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Nancy Mace previews House hearing on AI deepfakes https://t.co/ZcJ0TzCQZr

— Fox News AI (@FoxNewsAI) November 4, 2023

• Democrats aren’t focusing on an important part of the last jobs report:  yes, jobs grew, but wages also went up more than inflation.  Net pay raises.  
• The Trumps are definitely those defendants who hired a “jury consultant” who told Ewic and Junior to wear soft, non-threatening light and pastel colors to signal to jurors that they’re not a threat, because their entire personae are based on 1980s schlock pop psychology. 
• God help Sam Bankman-Fried’s cellmate.  That white-collar criminal is going to do his time the hard way:  hearing about Sam Bankman-Fried 24/7.
• Reportedly, Lauren Boebert is trying real hard to be taken seriously as a politician.  She claims she’s concentrating more on issues with her constituents and wants to be a “serious leader.”  You can wipe off the clown makeup, but there’s always the video…
  Read More ▶ “Random thoughts Friday, Volume CXLV”

The Special Counsel’s office is not hitting a Happy Hour on Friday night, as they’re also filing notice in federal court in Florida that they want evidence of the bad lawyer’s advice he’s been talking about and he’s likely to use as a defense in his upcoming case. So Smith et al is asking for that bad advice Trump is relying on, throwing attorney-client privilege in doubt, and smartly, heading off future motions/delays.  (Why anyone would want to be a Trump lawyer is unknown because you have to know you’re the one he’s going to throw under the bus.  After Eric, I mean.)

The Government moves for pretrial notice of defendant Donald J. Trump’s intent to assert an advice-of-counsel defense and disclosure of any discovery related to it.  Defendant Trump (hereinafter “defendant”) has claimed publicly that he believes that the law allows him to “do what I want” with classified documents and further that he was “told” legal precedent did not require him to return them.  The Government is not aware of any valid basis for an advice-of-counsel defense, but, if asserted at trial, it would require inquiry into any attorney communications on which it is based, and, under precedent in this District, would require disclosure of any such attorney-client communications. Accordingly, in order to prevent disruption of the trial, the Government requests an order requiring advance notice of any advice-of-counsel defense and timely production of any associated discovery so that any legal issues can be fully resolved well in advance of trial. In filing this motion, the Government does not concede the appropriateness or viability of an advice-of-counsel defense, or that a jury instruction will be warranted.

Relying on highly technical legal arguments, Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office filed opposition to a coalition of networks’ effort to force the court to allow networks to televise the DC federal trial of Orangina Idiot Donald Trump for betraying the nation on January 6th, 2020 (and other occasions).  First, Smith argues the networks don’t have standing to sue, but then gets into court rules on who can and cannot decide what federal proceedings must/may be televised.  Basically, he argues the networks don’t have standing to move to have the proceedings televised; the court is the only one that can, and even the court’s power to decide to do so is limited by existing rules.

In a split decision, a three-judge panel of the Seventh Federal Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld Illinois recently enacted gun ban, consolidating conflicting decisions from other courts and handing Democratic Illinois Governor J.D. Pritzker a victory for a law passed in the wake of a 2022 mass shooting in Highland Park.

The law makes a differentiation between guns used for personal defense and those that can be used by “trained professionals” such as assault weapons like the AR-15. “There is a long tradition, unchanged from the time when the Second Amendment was added to the Constitution, supporting a distinction between weapons and accessories designed for military or law-enforcement use and weapons designed for personal use,” Judge Diane Wood said in the opinion. “The legislation now before us respects and relies on that distinction.”

Per the Associated Press, the case unites four suits from the Southern District of Illinois, one from Chicago, and one from a Naperville gun shop owner being supported by the National Association for Gun Rights.  The panel concluded that the plaintiffs in this case were not lucky to succeed in overturning the state ban on high-powered weapons.  In their case, NARG and gun store owner Robert Bevis made an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court to block the implementation of the law, but the Court declined in an unsigned notice.

Montana Congressman and haute bourgeoisie who misses his flag Ryan Zinke has drafted a bill that would expel all non-legal resident Palestinians from the United States, a petty move of bigotry directed at the people exercising their First Amendment rights.

“This legislation keeps America safe. I don’t trust the Biden Administration any more than I do the Palestinian Authority to screen who is allowed to come into the United States,” Zinke said. [Curiously on his website, Zinke has “Zinke said” in bold.]   “This is the most anti-Hamas immigration legislation I have seen and it’s well deserved. Given the circumstances, the threats to our immigration system and the history of terrorists abusing refugee, asylum and visa processes all over the world, the requirements in this bill are necessary to keep Americans safe. This bill does exactly that.”

The move is clearly a conservative attempt to shut down Free Speech, particularly from Palestinian students and refugees in the United States.  Obviously, this is another conservative who doesn’t understand First and Fourteenth Amendment rights for Free Speech and Equal Protection extend to all people, not just citizens.

With legal cases flying around the Trumps like a blender set on “Cocaine,” another case that’s been flying under the radar is the latest lawsuit E. Jean Carroll filed seeking additional damages against Donald Trump.  In an otherwise routine filing announcing that the jury in the case (as well as the pool of potential jurors) will have their identities protected–a filing so routine even Trump’s lawyers didn’t file a single motion regarding it–Judge Lewis Kaplan again noted something other judges apparently fail to acknowledge:  when Donald Trump attacks people with words, his followers will attack them physically:

For the reasons stated in the Court’s decision ordering the use of an anonymous jury in the trial of a closely related second case, Carroll v. Trump, the Court finds that “[i]f jurors’ identities [in the trial of this case] were disclosed, there would be a strong likelihood of unwanted media attention to the jurors, influence attempts, and/or harassment or worse by supporters of Mr. Trump and/or by Mr. Trump himself.  Indeed, in the very recent past, Mr. Trump has been fined twice for violating a gag order issued by a New York judge in response to comments made by Mr. Trump in relation to the judge’s clerk.  In view of Mr. Trump’s repeated public statements with respect to the plaintiff and court in this case as well as in other cases against him, and the extensive media coverage that this case already has received and that is likely to increase once the trial is imminent or underway, the Court finds that there is strong reason to believe the jury requires the protections prescribed below.

“On October 23, 2023, the defendant filed a 31-page motion to dismiss on constitutional grounds, ECF No. 113, and a 34-page motion to dismiss on statutory grounds, ECF No. 114. To avoid the repetition and cross-referencing that pervades the defendant’s separate motions,… the Government intends to file one omnibus opposition brief,” the Special Counsel’s office filed Friday evening relating to Trump’s DC federal case.  “Given the need to respond to 65 pages of motions, the Government’s filing will exceed the typical 45-page limit for a single brief but will come in well under the 90 pages to which the Government would be entitled if it filed separate opposition briefs. …The Government therefore seeks leave to file an oversized brief. The defendant, through counsel, opposes this motion.”

A Florida physics teacher was fired after using the trans-friendly non-binary courtesy title “Mx.” in their name in class materials distributed to students, the Orlando Sentinel reports, a violation of Republican presidential candidate and the best Florida had to offer (really?) Ron DeSantis’s anti-LGBTQ law denying the existence of non-straight people.

AV Vary, a teacher at Florida Virtual School who started identifying as non-binary earlier this year, was told they would have to choose a gender-specific pronoun and title set instead of using “Mx.”  They refused to do so, insisting on using the title “Mx.,” so they were fired October 24.

“Obviously, I’m not OK with that,” Vary said. “I think it’s a direct result of my gender identity.”  They have contacted lawyers and plan on launching an Equal Employment Opportunity complaint and will explore a lawsuit challenging the law on Constitutional grounds.

Fat former President Trump is free to intimidate witnesses and talk shit about Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith again for at least the next 17 days as a three judge panel – all Obama or Biden appointees – at the DC Court of Appeals on Friday took up the fat fuck’s “emergency appeal” of the gag order imposed by Circuit Judge Tanya Chutkan in the DC coup attempt case, setting a hearing for oral arguments for November 20th, Politico’s Kyle Cheney reports.

Disgraced former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’s book publisher All Seasons Press on Friday filed a lawsuit seeking $1 million in damages plus his royalties for breach of contract over Meadows reportedly having admitted to prosecutors he lied about the 2020 election being stolen in his lame ghostwritten memoir “The Chief’s Chief,” Meidas Touch reports.

Jonathan Dunn, a pilot recently fired from Delta Airlines after pulling a gun midair on the flight’s chief pilot who had ordered the plane diverted to treat a passenger in medical distress in August 2022, isn’t new to legal issues:  as a member of the US Air Force Reserve, he was also the chief plaintiff in a lawsuit against the Pentagon for mandating Covid vaccines, Military.com reports.

Authorized to carry a weapon on board thanks to post-9/11 regulations, Dunn threatened to pull the gun and shoot the pilot multiple times after the pilot decided to divert the flight to help the passenger.  He is currently facing charges for interfering with the crew of a commercial airline and for using a dangerous weapon to assault and intimidate in a federal court in Utah.

Apparently still a Lt. Colonel in the Air Force Reserves even after the gun-pulling incident, Dunn lost his April 2022 case before the Supreme Court challenging the Pentagon’s authority to punish him for refusing to get the Covid vaccine, claiming that he refused it on religious grounds because, he claimed, the vaccine was being treated with a “sacramental quality;” both the Air Force and the Supreme Court ruled against him, and he was ultimately stripped of his squadron command.

Manhattan Judge Arthur Engoron on Friday expanded the gag order he imposed on disgraced former President Trump last month prohibiting him from saying anything about his staff during the trial over New York Attorney General Letitia James’s $250 million lawsuit against his corrupt business empire to now apply to the fat fuck’s stupid lawyers too, CNN reports.

Engoron stuck it to Team Orange after defense counsel Chris Kise made a complete asshole out of himself by moving for a mistrial based on some stupid Breitbart article about political donations made by Engoron’s clerk, prompting the entire courtroom to laugh at him mockingly.

Whoa! Did you hear that a Dem candidate for a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates posted a video of herself peeing online, which makes it a “real” version of the legendary “pee tape” that libs mocked Trump and his fans over for years? Come on bro, it’s all over the hottest right wing media sites and it’s shaking up the tight race for control of the Virginia legislature, majorities in both chambers of which are up for grabs next week AND it’s completely separate from the “controversy” surrounding an entirely different Dem female candidate who has an OnlyFans page.

And yeah, it’s really goddamned stupid. We’re not embedding it, but it’s not anywhere close to what a tweet by “RRH Elections” implies with “Virginia #HD71 candidate Jessica Anderson (D) made a video of herself urinating in public in Freedom Park and posted it on the internet,” with “public” doing a lot of heavy lifting there. It’s seven seconds of her face while she’s squatting down on the side of a running trail in the middle of nowhere, saying “Yeah, I’m peeing… Avoid yellow snow.” But hey, at least the Post Millennial, Libs of TikTok, and all the other assholes got a “pee tape” headline out of it.

A few years before John F Kennedy Jr tragically and kind of stupidly plowed his plane into the waters off of Martha’s Vineyard, he had launched George magazine, a glossy Vanity Fair-ish monthly trying to make politics as glamorous as high fashion and entertainment and what not. George was already in deep financial trouble due to a lack of circulation and advertising sales by the time he died in July 1999 but his death accelerated its demise and it folded in 2001 under its new publishers.

For nearly two decades George was forgotten about, just another Generation X relic like those “No Fear” stickers and the Spin Doctors. Then for some fucking reason that remains opaque to us, JFK Jr became the elusive messiah of a large swath of the QAnon movement. Not for lack of trying, they were unable to will John Jr back into existence, so one of them, former Trump 2016 Campaign photographer and QAnon fan Gene Ho, did the next best thing by acquiring the name and logo of George last year, resurrecting the brand as a web-only publication instead. It’s not clear if Ho even needed to acquire it, for all we know it may have been simply abandoned by its old owners.

So what’s Robert F Kennedy Jr to do when the new George reaches out for an interview? Does he say “No! Get away from me you fucking freaks! My cousin was a sweet, charming kid and I still miss him every day! You sick assholes dishonor his memory with your deranged worship of him”?

No, lol. Bobby Jr sits down for an interview and, per Media Matters, wishes the magazine “the best of luck” and says that his late cousin would “really like this,” after preaching to the choir about intel agencies “manipulating the American press for many, many years” and all sorts of other shit. But yeah, RFK Jr is a real threat to Biden’s reelection chances. Democrat voters love him.

A fundraising email from Speaker of the House Mike Johnson says, literally, in bold print, “I refuse to put people over politics,” as part of his message for Conservative governance or whatever the hell he’s trying to get donors on board with, Politico’s Nicholas Wu reports.

A DC federal judge on Friday sentenced former Trump Administration State Department appointee Federico Klein to 70 months in the slammer for his crimes committed during the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection, including assaulting at least six police officers, ABC News reports.

It’s actually even dumber than what we described in the headline: Jason Smith is wondering out loud why Joe Biden isn’t reporting on his taxes the interest on money he lent to his brother. Not sure if it’s even worth mentioning how common the practice of charging interest on personal loans to family members is among most people, especially Northeastern Irish Catholics from a certain generation.

Which is to say it isn’t, at all. Worse yet for Smith is proof of such interest would give some extremely minuscule “evidence” that Joe had at least indirectly profited from his brother’s stupid scams. This should tell you all you need to know about where the House GOP is at right now.

The present state of Republican politics in Texas is such a clusterfuck it’s not much of an exaggeration to say it makes the United States House of Representatives’ GOP majority look like a picture of comity. Unfortunately with so much else going on nationally and globally we’ve been unable to cover it as regularly as we might have. Getting up to speed is even harder.

The broadest contour is this: State House Speaker Dade Phelan and Lt Governor Dan Patrick (in his capacity as president of the State Senate) are locked in a full blown civil war. A lot, but not all of it, has to do with Phelan’s caucus joining Dems to impeach Patrick’s ally, the deeply corrupt and Picasso-faced Attorney General Ken Paxton. So overwhelming was the vote that even if all 60 Dems hadn’t shown up it still wouldn’t have been close as Republicans voted 60 to 23 to impeach. Then the state Senate acquitted Pax with only two Republicans joining Dems voting to convict.

Then there’s this other shitshow with the chief of a major PAC linked to Patrick, Paxton, and other big time Republicans hosting Neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes at his company offices last month, something even fucking Kyle Rittenhouse didn’t want anything to do with. Plus there’s this school vouchers mess where Phelan is dragging his ass on getting Governor Low Energy Greg Abbott and Patrick’s plan passed in his chamber, no doubt chock full of batshit home schooling extremism.

Patrick and Paxton were already firing up the engines on a hardcore MAGA retribution machine to recruit primary challengers to the state House Republicans who voted to impeach the credibly accused white collar crime lord, and the Fuentes-PAC and school vouchers clusterfucks have only accelerated the engine. Among the villains stepping up is former Harris County Republican Party Chairman Jared Woodfill, a character you would say was too over-the-top if this story were fictional.