So, this is what we’re dealing with. It is no longer a case of the media reporting on Democratic disarray, it is the media fomenting and igniting Democratic disarray by blatantly lying.
MSNBC: Blumenthal: “I am deeply concerned” about President Biden.
Actual quote: “I am deeply concerned about Joe Biden winning this election because it is an existential threat to the country if Donald Trump wins. So we have to come to a conclusion. Joe Biden as the Democrat nominee has my support”.
Kinda makes you wonder who all of the unnamed “Democratic insiders” were they’ve been quoting for weeks, and whether they actually said any of the things that were reported.
This is an open thread where everyone is welcome, especially night owls and early birds, to share and discuss the happenings of the day. Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments
Next: New York Times puts words in Pelosi’s mouth:
And their big “Parkinson’s Doctor” scoop turns out to have been shot out their {ahem} without even the most BASIC of fact-checking…
“Think of this as political post-traumatic stress,” Rep. Mike Quigley said. “It takes a while for people to process it all.”
The first two days of the week, President Joe Biden seemed like he had put to rest many of the questions about whether he would remain the presidential nominee. But a funny thing happened on Wednesday: Democrats kept asking.
Unsatisfied with his answer that he intended to remain atop the ticket, Biden was shivved from all sorts of directions on Wednesday, a potential signal that Democrats intend to keep bloodying the president until he’s too weak and has no choice but to drop out.
Even if there wasn’t a deluge of new lawmakers coming out against Biden, the drip of opposition — with Democrats like vulnerable Rep. Pat Ryan of New York and retiring Rep. Earl Blumenauer of Oregon becoming the eighth and ninth House Democrats to call for Biden to drop out of the race — was its own torture.
...But the real betrayal took place anonymously, as has become customary over the last two weeks.
...Biden and the White House would just as soon everyone shut up about the problems. But at this point, with so many conversations continuing, it’s inevitable that the president will have to seriously reckon with the issues that haven’t been addressed.
Also, for those of you here on DKOS who keep pushing the “Biden must stand down” narrative, keep in mind that they will instantly turn and Swift-Boat whoever replaces him.
And just a reminder, from after the first debate in 2012:
Americans are usually forgiving when they vote a man into the White House and he wants a second term. Of the last eight elected presidents, all but two — George H. W. Bush and Jimmy Carter — got their four more years. Which is why the conventional wisdom long held that Barack Obama would most likely weather his midpresidency slump to win another term.
Then came the debt-ceiling debates of July and August, which seemed to crystallize Obama’s vulnerabilities in a way that even the Democrats’ midterm disaster of 2010 did not. It’s probably because he handled the situation so poorly, simultaneously managing to annoy his base, frustrate swing voters, concede a major policy victory to Republicans and — through the fear imported into the market by the brinksmanship in Congress and the credit-rating downgrade that followed — further imperil the economic recovery. On Aug. 12, a week and a half after the debate ended in Congress, Obama’s stock on Intrade, a popular political betting market, dipped below 50 percent for the first time. It has hovered just below the 50 percent threshold…
Obama has gone from a modest favorite to win re-election to, probably, a slight underdog...
Alternatively…
Minor changes in voter preference after the debate don’t mean the course of the presidential race has shifted, Northeastern expert says.
President Joe Biden’s performance during the first presidential debate has been widely panned, with critics and even those within his own party calling for him to step aside. But the question remained: Would Biden’s shaky performance against former President Donald Trump result in a noticeable dip in the polls for the president?
According to a new report from the Northeastern University-led data project CHIP50, the answer is no.
Led by David Lazer, university distinguished professor of political science and computer science at Northeastern, the report indicates that the debate had little if any impact on people’s voting preference. Lazer hopes the report helps illustrate the dangers of making a mountain out of a molehill when it comes to the media interpreting data.
“Even the New York Times, which is usually better about this, talked about a very tiny shift that was totally insignificant statistically like it was evidence that it was a shift toward Trump after the debate,” Lazer says. “My hope is that reporters look at this and say, ‘Maybe we need to be careful in overinterpreting noise as actual signal.’”
Meanwhile, here’s Biden’s full NATO speach:
Meanwhile, the Treason Continues…
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been accused of not disclosing a yacht trip to Russia and a private helicopter flight to a palace in President Vladimir Putin’s hometown, among a slew of other gifts and loans from businessman Harlan Crow.
Buried on page 14 of a letter that two Democratic senators sent to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Tuesday, in which they urged Garland to appoint a special counsel to probe Thomas, was an astonishing list of dozens of “likely undisclosed gifts and income” from Crow, Crow’s affiliated companies, and “other donors.”
In the letter, Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) said Thomas, one of the court’s staunchly conservative justices, even may have committed tax fraud and violated other federal laws by “secretly” accepting the gifts and income potentially worth millions.
“The Senate is not a prosecutorial body, and the Supreme Court has no fact-finding function of its own, making the executive role all the more important if there is ever to be any complete determination of the facts,” reads the letter requesting the appointment of a special prosecutor.
“We do not make this request lightly,” said the letter.
The list of potentially secret gifts also includes a loan of more than $267,000 provided by Thomas’ close friend Anthony Welters, the yacht trip to Russia from the Baltics, and the helicopter ride to Yusupov Palace in St. Petersburg. ProPublica first reported last year on the existence of extensive undisclosed gifts and lavish trips from Crow.
Meanwhile, for stuff like this you have to go to the Alt press, since the MSM ain’t interested
Retribution is at the center of Donald Trump’s third presidential election campaign.
“I am your warrior,” Trump proclaimed earlier this year. “I am your justice, and for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”
Trump’s loyal surrogates have duly embraced the project — perhaps no one more zealously than Ivan Raiklin, a retired Army Reserve lieutenant colonel and former U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency employee, who bills himself as the former and would-be president’s “future secretary of retribution.”
Raiklin is seeking to enlist so-called “constitutional” sheriffs in rural, conservative counties across the country to detain Trump’s political enemies. Or, as he says, carry out “live-streamed swatting raids” against individuals on his “Deep State target list.”
Or maybe for a headline “SCOTUS Justices lied under oath at their confirmation hearings”?
Collective amnesia seems to have struck the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, especially around the question: Is the president above the law?
Five of the six conservative justices who ruled to give the president absolute immunity for “core” presidential duties seem to have made contradictory statements during their Senate confirmation hearings.
“No man is above the law,” Neil Gorsuch told Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) during his confirmation hearing in 2017.
Gorsuch even doubled down, calling the court’s landmark 1952 decision in Youngstown v. Sawyer, which reigned in presidential authority, a “brilliant opinion.”
Similarly, Brett Kavanaugh told the Senate that “no one is above the law” during his 2018 confirmation hearing, according to CNN. Amy Coney Barrett concurred during her hearing, but like Kavanaugh, obfuscated on presidential pardons, according to The New York Times.
Court’s troubling rulings on presidential immunity and regulatory power make it clear that change is an ethical essential
n 1 July 2024, the US supreme court, after an unconscionable half-year delay that it laughably described as “expedited” treatment, handed down Trump v United States, the immunity ruling placing American presidents above the law by deeming the president a “branch of government ... unlike anyone else.” The court’s delay guaranteed that Donald Trump would face the electorate in 2024 without first confronting a jury of his peers instructed to decide, and thus inform voters, whether he was guilty of trying to overthrow the 2020 election.
Famously, the English immigrant Thomas Paine advocated that we revolt against the crown to form an independent country and frame a constitution to prevent the rise of a dictator “who, laying hold of popular disquietudes, may collect together the desperate and the discontented … [and] sweep away the liberties of the continent like a deluge”. To that end, Paine asked: “Where … is the king of America?” And he replied: “In America THE LAW IS KING. For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”
... the idea that we need an unbounded chief executive to make the separation of powers work is grounded neither in theory nor in experience and contradicts the axioms of checks and balances. Worse still, the court’s decision delivers not a genuinely unbounded executive but one bound by whatever limits the court itself invents as it fills in the gray areas in its anything but black-and-white ruling. So it’s an imperial judiciary this court delivers in the guise of an imperial executive, not surprising for a court that just last week dismantled the administrative state by substituting itself for the panoply of expert executive agencies in Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo.
The post-Chevron world is here.
It’s been barely a week since conservatives on the US Supreme Court radically upended the balance of power between the branches of government, giving the federal courts the exclusive power to interpret statutes rather than deferring to agency experts. And we’re already seeing impacts on the ground.
Right-wingers have been in the habit of running to their preferred courts to get regulations overturned, but the decision in Loper Bright v. Raimondo, which officially destroyed agency deference, will make it easier — even routine — to block every Biden administration rule they don’t like.
Lawsuits to invalidate specific rules had been proceeding through the federal courts before Loper Bright, generally arguing that agencies exceeded their authority in promulgating a rule. These lawsuits exist in no small part because the Supreme Court made it clear they would destroy Chevron deference for years now, with Justice Neil Gorsuch having led the way well before his appointment to the Court.
Trump appointee Sean Jordan, who sits in the reliably hard-right Eastern District of Texas, was so eager to block a Biden administration’s overtime rule that he dropped his decision the same day Loper Bright came out. It runs 36 pages and mentions Loper Bright multiple times, which means either Jordan was so confident of the Supreme Court decision that he either wrote it in advance or he hurried to stuff Loper Bright into his already-written opinion.
Jordan’s opinion also rests heavily on dictionary definitions rather than expertise from the Department of Labor, which issued the rule. So now, the rule that would have made 4 million more Texas workers eligible for overtime, and thus more pay, is blocked thanks to a hurried read of a SCOTUS opinion and Webster’s Dictionary.
“And you may say to yourself, “My god! What have I done!”
What have YOU done tonight? Tell us all about it in the comments!
(And I’m sorry this wasn’t a more uplifting diary… but Jebus, WTF guys?)
The crew of the Overnight News Digest consists of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, jeremybloom, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Rise above the swamp, Besame and jck. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) eeff, Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man, wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw