Lew Black’s Annual Roundup on the Daily Show

Ronny Chieng- 2019 Was Stupid

Make perfectly fine, loving companion animals and probably should not be killed, especially with fire.

Right Wing Republican Conspiracy Theories on the other hand…

Graham: Rudy Should Scrub Evidence for Russian Propaganda
by Erin Banco and Asawin Suebsaeng, Daily Beast
Dec. 29, 2019

In the weeks leading up to their impeachment trial, senators on Capitol Hill are actively avoiding meeting with President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani — partly because they fear he might try to pass off Russian conspiracy theories as fact, according to interviews with more than half a dozen Republican and Democratic lawmakers and aides.

On his trip to Kyiv last month, Giuliani met with former general prosecutors and parliamentarians known for peddling Russian conspiracy theories, including supposed plots that involve Ukrainian intervention in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter. When he arrived back in Washington, Giuliani updated Trump, according to two individuals with knowledge of their conversation, and said publicly the president asked him to brief Republican senators about the information he gathered.

“He wants me to do it,” Giuliani told The Washington Post in an interview earlier this month. “I’m working on pulling it together and hope to have it done by the end of the week.”

Since then, though, various lawmakers, as well as administration officials and national security brass, have privately expressed concerns about Giuliani’s latest Ukraine jaunt, given that the Trump lawyer’s efforts are what helped create this Ukraine scandal and get the president impeached in the first place. Both Democrat and Republican senators have steered clear of the president’s personal attorney over concern that the information he is trying to disseminate originated from figures in Ukraine known for spinning the truth or spreading outright lies.

“He has not shared any of that information with me,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) about the information Giuliani obtained overseas. “My advice to Giuliani would be to share what he got from Ukraine with the IC [intelligence community] to make sure it’s not Russia propaganda. I’m very suspicious of what the Russians are up to all over the world.”

Graham earlier this month called on Giuliani to testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on allegations that Biden helped his son get a lucrative job at Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company.

While in Kyiv, Giuliani met with Andriy Derkach, a self-described political independent who attended the Dzerzhinsky Higher School of the KGB in Moscow and was for a time a member of the pro-Russia party—the Party of Regions—in the Ukrainian parliament. He also met with Oleksandr Dubinksy, a member of the parliament known for his close ties to controversial Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky. He and Derkach consistently disseminate conspiracy theories on Facebook and elsewhere. The Daily Beast recently obtained a dossier that in part contained the debunked claim that Ukraine intervened in the 2016 presidential election, a claim which had been disseminated by Derkach to Americans, including senior officials, close to President Trump.

That claim and others were aired on One America News shortly after Giuliani’s visit in a documentary-style show. OAN traveled with Giuliani to Ukraine for his meetings with Derkach and Dubinksy and are currently working on a fourth segment to air sometime in the coming weeks.

Oh, you want to see it? Ok.

A pack of lies straight from Putin, the Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye, and the Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsii. Who’s your favorite network now?

To continue-

As senators prep for the impeachment trial they are distancing themselves, now publicly, from Giuliani in an attempt to steer clear of his less-than-reliable associates in Kyiv.
…
“I wouldn’t trust Rudy to represent me in a parking dispute so I’d say avoid,” a senior GOP Senate aide said tersely when asked if it was a good idea for Republican senators to meet with Giuliani to get a Ukraine briefing. Another top aide in a different Republican office said their senator had informed staff that they had “no interest at all” in meeting with Giuliani on this, fearing it would amount to a “waste of time,” if not something worse.

And it’s not just Capitol Hill that’s worried about associating with Giuliani.

“I do not want my name showing up in a [news] story about what Rudy and the president discuss,” said one senior White House official. “I don’t want my text messages with [Giuliani] being all over cable news,” this official continued, referencing the incident when Trump’s personal lawyer went on Fox News and unveiled texts sent between him and Kurt Volker, the former U.S. special envoy to Ukraine. As The Daily Beast reported in early December, senior officials in the State Department and within the national security apparatus began worrying that Giuliani’s ongoing crusade (which has been explicitly blessed and personally encouraged by President Trump) could hurt American foreign policy, and it even got to the point where these officials frantically devoted resources to tracking his foreign movements and figuring out who he was meeting with in Europe.

When asked about Sen. Graham’s recommendation to approach the intelligence community with his materials, and if he agreed that he should do so as due diligence, Giuliani would only reply to The Daily Beast, “It’s not Russian propaganda.”

No, of course it isn’t.

First of all I hate Link Rot so I’m totally hesitant but this seems without encumbrance of that sort. The reason I’m anxious to expose you to The Crossing is I think the Battle of Trenton a pivotal moment in United States history that demonstrates the bravery and genius of George Washington and the Colonial Army.

That said it’s a bit overwrought in Washington worship and I’m a Mason who thinks he’s Cincinnatus reincarnated so you might want to monitor your Blood Sugar if that’s a problem for you (not for me and I have 10 years of Sodium levels that have not changed a bit so screw you Dieticians and your low Salt diets, your Pasta water should taste like the Sea!). I’ve also just written about it and I don’t like repeating myself.

The Secrets of Jewish Genius
By Bret Stephens, The New York Times
Dec. 27, 2019

Now, I’m going to stop right there to point out a few things. This is The New York Times which means it’s base readership includes a number of people with Semitic heritage some of whom are entirely secular. Many of the ‘Geniuses’ cited were notable Atheists. Despite Executive Orders to the contrary ‘Judaism’ is a religion not a race. You can convert if you want to (No lobster? Non-starter.).

Now to be fair to Bret perhaps it’s not his headline. These things happen. The problem is the content is not just Anti-Semitic, it’s Racist.

Jews are, or tend to be, smart. When it comes to Ashkenazi Jews, it’s true. “Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average I.Q. of any ethnic group for which there are reliable data,” noted one 2005 paper. “During the 20th century, they made up about 3 percent of the U.S. population but won 27 percent of the U.S. Nobel science prizes and 25 percent of the ACM Turing awards. They account for more than half of world chess champions.”

Ok, generally speaking, like Islam Judism has 2 branches, Ashkenazi and Sephardic. Sephardic literally means “Spanish Jews” and for nearly a thousand years they lived a relatively unpersecuted existence under the protection of Muslims who regarded them as fellow “people of the Book” (as indeed they did Christians, terribly tolerant folks those Muslims). Spain was the home of many famous and influential Rabbis and one could argue (and Sephardic Jews will until you distract them with something else) that their practices and rituals are more authentic representations of Abraham, Moses, David, and Solomon because they were not repressed.

In Catholic Europe however the Ashkenazi were brutally oppressed and often had to ‘pass’ to avoid harassment.

Territories under the Byzantines and later the Eastern Orthodox Church also allowed more open religious expression for Jews and the Rabbis of Spain developed large followings.

So Sephardic Jews tend to be a bit more Hispanic, more Slavic, and fit the Anti-Semitic stereotypes of sub-human Neanderthals while the “civilized”, assimilated (or beaten into compliance, take your pick) Ashkenazi are good Jews, bright Jews, cultured Jews. The kind you want doing your taxes because they’re good with money, you’d hardly notice they were Jewish at all unless you gang showered with them at the Country Club (for the record I am both circumcised and not Jewish).

You know, the kind that are replacing all us good decent Christian White folks.

The descendants of European immigrants do not govern the United Sates of America today. The foreign and domestic policies of the country are made by Jews and their lackeys. Julius Streicher

We hung him for War Crimes.

Jewish people are overly represented in certain professions because they were excluded from others, same as women and blacks. Why do you think the Irish are stereotyped as Bar Owners, Cops, and Firemen? It’s not an indicator of a vast Irish conspiracy.

Though if I said so do you think I would get as famous as “Q”?

I mean, it should go something like this-

Hunter Biden

      Q: Do you have any particular qualification to sit on the Board of a Gas Company?
      A: No. Not at all.
      Q: Did your position have any duties?
      A: Nope. I was supposed to show up at meetings but it was kind of optional.
      Q: Why do you think you got this job?
      A: Because I’m the son of a former Senator and Vice President of the United States.
      Q: Did you know Burisma was under investigation?
      A: I don’t know. Someone might have told me something but I wasn’t actually paying that much attention.

And murmurs are heard throughout the Chamber. How scandalous!

Joe Biden

      Q: Did you deliver a demand to Ukraine that they fire Viktor Shokin?
      A: Absolutely. It was the official policy of the United States Government in consultation with Congress and our NATO allies.
      Q: Did you know Shokin was investigating Burisma?
      A: Well, it’s what he wasn’t investigating that was the problem and no, not particularly. It might be in some report I looked at but I looked at a lot of reports about a lot of things. I was merely the messenger of others, I didn’t set this policy.

And where do you go from there? So what.

I admit it’s not pleasant to have to sit around while Republicans pound the table and yell at you, and were I Hunter attempting some kind of slick Millenial move I’d ostentatiously plug in my iPods and stare at my phone. Joe should have a professional strength filter after all those years of Beltway Babblefarck and he’s senile and been a gaffe factory his whole life so a hazy memory is totally plausible. Attentive readers remember Joe is my least favorite candidate so I expect the Centrists and Institutional Democrats that support him would characterize it more charitably. I don’t think it would change his standing as a candidate at all.

But my point is it’s as big a nothing burger as Benghazi, so why not? If you’re lucky you get hours and hours of free media looking like a champion of democracy. This makes you look like a weasel with something to hide.

The original interview is paywall protected, but there’s a link in this summary.

Biden says he would not comply with a Senate subpoena in the impeachment trial of President Trump
by Nick Coltrain, Des Moines Register
Dec. 28, 2019

Biden said in early December he wouldn’t comply with a subpoena by the Senate, and confirmed that statement Friday in an interview with the Des Moines Register’s editorial board. He has not been subpoenaed, but Trump’s allies have floated the idea.

Testifying before the Senate on the matter would take attention away from Trump and the allegations against him, Biden said. Not even “that thug” Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney and former New York City mayor, has accused Biden of doing anything but his job, the former vice president said. Biden also said any attempt to subpoena him would be on “specious” grounds, and he predicted it wouldn’t come to that.

Biden said even if he volunteered to testify in an attempt to clear the air, it would create a media narrative that would let Trump off the hook.

“What are you going to cover?” Biden said to Register Executive Editor Carol Hunter in response to a question. “You guys are going to cover for three weeks anything that I said. And (Trump’s) going to get away. You guys buy into it all the time. Not a joke … Think what it’s about. It’s all about what he does all the time, his entire career. Take the focus off. This guy violated the Constitution. He said it in the driveway of the White House. He acknowledged he asked for help.”

File under Clio. We are accustomed to regard Athens as a paradigm of Democracy and a center of Philosophy and Science, especially in contrast with Sparta which is widely and correctly considered a militaristic slave holding society of sadism and cruelty. Given this sympathy it’s easy to forget that Athens lost the Peloponnesian War and pretty definitely deserved to considering that they started it and had spent decades looting and grinding down vassal cities all over Greece and Asia Minor. Not that this was a new thing mind you, it’s pretty much what they did to start the Persian War too.

Oh, that Science and Philosophy thing? A ton of it was done in what is now Turkey and Sicily, as well as Ptolemaic Egypt. Athens gets credit because… Greek. Nothing like some Dolma, Kalamata, and Feta with a squeeze of Lemon.

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

Pres. Woodrow Wilson is born; John C. Calhoun becomes first US vice president to resign; Alexander Solzhenitsyn ‘Gulag Archipelago’ is published; Actor Denzel Washington and comic book creator Stan Lee are born.

We create our own government. We are responsible for its beauty and for its ugliness. We are responsible for its glories and for its failures and, most important, we are responsible for amending those failures no matter who are their most immediate architects.

Charlie Pierce

Continue reading

Major League Baseball has decided to introduce ‘automated strike zones‘ in some minor League Parks next year which will be uniformly hated and despised.

Still, I haven’t gotten over the ‘Designated Hitter’ Rule yet so consider the source.

Trump Impeachment Trial Is Chief Justice Roberts’ Nightmare
By Noah Feldman, Bloomberg News
12/27/19

Roberts has devoted his whole career to trying to keep the Supreme Court from being seen as a partisan body. That started with the famous baseball analogy he offered at his Senate confirmation, according to which the justices are like umpires who call balls and strikes. The comparison is pretty dubious: balls and strikes aren’t infused with controversial moral questions like when life begins and who can marry whom. But Roberts was trying to illustrate his ideal of a justice who stays out of the partisan fray of team spirit.

Since then, Roberts has made a number of important rulings perhaps intended to keep the court from appearing too partisan. For example, he broke with his conservative colleagues to save the individual mandate in the landmark Affordable Care Act case (even though, in the same judgment, he gutted the act’s Medicare expansion) and also sided with the liberals in a 5-4 decision that kept a citizenship question off the 2020 census questionnaire.

Trump’s impeachment trial is a nightmare for Roberts because it will be very challenging to avoid an appearance of partisanship while he presides. There’s no ducking the job, though. The Constitution specifically requires the chief justice to preside over presidential impeachment, presumably because the framers realized that it would be awkward for the vice president to be in that chair as the senators decided whether to oust the president and thus elevate the vice president.

When Chief Justice William Rehnquist presided over President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial, he managed to stay out of the politics almost entirely. As Rehnquist later said, quoting his beloved Gilbert and Sullivan, he “did nothing in particular and he did it very well.”

Roberts was a law clerk for Rehnquist and would doubtless love to emulate this aspect of his experience. The trouble is that times have changed in ways that will make things much tougher for Roberts than they were for his old boss.
…
Roberts could be asked regularly to rule on tough procedural issues, such as which witnesses may be called by whom or whether certain evidence (for example, hearsay) can be admitted.

Deciding these questions would put Roberts in a difficult spot. Democrats will criticize him as partisan if he issues rulings favorable to Trump. Republicans will excoriate him as a traitor if he rules against the president.

The best strategy available to Roberts may be to rely on a quirk of Senate impeachment rules. Under Senate precedent, a majority of the Senate can overrule any procedural or evidentiary decision made by the chief justice.

Rather than ruling and subjecting himself to the indignity of being overruled, Roberts could say to the senators that he would like to them to vote on any close question, skipping the step of issuing a decision himself.
…
Assume Republicans make Roberts rule, instead of voting to decide the issue themselves. If he decides for Trump, they win — because now the ruling seems more judicial and objective and less partisan.

If he rules against Trump, the Republicans can overrule the decision. Doing so would make them look partisan, to be sure. They might prefer not to do it. But in the end, the public already knows both parties are partisan in this particular Senate battle. So the Republicans might be willing to overrule Roberts.

At the same time, if Roberts suggests to the Republicans that they should vote before he rules on something, that might signal to the Republicans that he might be prepared to rule against Trump on that issue.

In light of this complexity, if Roberts is forced to make controversial rulings, he will have little choice but to try to be objective: to call balls and strikes, and hope for the best. It’s not an attractive role.

Hate to say it, but you can’t always expect the Umps to be fair. Your Game Plan should include that.

I haven’t endorsed yet (and probably won’t) but there are candidates I oppose and one is Uncle Joe. He represents everything that is bad about Versailles, its ‘Villagers’, and the Institutional Democratic Party.

Joe Biden is the candidate of Other People. Is that enough?
By Paul Waldman, Washington Post
Dec. 26, 2019

Biden’s own wife told voters that “maybe you have to swallow a little bit” and vote for him even if you like another candidate better, because he’ll win over independents and Republicans.

That might be true. But it’s a proposition that should be treated with skepticism. Particularly since right now almost everyone saying that Republicans will vote for Biden is a Democrat.

That Times article does quote a Republican, former senator Chuck Hagel, saying that members of his party have “said to me, ‘If Biden is the nominee, I will vote for Biden, I will not vote for any of the other Democrats.’” But it’s revealing to hear this from Hagel, a voice from another age. A moderate of the kind virtually extinct in today’s GOP, Hagel was appointed to President Barack Obama’s Cabinet as part of Obama’s futile attempt to show the opposition that he was bipartisan and therefore they should approach him with an open mind.

To be sure, there are some number of Republicans who are dissatisfied enough with President Trump to be open to voting for a Democrat. But there were also a good number of Republicans in 2016 who said the same thing, and in the end it didn’t happen. They were pulled back to vote for Trump by the power of partisan loyalty: Even though it was not some kind of mystery who Trump was, 92 percent of Republicans voted for him. That was virtually unchanged from 2012, when 93 percent of Republicans voted for Mitt Romney.

While Biden’s potential appeal to your Republican uncle is often described as a product of Biden’s ideological moderation, there is no reason to assume that voters will make their decision based on some finely tuned understanding of ideology. There’s a temptation among those who pay a lot of attention to politics to believe that the average voter thinks the same way they do, but that has never been true, particularly in presidential elections.

It’s also important to remember that whoever the Democratic nominee is, those Republican voters will be absolutely bombarded with messages meant to enforce party loyalty, coming not just from Trump but also from every Republican they respect and admire. Joe Biden is a villain, a liar, a crook, they’ll be told, and he’d turn America into a socialist hellscape. A vote for him would be a betrayal of your party, your country, and everything you hold dear.

I’ll pause here and remark they would say the same of any Democratic candidate. It doesn’t make Joe particularly virtuous because it’s a lie. To continue.

It’s hard to know how Biden will stand up to that assault, because he has never been tested in that way. The attacks to which he has been subjected so far in this campaign, not to mention in his career to this point, are but a fraction of what he would face if he became the party’s nominee. And we know that his Republican friends in the Senate will not vouch for his goodwill. Quite the contrary; they have shown that they will do everything in their power to destroy him on Trump’s behalf.

Any Democratic nominee will face a similar version of the right’s campaign of vilification, not to mention a news media that is likely to rerun the “But Her Emails” debacle of 2016, elevating some small weakness or misstep in the Democrat’s history into a Watergate-level scandal. The most skilled candidates, like Obama and Bill Clinton, were able to overcome what was thrown at them, and it’s perfectly reasonable to ask which candidate is best able to withstand the assault.

Biden might be that candidate, but looking over his career I see reason for skepticism. Many Democrats are supporting him at the moment because of how they think Republicans will react to him at the end of what will be an utterly brutal general-election campaign. At that point, there will be no hypothetical or imagined open-minded Republicans, only real ones. Counting on them to vote for a Democrat isn’t a safe choice. It’s a gamble — one that might pay off, but not one with any guarantees.

The Neo Liberal system Institutional Democrats support is in its death throes, not only from Global Warming but its inherent fallacies. We had an opportunity in 2008 and Barack Hussein Obama, War Criminal and Accessory After The Fact to War Crimes (it’s true and saying Republicans are worse doesn’t make it any less so), blew it. A Vote for Joe is a vote for failure, a vote for endless War, a vote for more Corporatist Thievery.

I’d like to defend the guy because Unindicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio and the totally fake Ukraine thing, but his record is lengthy, stark, unblemished sellouts to Mammon when it’s not based on his own inherent racism and misogyny. I give you the Joe Bros which has at least the virtue of rhyming instead of relying on assonance. If he is the nominee there will be not just a second term, but a destruction of the Party System in the United States of America and I don’t know about you but I think it would be bad for my health and intend to get as far away from the fallout as I can.

(We write about politics all the time here. What makes you think otherwise?)

Pink Panther