[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi

No wonder Bolsonaro fucked off to Florida (yes, fucking Florida) days ago - I'm positive the asshole had this planned before the election.

As a matter of fact, how about this article from November 23:

Trump aides Bannon, Miller advising the Bolsonaros on next steps

[Skuj]

Does the GOP learn anything from 3 election losses in a row that are mainly due to Trump? I mean, Gaetz keeps saying Trumpy 2016 things, Greene keeps bragging about "my president" calling her, and McCarthy thanks Trump for his support. Now the House will do Trump's bidding with investigations into Bidens and Jan 6th.

I mean.....shouldn't they move on? Can't they?

[tw2113]

Well, when they're so used to living in the past...

[The Soup Nazi]

Goddammit, the new Republican majority has its own Benghazi/Mar-a-Lago now. Just what we needed...

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi

Goddammit, the new Republican majority has its own Benghazi/Mar-a-Lago now. Just what we needed...

the biden team is cooperating with investigators and garland assigned a trump appointee to the case, so we'll see when we see, and go from there...

but in the meantime i don't see biden or the democrats attempting to obstruct justice or tweeting fucked up lunacies like these:

https://gizmodo.com/9-unhinged-tweet...go-1849388563/

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

the biden team is cooperating with investigators and garland assigned a trump appointee to the case, so we'll see when we see, and go from there...

but in the meantime i don't see biden or the democrats attempting to obstruct justice or tweeting fucked up lunacies like these:

https://gizmodo.com/9-unhinged-tweet...go-1849388563/

Of course it's not the same thing. But people are stupid, and it's easy to bothsides the issue and sell the resulting bullshit to stupid people. "But her emails", remember?

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi

Of course it's not the same thing. But people are stupid, and it's easy to bothsides the issue and sell the resulting bullshit to stupid people. "But her emails", remember?

the deplorables are always going to come up with some bullshit or another, like hunter's laptop. that's just par for the course.

and the stupids will always be there to eat it up, like for pizzagate or the tall tale of the stolen election or other innumerable conspiracy theories and nonsense.

the real events are still a concern for rational people though.

i mean, beyond what the deplorables may or may not do here, other things exist independent of them, and also matter--to rational people anyway.

the same rational people who got tired of trump and voted him out of office can actually tell apples from oranges.

the stupids can only go one way, and ultimately won't change anything because they themselves won't change. they just are. there. and stupid. forever.

so if you just write them off and calculate from that point forward, you can notice the actual relevance of various effects.

--

eta, in other words, "the decider" is "the suburban voter" as they call it. moderately educated, money-minded, professionally employed, practical, square, a driver, a breeder. everyone else is fairly entrenched at this point.

[Skuj]

Oh Christ.

Of course, the differences between this and Mara Lago is night and day, but none of that fucking matters in US Politics.

[Skuj]

It makes me ill that Biden fucked up with classified docs in light of Trump's complete and utter fuck-up. No amount of contrasting the two cases will do any political good now. Trump's case is absolutely, unequivocably criminal/incompetence/stupidity. But none of that matters now. Biden did it too. Exponential degrees of stupidity will not register. This is perhaps the greatest gift to Trump ever.

[The Soup Nazi]

Between the McCarthy shitshow and the Biden docs (oooh, Jim Jordan's gonna "investigate" - now I'm scared ), I don't think the following NYT article, which exposes a ferocious degree of corruption in the Supreme Court, gained much traction. Two weeks is a long damn time for a news cycle... Anyway, here it is:

A Charity Tied to the Supreme Court Offers Donors Access to the Justices

The Supreme Court Historical Society has raised more than $23 million in the last two decades, much of it from lawyers, corporations and special interests.

By Jo Becker and Julie Tate
Published Dec. 30, 2022 Updated Jan. 1, 2023

In some years, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. does the honors. In others, it might be Justice Sonia Sotomayor or Justice Clarence Thomas presenting the squared-off hunks of marble affixed with the Supreme Court’s gilded seal.

Hewed from slabs left over from the 1930s construction of the nation’s high court and handed out in its magnificent Great Hall, they are a unique status symbol in a town that craves them. And while the ideological bents of the justices bestowing them might vary, there is one constant: All the recipients have given at least $5,000 to a charity favored by the justices, and, more often than not, the donors have a significant stake in the way the court decides cases.

The charity, the Supreme Court Historical Society, is ostensibly independent of the judicial branch of government, but in reality the two are inextricably intertwined. The charity’s stated mission is straightforward: to preserve the court’s history and educate the public about the court’s importance in American life. But over the years the society has also become a vehicle for those seeking access to nine of the most reclusive and powerful people in the nation. The justices attend the society’s annual black-tie dinner soirees, where they mingle with donors and thank them for their generosity, and serve as M.C.s to more regular society-sponsored lectures or re-enactments of famous cases.

The society has raised more than $23 million over the last two decades. Because of its nonprofit status, it does not have to publicly disclose its donors — and declined when asked to do so. But The New York Times was able to identify the sources behind more than $10.7 million raised since 2003, the first year for which relevant records were available.

At least $6.4 million — or 60 percent — came from corporations, special interest groups, or lawyers and firms that argued cases before the court, according to an analysis of archived historical society newsletters and publicly available records that detail grants given to the society by foundations. Of that, at least $4.7 million came from individuals or entities in years when they had an interest in a pending federal court case on appeal or at the high court, records show.

The donors include corporations like Chevron, which gave while embroiled in a 2021 Supreme Court case involving efforts by cities to hold the oil company accountable for its role in global warming. Veteran Supreme Court litigators gave while representing clients before the court that included Tyson Foods and the Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China.

Among the ideologically driven activists from both sides of the political aisle who donated to the society were the benefactors of an anti-abortion group whose leader instructed them to use the society’s annual dinners to meet and befriend conservative justices.

Virtually no one interviewed by The Times, including critics of the society’s fund-raising practices, said they believed that donations to the society had any bearing on cases before the justices. For one thing, many of the donors are already part of the Supreme Court’s insular and clubby world, where former clerks frequently socialize with and argue cases before their former bosses, and where the justices steadfastly refuse to televise their arguments and specifically reserve only a fraction of the court’s 439 seats for members of the public.

Carter G. Phillips, a Supreme Court litigator at Sidley Austin and the society’s treasurer, said it never occurred to him that anyone would use the society as a way to buy face time or favor with the justices, in part because the society’s events generally afford only fleeting contact with them.

“It’s one thing to go into the Oval Office because you spent $100 million on a campaign and get to talk substantively about the most important thing in the world to you,” he said, “as opposed to getting to go to a dinner or a lecture by a law professor on Marbury v. Madison where a justice might say a few words of introduction.”

But as polls show public approval of the court at an all-time low, amid widespread concern that the institution has become increasingly politicized, even some supporters said it might be time to rethink the Supreme Court Historical Society’s reliance on secretive private donations. The long-obscure society recently found itself in the spotlight after the anti-abortion leader, the Rev. Rob Schenck, told The Times how he had made the society and its events part of his campaign to embolden the justices to take unapologetic stands against abortion.

Charles Fried, who served as solicitor general in the Reagan administration and is now a professor at Harvard Law School, said he was so “horrified” by Mr. Schenck’s use of the society that he might no longer donate. And he said that, while he did not believe that donations influenced the justices, for the sake of appearances a charity so closely tied to the court should not solicit money from corporations and other special interests while they had matters before it.

“It’s disgusting,” he said. “Many of the people who contribute have the same reasons I do. You go to a cocktail party and support a good cause. But it turns out that for some people it’s not that innocent. And I think the justices are a victim of that.”

But David T. Pride, the executive director of the society from 1979 until he retired last year, defended the society’s practice of seeking donations from those with interests before the court, saying he “was pretty unabashed about it.”

“Who wouldn’t expect that to be our constituency?” he said. “I don’t think I would have taken money from the Communist or Nazi Parties, but within reason the society was open to all.”

The society was founded in 1974 by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger to make the court more welcoming to visitors and to restore dusty old portraits of justices of yore. Every chief justice since has served as its honorary chairman.

It publishes bound journals of Supreme Court history; restores, maintains and displays historically significant artifacts such as the robes of Justice Louis D. Brandeis; hosts lectures; and brings schoolteachers from around the country to Washington for an annual summer institute, where they learn about the court. Trustees of the nonprofit are expected to give at least $5,000 a year, “patrons” give between $12,500 and $25,000, and “benefactors” give more than $25,000.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the historical society’s most significant source of identifiable funds — more than 34 percent — is the lawyers and law firms that practice before the Supreme Court, according to the Times analysis.

The chairman of the society’s board of trustees, Gregory P. Joseph, is a corporate litigator who served as the president of the American College of Trial Lawyers. Over the years, he and his firm have given at least $187,500 to the society, including in 2019, when he filed a submission with the court on behalf of the Sackler family, the longtime owners of Purdue Pharma, in a case involving accusations that they had siphoned billions of dollars out of the company in an attempt to deplete its coffers and limit the exposure the drugmaker faced over its deceptive marketing of OxyContin.

A number of other trustees who give regularly, such as Beth Brinkmann of Covington & Burling, served as Supreme Court clerks. Ms. Brinkmann joined the society’s board in 2006, and she was featured in the society’s newsletter in 2021 for giving at the patron level. Also in 2021, she represented power companies in the Supreme Court case West Virginia v. E.P.A., which limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate power plant emissions.

Corporate interests formed the next biggest category of donors, responsible for more than 15 percent of the total amount The Times was able to trace. Longtime donors include United Parcel Service, which has given $550,000 through its charitable foundation, including while the justices were considering a pregnancy discrimination case involving the company, Young v. United Parcel Service. AT&T, Home Depot, General Dynamics and Ford Motor Company are among other corporate donors that have given to the society, sometimes in years when they had cases before the court.

(continues)

[The Soup Nazi]

(cont'd)

One way the society attracts such corporate largess is by courting top corporate lawyers with deep attachments to the court. Take Chevron, for instance. It began giving in 2010, the year after it hired R. Hewitt Pate, a former Supreme Court clerk and society trustee, as its general counsel. It has given every year since, for a total of $190,000, even as the Supreme Court heard a number of cases involving the company.

“We have given to the historical society in the spirit of furthering its stated mission of preserving the court’s history,” said a Chevron spokesman, Sean McCormack. “There is no other motivation.”

Another donor solicitation strategy involved bestowing special honors on the general counsels of major corporations. Martha Meehan-Cohen, a society employee who tracks the donations, said that the idea was to encourage the honorees’ employers to buy a table.

In 2013, the general counsels of Facebook and Time Warner were invited to attend the gala at the Plaza Hotel in New York. There, under a projected image of the Constitution, they were given the society’s first “Amicus Curiae Awards,” according to a society newsletter. That year, Facebook and Time Warner, through its various entities, donated at least a combined $50,000. This year, Kathryn Ruemmler, the general counsel of Goldman Sachs, received the award; Goldman Sachs, which had recently secured a Supreme Court victory making it harder for shareholders to mount class-action suits alleging securities fraud, donated $25,000.

Special interest advocacy groups accounted for about one out of every 10 dollars The Times could identify. Mr. Schenck said he encouraged not only his own donors to become trustees, but others in the anti-abortion movement as well. He couched it as a bargain, advising that $10,000 was enough to get noticed.

“I’ll warn you: There’s money involved,” he emailed one ally. “Societies like this begin from one starting point: Donor. It’s not as expensive as you think, though.”

In return, Mr. Pride, the longtime executive director of the society, did favors for Mr. Schenck and other donors, getting them coveted seats at oral arguments and arranging for face time with justices at society functions. In one email exchange with Jay Sekulow, a society trustee who as chief counsel for the conservative American Center for Law & Justice argued cases involving religious liberty and abortion before the court, Mr. Schenck wrote that Mr. Pride would make sure Mr. Sekulow was seated at a justice’s table at the annual dinner. “Maybe CJ’s table,” he added, referring to Chief Justice Roberts.

Mr. Pride said that “my job was to serve members of the society, and that was part of the service.”

(Mr. Schenck also told The Times that one of his donors, a society trustee, had shared advance notice of the outcome of a high-profile contraception case after dining at the home of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., the author of the opinion. Justice Alito and the trustee acknowledged sharing a meal and a friendship, but denied discussing confidential court business.)

Another top special interest donor is First Liberty Institute, a conservative nonprofit that also frequently litigates religious liberty cases before the justices. The institute, along with its employees and donors, gave a combined $217,500 from 2012 to 2022 while arguing before the court on behalf of clients such as a baker who refused to make cakes for gay couples. On the liberal side, special interest donors include the Boston Foundation, which advocates abortion rights. The Freedom Forum, which advocates First Amendment rights, was also a significant donor.

Mr. Phillips, the society’s treasurer, said he hoped that Mr. Schenck’s account and the subsequent scrutiny wouldn’t result in the justices’ distancing themselves from the society, which he said does important work in preserving the court’s history in much the same way that similar nonprofits preserve the history of the White House and the U.S. Capitol.

But Gabe Roth, the executive director of Fix the Court, an advocacy group critical of the court’s lack of transparency, said that if the court wants to preserve its history, it should do so itself by asking for a small appropriation from Congress.

Jo Becker is a reporter in the investigative unit and a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner. She is the author of “Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality.” @Jo_Becker

[Skuj]

I'm still rotflmao at Amy, who, not being political at all, went to the McConnell building, and made a speech, with an introduction by....McConnell.

[The Soup Nazi]

Damn.

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

hahahahaaaaaaaaaaa

funnily enough i was listening to jaco earlier. "honest to god," as they say

Off-topic: did you know about this one?

https://www.discogs.com/master/79146...-Ali-Blackbird

I just found out about it. Man, I don't know anything...

[The Soup Nazi]

Oh COME ON.

https://news.google.com/stories/CAAq...S&ceid=US%3Aen

Does anybody NOT have classified shit at home?

[The Soup Nazi]

Also:

The Doomsday Clock reveals how close we are to total annihilation

Lovely...

[The Soup Nazi]

From The Washington Post:

Opinion | Yes, everyone has classified documents. The system is out of control.

By Fareed Zakaria
Columnist

What should we think of the fact that Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and now Mike Pence have all turned out to have classified material sitting in their houses? Before I answer that question, let me tell you a few facts. One 2004 essay put the number of classified pages in existence at about 7.5 billion. In 2012, records were classified at a rate of 3 per second, making for an estimated 95 million classifications that year alone. Today, no one knows how frequently information is classified. And as of 2019, more than 4 million people were eligible to access classified information, about one-third for top secret records, the highest general designation.

The real scandal is that the U.S. government has a totally out-of-control system of secrets that represents a real danger to the quality of democratic government.

Let me acknowledge a political point. It is true that people glossed over these issues when Trump was found to be holding onto classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home, but have begun to discuss them now that President Biden also appears to be guilty of the same offense. Some of this double standard is political bias. But Trump’s behavior was also a major issue, particularly his refusal to turn over the documents and defiance of direct requests from the Justice Department. That is an important difference, though it doesn’t change the larger point. Given how crazy the classification system is, the wonder is that we don’t find more top secret documents littered throughout the houses of government officials.

In 1998, then-Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), who served for years on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence beginning in 1977, wrote a book titled “Secrecy: The American Experience.” In it, he lamented the rise of the “culture of secrecy” within the U.S. government, which he believed was both bad for foreign policy and dangerous to democracy. On the first point, Moynihan argued that many of the government’s biggest mistakes were a result of its reluctance to share information and subject its analysis to outside criticism.

Remember that the intelligence community was largely created to assess one question — the nature of the Soviet threat. It got this wrong. In the late 1950s, for example, it claimed that the Soviet Union was significantly ahead of the United States in missile technology and deployment, a very consequential but totally false assertion. More broadly, it got the state of the Soviet economy in the 1980s dead wrong, claiming it was sturdy when, in fact, it was collapsing. After the Cold War, in the late 1990s, the intelligence community’s central directive was to establish whether Saddam Hussein was trying to develop weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It got that wrong, as well.

Moynihan argued that secrecy had become a form of regulation and bureaucratic control. People in government viewed information as power, didn’t want to share it, and developed elaborate mechanisms to horde it. They covered up mistakes, embarrassments and illegal activities by classifying the problem away. Richard M. Nixon’s solicitor general wrote in 1989 about the publication of the Pentagon Papers, top secret documents about the Vietnam War released while the war was still being waged: “I have never seen any trace of a threat to the national security from the publication. Indeed, I have never seen it even suggested that there was such an actual threat. … It quickly becomes apparent to any person who has considerable experience with classified material that there is massive overclassification and that the principal concern of the classifiers is not with national security, but rather with governmental embarrassment of one sort or another.”

Democratic governments demand transparency. Accountability and control are impossible when citizens know so little about what the government is doing — and when it has the power to block access to any of that information.

This problem has become much, much worse in the digital era. Timothy Naftali, a New York University scholar and former director of the Nixon Library, told me, “We now have a tsunami of classified documents — tens of thousands of emails, PowerPoints, all kinds of stuff — all stored somewhere in the cloud, but we still have a tiny staff of people at the National Archives for the declassification process.” He estimated that it could take five years for a request to declassify a single document to even make it to the agency that has to decide whether to do so. Another scholar, Matthew Connelly of Columbia University, points out that the U.S. government spends about $18 billion a year on classifying and protecting information and just $100 million on declassification.

Most presidents come to office promising to open up government secrets. Yet once they get into office, they prefer the cozy system that keeps their actions hidden from public scrutiny and assessment. What we have now is a vast military-intelligence secrecy complex that just keeps growing — a recipe for bad decision-making and unaccountable government.

[Skuj]

....but only one person gets an FBI raid after continuously refusing to do the right thing.

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by Skuj

....but only one person gets an FBI raid after continuously refusing to do the right thing.

Yeah, and I don't think Zakaria is bothsidesing this. It's right there in the third paragraph. The point is that this is also a gigantonormous systemically fucked up problem.

[Skuj]

Right.

I don't understand this. I worked in an environment where classified docs existed. Said docs were tracked very carefully whenever they were moved around. The only way I could have such docs in my house is if I took them, or copied them. Taking them would cause much fanning of shit on the very next regular muster. These people didn't copy them, surely?

So, yes, something is seriously fucked within the US Gov for this to happen.

(I worked alongside US Military often, and they seem to be even more anal than us Canadians about this stuff.)

Anyway - if someone found a SECRET doc in my house tomorrow, I would basically adopt the position. There would be no other option. But what consequences occur for US Gov people?