Meritocracy on the docket for October.
The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear challenges to the admissions process at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, presenting the most serious threat in decades to anti white and anti Asian racism in the nation’s public and private colleges and universities.
abandoning considerations of race “would cause a sharp decline in the percentage of unqualified African American and Hispanic students.”
Small corrections above, since it’s NBC after all.
Why do I get the feeling NBC is frontrunning this story, to drum up concern and rally the never-Trumpers from last election, so that it doesn’t end up happening?
Isn’t he just using Democrat talking points to frame the points he’s making?
There’s a lotta chatter about Russia / Ukraine in politics recently, and the US is looking fairly unimpressive towards stopping an invasion of the latter by the former. You might be quick to write this off to executive incompetence, but perhaps not, or at least this might not be a bad outcome for the US nationally.
If Putin is successful in subjugating Ukraine, it will open doors elsewhere, especially as regards Taiwan soon as the Olympics conclude. And with weak sisters Germany and France on our team, Putin has a good chance if he is willing to pay the price. And he knows this.
Totalitarians like Putin and Xi are bloodhounds when it comes to smelling weakness as pronounced as Biden’s. We have no chance with him at the helm.
Remember to bold Reagan walkout at Reykjavik? Biden would NEVER have had the cajones to pull that off.
Biden yesterday called Peter Doocy’s mother a “bitch”. There was no apology. Biden does not even know Doocy’s mother and neither she nor her son had attacked him in any way.
Women who prior viewed Biden as their friend and supporter now understand better the extent of his disrespect, depravity, and desperation.
Satire? I bet the current admin is playing up their responses just to do something else besides suck domestically
Hey, that’s no joke for anyone who remembers (Bill) Clinton and the aspirin factory!
Intentional lies and purposeful distortions
Distractions
Sleight of hand
Bright shiny objects
Dirty tricks
There you have a short list of the Democrat Party playbook.
Another policy take on Russian relations
Breyer retiring from the Supreme Court. Guess they’re worried they can’t get anyone confirmed after midterms and might lose 2024?
I say it’s better than 50-50 that the Biden handlers’ nominee will be transgender🥸
The nominee will be at least as far to the left as Sotomayor, only even more woke . . . . if that is possible.
I wonder if she (it has to be a woman) will be so far out that even Manchin and Sinema have a problem.
I’m thinking a black woman. How about Anita Hill? That would be an interesting cage match.
Of course it must be a black woman. The only question is whether they were a man before they thought they were a woman 
Meanwhile, in San Fran, likely Biden voters are responsible for nearly all of the over 500% increase in Asian hate crimes.
I mean, there aren’t any Trump voters in San Fran right? It went 85%+ to Biden, and some of the rest were to far left minor candidates.
That would be interesting but I just looked it up and she was born July 30, 1956. That means she will be 66 this July. Probably too old since they want someone who will serve 30 or 40 years.
This very interesting article from Time is pursuant to the Breyer replacement:
BY PHILIP ELLIOTT
JANUARY 26, 2022 1:55 PM EST
Within moments of widespread media reports that Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer will retire when the current term ends this summer, the Washington parlor game of making a short list of judges President Joe Biden might consider to replace him began. After all, Biden had pledged during the campaign that he would nominate a Black woman to the nine-Justice panel in an historic first.
There’s one major problem facing Biden’s prospects, though: he might not be able to win confirmation for the expected pick. So much of influence in Washington isn’t in the press conferences or performative turns on cable news. The real power comes from mastering the process by which it is transferred, accumulated and defended. And, when it comes to managing a generational shift of power in America’s judicial system, no one has proven more adept than Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
The Senate is split 50-50, with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking the tie. So far, so good, given past Senators have changed the rules for judicial nominees to get across the finish line with just 51 votes. The so-called nuclear option is meant as a last resort, but with the exception of Chief Justice John Roberts, none of the current conservative Justices cleared a 60-vote benchmark.
But the nuclear option can go into motion only if the Judiciary Committee reports the nomination to the floor, a procedural move that says whether a majority on the committee recommends the full Senate consider the pick. Well, in a little-noticed backroom deal that took more than a month to hammer out, McConnell and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer agreed to a power-sharing plan in February that splits committee membership, staffs and budgets in half. (A full nonpartisan analysis from the Congressional Research Service regarding the current process for nominees is here.)
Why does this matter? If all 11 Republican members of the Judiciary Committee oppose Biden’s pick and all 11 Democrats back her, the nomination goes inert. (A pretty safe bet in a committee where at least half of the Republican members have White House ambitions of their own.) The nomination doesn’t die, but it does get parked until a lawmaker—historically, the Leader of the party—brings it to the floor for four hours of debate.
A majority of the Senate—51 votes, typically—can then put debate about the issue on the calendar for the next day. But that’s the last easy part. When the potential pick comes to the floor again, it’s not as a nomination. At that point, it’s a motion to discharge, a cloture motion that requires 60 votes. In other words, 10 Republicans would have to resurrect the nomination of someone already blocked in the Judiciary Committee.
Given this is an election year and Republicans have historically shown they’re not willing to give Democrats any wins on the Supreme Court in such a politically charged environment, there’s a good chance that Biden’s nominee spends her summer waiting for invites that never come from GOP lawmakers asking her in for typically cordial and informal coffees.
So, yes, Biden may get to nominate a pick for the Supreme Court. But there’s no guarantee that the full Senate will take it up. After all, McConnell successfully rejected Merrick Garland’s nomination in 2016 and waited for Donald Trump to win the White House to install a replacement for Antonin Scalia. McConnell narrowly carved out selected history and dug his heels in that he wouldn’t bring Garland up for a vote. There was simply nothing Democrats could do about it.
And given the rules of the Senate as they stand, a resolute Republican Party can pull a sequel to the Garland nomination. Sure, the Democrats could try to change the power-sharing agreement, but as the debate on voting rights showed us in recent weeks, one hold-out voice among Democrats in favor of the filibuster can tank the plan with little consequence. Which means all of the odds-making about who might get the call from White House Counsel in the coming days, who might get tapped to sherpa the nomination through the Senate or even what this means for the next term are all likely for naught. Republicans, should they want to, can sink this nominee. And if history is predictive, that’s exactly what they’ll do.
Given the above writing from Time, I have an additional thought:
Justice Breyer is beyond doubt a liberal. But of the three liberals currently on the Court, he is the person least to the left. He is no Sotomayor, for example. He is not a wild-eyed radical liberal, an AOC-style liberal if you will.
But given his administration so far, I think Biden will nominate and seek confirmation for a radical liberal Justice, one FAR more to the left than Justice Breyer. That has been Biden’s course so far on everything else, casting shade even on Bernie Sanders.
So if Mitch does exercise the power move above outlined, it might be to protect our country from elevation to the Court of such a radical liberal. As Biden seeks to stretch as far to the left as he can with his nominee, Mitch might step in, exercise his power, and say: This far and no further.
There were times, in the past, I was willing to condemn (what appeared to me to be) John Durham’s incompetence. Now I’m realizing how unfair, and how wrong, that evaluation was. The extent of the secretive, despicable, and corrupt efforts on the left to impugn Trump surpass my imagination. It is more difficult for me today to blame Trump for not realizing what was going on when Durham’s full scale investigation is even now encountering these sorts of roadblocks. The anti-Trump conspiracy continues apace. And of course there are zero revelations in the equally corrupt American mainstream media. It’s all happening in the shade.
Special Counsel John Durham suggested the Justice Department’s watchdog sat on key information about debunked Trump-Russia collusion claims, including a critical 2017 meeting it held with a defendant but only disclosed earlier this month.
The defendant, former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, is under indictment for allegedly lying to an FBI official in 2016 while pushing debunked claims of secret communications between a Russian bank and the Trump Organization.
But in a Tuesday court filing, Durham said he only learned a week ago that Sussmann had a subsequent meeting in March of 2017 with DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who conducted his own investigation into Trump-Russia matters, including claims about former President Donald Trump and Alfa Bank.
“The OIG had not previously informed the Special Counsel’s Office of this meeting with the defendant,” Durham’s team said in the filing.
Durham’s team had met with Horowitz in October and followed up with a discovery request for information relevant to its inquiry of the Russia investigation origins. Horowitz provided transcripts of interviews his office had conducted, including a report about a “cyber-related matter” Sussmann brought to the inspector general’s attention in early 2017.
The report said Sussmann told an agent in Horowitz’s office that one of Sussmann’s clients claimed a DOJ inspector general employee’s computer was “seen publicly” in “internet traffic” and had connected to a virtual private network in a foreign country.
What Horowitz failed to reveal, according to Durham, was that he personally met with Sussmann in March 2017 to discuss the mysterious report. Durham only learned of that meeting during a Jan. 20 call with Sussmann’s lawyers, according to the filing, and the DOJ watchdog discussed it with Durham’s team for the first time the next day after being asked about it.
Durham also said his team only learned this month that Horowitz was holding two FBI cellphones belonging to FBI general counsel James Baker, the official whom Sussmann allegedly lied to, along with forensic analysis of the phones, which Durham is now reviewing.
Durham contends that while Sussmann told Baker he was not working for any particular client, he was secretly doing the bidding of Clinton’s campaign and billing his services to her — as well as working on behalf of technology executive Rodney Joffe. Sussmann has pleaded not guilty.
The new filing by Durham also revealed that Democratic lawyer Marc Elias, who funded British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s discredited dossier while he was the Clinton campaign’s top lawyer in 2016, has testified before the grand jury.
Although the Trump-Alfa Bank claims were not part of the dossier, Steele pushed them to the media, to State Department officials, and to at least one high-ranking DOJ official. The Obama administration officials forwarded Steele’s Alfa Bank claims to the FBI in late 2016.
Steele testified in a British court that Sussmann provided him with claims about Alfa Bank’s purported ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin during a July 2016 meeting.
Clinton herself tweeted in the closing days of the 2016 race allegations that the Russian bank collaborated with Trump. She also shared a statement from Jake Sullivan, then her foreign policy adviser and now President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, on the “New Report Exposing Trump’s Secret Line of Communication to Russia.”
Horowitz’s lengthy December 2019 report on the flawed Trump-Russia investigation revealed that the FBI by early 2017 had concluded there were no links between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank.
The Office of the OIG is supposed to be above reproach. Also, pigs can fly. What a sack of corruption and s**t.
Just to elaborate on what this means:
Of course, we need to ignore the fact that even if they manage to pull off step one (with Harris casting the tie-breaking vote in her own confirmation?), there would then be no VP to break a Senate tie when confirming a new VP. And that’s being said without even knowing if there is such a tie-breaking vote in such confirmation votes, or if confirmation requires a clean majority.
While it may not be a far-fetched idea in theory - I’m sure many Democrats would consider this a dream scenario - the Democrats lack any means of executing it. It really says a lot that the response is to callusly ridicule the idea, rather than simply point out how it wouldnt be possible under current circumstances.