with the Mar-a-Lago FBI search, looking at the warrant and what was found. He does not see a path for Mr. Trump to avoid being charged with a serious crime.
     
  • First time I had seen this. Ant Farmer’s Almanac has figured out what was in that more secret than top secret cache of documents stolen by Mr Trump. Yeah, yeah, I already know it’s satire.
     
  • CalicoJack in The Psy of Life starts with this:
     
    To my knowledge, though, no one has looked at what it means for an unproductive malignant narcissist to have stolen from the White House.
     
    Jack makes a plausible case that Mr Trump saw, in those more-secret-than-top-secret documents a chance to show off.
     
    An interesting take, and a departure from the assumption by those in my corner of the ideological spectrum that it involved a serious, dark, self serving, financial motive.
     
    When it comes to revealing secret documents that damage national security, where does the substitution of a petty, silly motive leave us?
     
  • At first, the Mar-a-Lago search was supposed to cement Donald Trump’s political position as a martyr to the cause of Trump. Then details of probable cause and a list of items of specific topper-than-top secret documents began to emerge. The Palmer Report takes a close look at the warrant and discovers something more that bodes ill for Mr. Trump. The usual legal justification is missing. Instead, the document contains something much worse.
     
  • So the probable cause contains stuff that could hurt people: doxing the informant and a couple of signing FBI agents. And it could let a few people-of-interest get phony stories straight. Gotta be careful with all that.
     
    Trump demands the affidavit that led to the warrant be published. Press organizations are ready to file suit to get the affidavit. Garland says okay but some information must be redacted. The judge agrees the affidavit should be redacted and open to the press.
     
    So Tommy Christopher reports that all God’s children want that affidavit open.
     
    The judge holds a hearing on it. All sides can be heard. But Trump’s lawyers are strangely silent. On publishing the affidavit, on redaction, on everything. Weird.
     
    Former Fox maven, current CNN maven, Chris Wallace knows why.
     
  • So Mr Trump has a host of explanations, excuses, and attacks as he encounters possible legal consequences for stealing ultra-secret documents. Iron Knee at Political Irony explains why political experts examine his reasoning with barely suppressed laughter.
     
  • At Cato Institute, Julian Sanchez has some fun with a defense made popular by the Trump-can-do-no-wrong rage machine:

  • My one time President explains that anytime he takes a classified document, it is, by a sort of transubstantiation, no longer classified. Nojo very briefly explains where this honored tradition began.
     
  • News Corpse lists some of the Trump excuses for holding on to the stolen documents, including the newest one. They assure us the storeroom was mostly locked and only real nice people had keys. Promise? Promise!
     
  • Satirist Andy Borowitz reports as Tucker Carlson calls Trump’s theft of nuclear secrets less worrisome than Hunter Biden’s use of Joe’s Netflix password.
     
  • Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson appears unimpressed with Mr Trump’s legal maneuvers

  • Dave Columbo does Tucker: outraged at the unlawful raid victimizing the honorable Mr Trump:
    @davecolumbo Back by popular demand 🙂 #democrat #democrats #democratsoftiktok #maralagoraid #politicalsatire #politicaltiktok #politicalhumor #fy #fyp #foryou ♬ Manke, honobo, everyday, funny, loop – arachang

  • Dave Dubya documents Trump-folk frustration as they are confronted by criminal statutes, evidence, and answers to excuses.

  • The warrant and search for hyper-classified eyes-only documents at Mar-a-Lago did startle. Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit briefly and accurately summarizes the right wing freak out.
     
  • Green Eagle reads up on extremist fury at the treatment of Mr Trump. Their promises of a new Civil War result in an armed protest in Arizona numbering literally in the teens.
     
    Pffft!
     
  • YellowDog Granny follows the Trump civil court dealings (he declines to answer 440 plus times because of self-incrimination) and comes up with a comprehensive list of reasons to plead the fifth. Kind of short, actually.
     
  • At The Onion, conservatives explain why they no longer trust the FBI.
     
  • An armed man attacks the FBI office in Cincinnati. State and local police defend the office, chase the culprit, and are forced to kill him. Frances Langum takes note as Ohio’s political leaders rush to thank the police for the risks they routinely take in protecting us. Well… not all Ohio leaders.
     
  • Infidel753 has an update on the health of Salman Rushdie, the recent target of an attempted assassination apparently by an Islamic fundamentalist after an Iranian fatwa.
     
  • The return insult used to be: Like being called ugly by a frog. Steve Bannon makes fun of Democrat John Fetterman’s “satanic” appearance.
     
    Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged teaches poor Steve the fine art of return insult.
     
    Free sample:
     
    Steve Bannon looks like he rolls bums for new clothes. He looks like his skincare regime is to powder his face with fresh bread mold in the hopes he looks at least partially alive. He looks like he doesn’t so much change shirts as lets them molder into his gelatinous form and then acquires new ones. From corpses.
     
    Her main point, though, is that Bannon and Trump are guilty of much more than the simple crime of being not cute.
     
  • M. Bouffant at Web of Evil has the links and a brief reaction as Lauren Boebert’s wayward husband goes wildly, violently nuts against their neighbors.
     
  • Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has established an Office of Election Police, reporting directly to him, part of whose duties will be to stand in polling locations and glare at voters. No intimidation, of course. They have already found 20 people who voted illegally.
     
    Turns out the 20 were convicted felons who had completed their sentences. A while back, voters had overwhelmingly passed a measure allowing felons to vote once their sentences were over. But, later on, DeSantis pushed through legislation excluding some felons. So it is likely the 20 may not have read up on changes in the details of the legislated exceptions and instead relied on what election officials told them.
     
    Those 20 violations are what DeSantis’ new special police found out of 11 million voters.
     
    tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors knows his math, does some arithmeWork and is able to calculate gubernatorial integrity.
     
  • It isn’t often labeled voter suppression, but it is. Scottie has a bit of personal experience.
     
    In Scotties Playtime, he has lived in a mostly minority voting district and then in a mostly white area. The contrast in voting ease is remarkable.
     
  • Thursday was the anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment recognizing that women have the right to vote. The right always existed, being inalienable. It had mostly been unthinkingly violated. In Letters from an American, historian Heather Cox Richardson tick tocks the step-by-painful-step struggle.
     
  • Max’s Dad gets into the heads of MAGA-folk and tells us the why of the current state of the Republican party.
     
    More eloquently expressed than my own similar thoughts some years back.
     
  • The Propaganda Professor helpfully posts another useful lifehack, this time on how to make a right-wing documentary.
     
  • Nan’s Notebook wants male opinions about a possible workaround to SCOTUS inspired abortion bans.
     
  • @whiskeywhistle98 looks for, and finds, something that will tick her off:
    @whiskeywhistle98 Keep your laws off my body!!!! #womensrights #foff #fyp #foryourpage #tiktokmom #daughters ♬ Tell me something that will piss me off – Artimus Wolz

  • Last week, the Republican candidate for governor of Illinois really stepped into it, comparing abortion to the Holocaust. Then he kept doubling down, letting the public know that abortion really is the same as a national government herding 6 million Jews and 4 million others into camps and murdering them. That was last week.
     
    driftglass brings this week’s self-vivisection as the same guy, Darren Bailey, goes out of his way to insult Chicago voters. Then r-r-r-repeats.
     
  • In Hackwhackers Putin troops invading Ukraine keep posting proud photos. Ukraine patriots watch for the photos, figure out the precise locations, target their missiles, and blow up Putin troops. It happened again this week.
     
  • The United States has been dancing around the China/Taiwan issue since before I was born. And I was born a hell of a long time ago.
     
    China claims Taiwan as a province. Taiwan claims to be the legitimate government, in exile, of all of China.
     
    I remember the great debate over a small series of islands called Quemoy and Matsu in the 1950s. The People’s Republic of China was making noises about moving in on them. Taiwan said they’d better not. Kennedy and Nixon argued over whether the small bits of land could be defended and whether they were worth defending, being largely uninhabited.
     
    The US finally declared that Taiwan and China were actually one country, as both wanted, and worked out an ambiguous muddle on which government was legitimate. But we treated both as separate in spite of the fiction.
     
    Everyone knew they were separate. Everyone pretended they were one.
     
    And therein lay the peace.
     
    At The Moderate Voice, foreign affairs specialist Brij Khindaria looks at the impact of the Nancy Pelosi visit to Taiwan, the anger of the mainland government, and their threatening military moves.
     
    Brij makes the case that a meeting between President Biden and China’s Xi Jinping might calm everything allowing everyone to go back to the original useful fiction.
     
  • In Happiness Between Tails da-AL’s husband has been afflicted with COVID. She relates a common experience among the vaccinated: a short time of minor symptoms.
     
  • A high school coach makes of public display of having all his players kneel in prayer before big games. The school is afraid this violates the establishment clause of the constitution. This is the First Amendment that says government can’t support religion. So they tell him to stop. He won’t. They fire him. He sues.
     
    The Supreme Court now says the evidence supports the coach because individual players say they don’t feel coerced to pray. So SCOTUS rules in favor of the coach and his exercise of freedom of religion.
     
    Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara explains how the ruling in favor of religious freedom is an attack on freedom of religion.
     
    Michael is right and we can hope the Supreme Court will one day catch up.
     
  • How do we approach Maga hate?
    Do we try to coddle it?
    Do we overmatch it with hostility?
     
    North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz suggests an alternative:

  • In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, Bruce walks us along his path to atheism and introduces us to the patronizing condescension of true believers along the way.
     
  • SilverAppleQueen narrates what it is to find complete trust in another betrayed.
     
  • Another wonderful life-hack from Reductress: how to put your grocery cart back without wondering if anyone saw and thinks you’re a good person.
     
  • Professor PZ Myers gets really angry at Black & Decker coffee, partly because he has his pride and there are simply some things he will not do.
     
  • Legal guru Imani Gandy really likes her new writing utensil:

A few tweets I thought worthy:

And I’m allowed a few of my own:

– Podcasts –
 

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