Good morning from my office stashed between the two stadiums in Seattle. It is 0500 on a Tuesday morning, where it is currently 36° F and overcast. It may warm up to a sweltering 46°F by 1400. So it’s a bit nippily out there today.
I wasn’t planning on posting anything today — I was expecting to be in meetings all day, but the GM caught COVID (remember that?) and is probably going to be out for the rest of the week.
So I hopped on this thing an started looking at the news.
Oy vey, what a friggin’ circus. I should have stuck with watching TikTok videos. You probably should also…
I sure could use a “Blanket Pardon”. I have so much I want to get away with…
Biden’s broken promise on pardoning his son Hunter is raising new questions about his legacy
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden’s decision to go back on his word and issue a categorical pardon for his son, Hunter, just weeks before his scheduled sentencing on gun and tax convictions was a surprise that wasn’t all that surprising.
Not to those who had witnessed the president’s shared anguish over his two sons after the boys survived a car crash that killed Biden’s first wife and a daughter more than a half-century ago. Or to those who heard the president regularly lament the death of his older son, Beau, from cancer or voice concerns — largely in private — about Hunter’s sobriety and health after years of deep addiction.
But by choosing to put his family first, the 82-year-old president — who had pledged to restore a fractured public’s trust in the nation’s institutions and respect for the rule of law — has raised new questions about his already teetering legacy.
“This is a bad precedent that could be abused by later Presidents and will sadly tarnish his reputation,” Colorado’s Democratic Gov. Jared Polis wrote in a post on X. He added that while he could sympathize with Hunter Biden’s struggles, “no one is above the law, not a President and not a President’s son.”
Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter rattles the political world
Reactions from both sides of the aisle poured in in the wake of the announcement, with Republicans expressing furor over the president’s pardon of his son.
President-elect Trump, in a post on his Truth Social platform, called Biden’s pardon of his son “an abuse and miscarriage of justice” Sunday.
“Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years? Such an abuse and miscarriage of Justice!” the president-elect said, referring to rioters who have been accused of storming the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021 attack.
Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), said in a statement posted to the social platform X on Sunday that the president “has lied from start to finish about his family’s corrupt influence peddling activities.”
“Not only has he falsely claimed that he never met with his son’s foreign business associates and that his son did nothing wrong, but he also lied when he said he would not pardon Hunter Biden,” Comer continued.
“Miscarriage of justice:” White House press secretary explains Biden pardon
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Monday explained President Biden’s process in his decision to pardon his son Hunter Biden.
The big picture: Biden’s decision to issue a presidential pardon for Hunter Biden, which he previously said he would not do, has been met with condemnation, including from members of the president’s own party.
Driving the news: Jean-Pierre told reporters aboard Air Force One on Monday that Biden said he made the decision over the weekend.
- The president said “he wrestled with this and, because he believes in the justice system, but he also believes that the raw politics infected the process and led to a miscarriage of justice,” Jean-Pierre said, per NBC News.
- She added, “Hunter was singled out, and because his last name was Biden, because he was the president’s son. That’s what we saw. And so the president believed enough is enough, and the president took action, and he also believes that they tried to break his son in order to break him.”
Here is my take on this whole “pardon” thing:
Pardons should be extremely rare, and for extenuating circumstances or mitigating factors where the punishment doesn’t fit the actions or crime. I don’t see Hunter Biden’s case having any of those factors.
A case could probably be made for a commutation of sentence in Hunter Biden’s case, but not a full-on pardon. Hunter Biden not only committed the crime(s) for which he’s charged, but he has admitted to them not once, but twice in his legal case.
The normal, pre-Trump-era process for pardons went through the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney, which is tasked with identifying and vetting worthy clemency recipients. The office mostly recommends full pardons for people who have already served their sentences.
Biden not only hasn’t served his sentence, he hasn’t even been sentenced yet. So the Office of the Pardon Attorney would never have recommended any kind of a pardon or clemency program.
This has been the system in place for at least seventy years. Prior to Trump, it is the system that every president since Truman has used when giving out pardons.
Joe Biden is not the first president to pardon a family member.
• Abraham Lincoln pardoned his wife Mary Todd Lincoln’s half-sister, Emilie Todd Helm for being the wife of a rebel general during the Civil War. Her husband was a Confederate general who was killed during the Battle of Chickamouga.
• Bill Clinton issued a pardon for his half-brother Roger Clinton for his 1985 conviction for selling cocaine to an undercover police officer. He received a sentence of a year in prison. I remember some kind of controversy around the pardon because Roger had also provided a list of other people to pardon — that Bill Clinton didn’t follow through on.
• Donald Trump issued a pardon to the father of his son-in-law, Charles Kushner. Kushner was convicted of 18 counts of “falsifying tax returns, retaliating against a witness and making false statements about campaign contributions to the Federal Election Commission.” The pardon was justified by citing Kushner’s philanthropic work.
The difference between Biden’s pardon of his son and the other three pardons by other presidents is that Hunter Biden has not even been sentenced yet, meaning there is not yet anything to commute. He hasn’t served a sentence, so the typical requirement for a pardon doesn’t yet exist.
When Trump was POTUS, I pulled no punches when it came to his use of the pardon pen. I don’t feel that any of the people that Trump pardoned deserved a pardon or commutation. Those were strictly political pardons and should never been granted.
While I am completely against Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter, I also find it hilarious that there are people on the Right who find Biden’s pardon of his son to be “The Worst Thing Ever”. To those people I say STFU. Where were you when Humpty Trumpy issued 238 politically-motivated pardons? Where will you be when Trump goes ahead and pardon’s most of the J6 rioters when he gets back into office?
First it was Greenland, now it is Canada?
Trump Suggested Canada Could Become 51st State to Justin Trudeau
Donald Trump suggested “maybe Canada should become the 51st state” when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told him his proposed tariffs would “kill the Canadian economy,” Fox News reports citing unnamed sources.
Trudeau met Trump at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida last week, after Trump threatened a 25 percent tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico unless the countries reduce migrants and drugs coming into the U.S.
The U.S. is Canada’s biggest trading partner by a distance, accounting for approximately 75 percent of Canada’s exports. The countries currently trade under a largely duty-free deal, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which was signed into law by Trump and took effect in 2020.
Fox News’ White House correspondent Peter Doocy told Special Report host Bret Baier on Monday evening: “We are told that when Trudeau told President-elect Trump that new tariffs would kill the Canadian economy, Trump joked to him that if Canada can’t survive without ripping off the U.S. the tune of one hundred billion dollars a year, then maybe Canada should become the 51st state and Trudeau could become its governor.”
I don’t think that many people really understand where we get our gasoline from. We don’t produce the proper crude oil for gasoline, we get it from Canada. If you think gasoline prices are high now, wait until Trump tacks on his 25% tariff on Canada.
So much for that “Mandate”…
Trump falls just below 50% in popular vote, but gets more than in past elections
President-elect Donald Trump got very close to a majority of the vote in this presidential election, but not quite. It is not exactly the “unprecedented and powerful mandate” Trump claimed on election night.
In fact, this year’s popular-vote margin is the second-closest since 1968 and still tightening. It shows just how closely divided the country is politically, and that any shift to the right is marginal.
Republicans are likely to have the same or a slightly smaller House majority as they have now, and despite new GOP control of the Senate, there is evidence that many Republicans in key states voted for Trump but not necessarily for Republican Senate candidates.
A county-level map of the United States showing how the presidential vote shifted between 2020 and 2024. In a majority of counties, the vote shifted more toward the Republican candidate.
2024 Election
Most of the country shifted right in the 2024 presidential election
With 96% of the vote in, Trump has, according to the Associated Press, 49.97% to Vice President Harris’ 48.36%, or 76.9 million votes to 74.4 million. (The U.S. Election Atlas has a higher raw vote total and a slightly narrower margin, 49.78% to 48.23, or 77.1 million votes to 74.7 million.)
It’s the highest percentage Trump has received in his three runs at the presidency. (He got just less than 46% in 2016 and less than 47% in 2020.) Votes are still being counted, including provisional and overseas ballots across the country.
A majority of eligible voters don’t bother voting. Unlike countries like Australia, which requires its citizens to vote, the US takes the opposite approach: We like to try and keep people FROM voting.
But of the people who did bother to vote, you would like to hope that the candidate who won the vote might actually have gotten the most votes, but that isn’t always the case. Especially if the candidate is a Republican.
“They are eating …”
Ohio Woman Charged With Killing, Eating Cat Pleads Guilty To Animal Cruelty
The Ohio woman charged with killing and eating a cat today pleaded guilty to animal cruelty and was sentenced to a year in jail, records show.
Allexis Ferrell, 27, copped to the felony charge during a hearing in Stark County’s Court of Common Pleas.
Ferrell was arrested in late-August after she killed the animal by “stomping its head then eating the cat” on the grounds of the Canton public housing complex where she resided. Ferrell has been locked up in the county jail on $100,000 bond since the incident.
Police responding to a 911 call found Ferrell squatting next to the dead feline. She had blood on her feet and hands, and fur on her lips, cops reported. The pet’s owner has not been identified.
“Did you eat that cat?” a cop asked Ferrell, according to police bodycam footage. “Why’d you kill it?” Ferrell remained mute as the officer contacted dispatch and asked, “Will you call the Humane Society to see if they’ll come pick this cat up? It’s deceased.”
ONE person, and she an American citizen suffering from mental illness. Hardly the claim that JD Vance had made about immigrants eating your pets…
Wait, what? Dinesh D’Souza was wrong after all?
Dinesh D’Souza apologizes for false claims in election conspiracy theory film ‘2000 Mules’
Far-right provocateur and pardoned felon Dinesh D’Souza has issued an apology over false accusations he made in his 2022 election conspiracy theory movie 2000 Mules, acknowledging that his claims about illegal “ballot trafficking” during the 2020 presidential election were misleading and inaccurate.
In a lengthy statement posted to his website on Sunday, D’Souza said that his movie — which asserts that “mules” were paid to fraudulently deposit harvested ballots in swing states — had relied on “cell phone geolocation data” provided by conservative non-profit group True the Vote. That data, D’Souza noted, had turned out to be false.
“We were assured that the surveillance videos had been linked to geolocation cell phone data, such that each video depicted an individual who had made at least 10 visits to drop boxes. Indeed, it is clear from the interviews within the film itself that True the Vote was correlating the videos to geolocation data,” he wrote. “We recently learned that surveillance videos used in the film may not have actually been correlated with the geolocation data.”
Adding that his movie and companion book created the “impression that these individuals were mules that had been identified as suspected ballot harvesters” based on True the Vote’s cell phone data, D’Souza conceded that these people were wrongfully accused of misconduct.
Oh, the arguments that some of you had here back then about the stolen election. A couple of you really leaned into D’Souza’s claims — and they turned out to be bullshit.
This is an actual headline:
Did a couple really have sex on an elephant at that exhibit in Miami Beach? What we know
A couple got a little too excited about an unusual public art installation in Miami Beach early last week.
Page Six originally reported that a security guard caught two people having “loud sex” at the “Great Elephant Migration,” 100 life-size sculptures of elephants that were installed on the sand near 36th Street Park for Miami Art Week. The amorous pair were atop of one of the animals, which are made out of a repurposed invasive weed called Lantana camara by a team of artisans in India. The installation’s goal is to inspire conversations about coexistence with animals and conservation. Money raised from the sale of the pachyderms goes to support different environmental organizations.
A representative for the exhibit, which was organized by the Real Elephant Collective, confirmed the incident to Miami.com in an email.
“Tuesday night, a security guard heard strange noises and went over with his flashlight to investigate,” the rep wrote in an email. “Apparently, he saw a couple having sex on top of one of the larger elephants. We do not know how they got up there.”
Without context, the headline is misleading.
The Bibi Files — The Leaked Tapes
The Bibi Files contains leaked footage of the Israeli PM being interrogated by police over allegations of corruption – and argues that these are partly why he has taken the region into the abyss. We meet the journalist behind it
The Bibi Files, a new documentary, begins with its eponymous antihero, Benjamin Netanyahu, being read his rights by police interrogators. His oblong, jowled face is well known – Netanyahu has been Israel’s prime minister for a total of 17 years – but we are accustomed to seeing him in charge of events, behind a lectern haranguing his country and the world beyond. We have never seen him like this.
Late last year, videos of police questioning of Netanyahu, his family, his rich backers and his disillusioned aides were leaked to Alex Gibney, an Oscar-winning American documentary maker and one of the producers of The Bibi Files. The tapes were recorded between 2016 and 2018 and appear for the first time in The Bibi Files, which premiered at festivals in Toronto and New York but still cannot be viewed in Israel.
During the questioning, we see Netanyahu project derision, bewilderment, boredom – and anger
From the outset, we see Netanyahu literally backed into a corner, behind his desk, fending off a barrage of questions about lavish gifts which the police claim he received in return for favours, and about political favours that they claim were bestowed in return for flattering news coverage.
The leaked tapes themselves are compelling, but the director, Alexis Bloom, seeks to go further. The Bibi Files appears to draw a bright, bold, causal line between Netanyahu’s 2019 corruption indictment and the current state of the region. Netanyahu has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, alleging he is the victim of a politically motivated witch-hunt orchestrated by liberal media and a biased justice system, and he formally pleaded not guilty in a trial which has now continued, off and on, since 2020. However, the film argues that the trial is part of the reason a desperate Netanyahu took his country and the surrounding region into the abyss. Netanyahu has said throughout the war that he is motivated by the need to reestablish Israel’s security.
I’m going to have to see the documentary first, before passing my judgment…
From the Meme Box:
Xitter is losing participants fairly fast, now that Bluesky is up and running now.
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