From Brian Heath of Reuters:  “Sidney Powell – the lawyer behind the fantastical Kraken election lawsuits – has indicated that she will ask the Supreme Court whether it really meant that all of this election-conspiracy stuff should stay off of its lawn. …  (It did. The court very clearly indicated that this stuff is not welcome on its lawn.) … Always cool to try to sell the Supreme Court on your anonymous witness even though he was identified in the press yesterday and some of the stuff you’re saying about his credentials is demonstrably false and you knew it before you filed this. … I don’t actually see any of the Kraken cases on the Supreme Court’s docket yet, though, so who knows …..”

Reuters: “Twitter Inc said on Saturday it had ‘inadvertently’ limited engagements for a brief period on Donald Trump’s tweets with ‘disputed’ labels but later reversed its action. Some users on the social media platform had noticed earlier on Saturday that the ability to like, re-tweet or reply to Trump’s tweets with a ‘disputed’ label was not working. ‘We inadvertently took action to limit engagements on the labeled Tweet you referenced. This action has been reversed’, a Twitter spokesman told Reuters in an emailed statement. The White House did not comment.”

Sounds like the Dems are in good shape then. Read more here.

Des Moines Register: “The national Democratic Party ‘aggressively interjected itself’ into the 2020 Iowa caucuses, slowing down and complicating the development of a reporting app that crashed on caucus night and delayed the tallying of results, an audit of the process found. The Iowa Democratic Party commissioned the audit shortly after the Feb. 3 caucuses, hiring a pair of Democratic lawyers to examine the technical and procedural failures that prevented it from announcing a caucus winner for days after the high-profile contest ended. The party released the results to its State Central Committee Saturday morning. A copy was obtained by the Des Moines Register. Shadow Inc. designed the app for the Iowa Democratic Party, beginning its work in August. But the company’s CEO, Gerard Niemira, told Motherboard, an online tech publication, that ‘we didn’t have a final production version of this until pretty close to caucus time.'”

MyPillow founder, rabid Trump supporter and man propping up Tucker Carlson’s advertising single-handedly Mike Lindell tells a Fox News reporter that “We are one nation under God!” during a protest to overturn the November presidential election won by Democrat Joe Biden.

https://youtu.be/t0jk1HfR2ts

It is unclear if, by “under God,” Lindell was referring to a Supreme Being or to Donald Trump, who was flying overhead in Marine One as Lindell spoke.

Groundbreaking country music legend Charley Pride died from COVID-19 Saturday at the age of 86, Variety reports.

The first Black person to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, Pride received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Country Music Association last month, in a ceremony broadcast November 11th.  It would be his last public performance, during which he performed a duet of his classic “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin’,” with Jimmie Allen.

Born in Sludge, Mississippi, Pride was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2000.  He won three Grammy Awards in his career and was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Recording Academy in 2017.

Pride is survived by his wife of 64 years, Rozene, and their three children.

Saturday was not a good day for the Trump campaign’s legal efforts in Wisconsin.

A Trump-appointed federal judge in the Eastern District of Wisconsin dismissed a lawsuit by lame duck president Donald Trump to overturn the state’s election, and a Trump-endorsed state Supreme Court judge blistered a lawyer representing Trump’s interests in a state case.

“This Court has allowed plaintiff the chance to make his case and he has lost on the merits. In his reply brief, plaintiff ‘asks that the Rule of Law be followed.’ It has been,” judge Brett Ludwig, who was nominated and confirmed to the federal bench earlier this year, wrote to wrap up his opinion dismissing Trump’s lawsuit. 

An op/ed writer for the Wall Street Journal condescendingly implored Dr. Jill Biden, the incoming First Lady, to drop the use of the title “Doctor” because she isn’t a medical doctor.

“Madame First Lady—Mrs. Biden—Jill—kiddo: …” the column starts off, foretelling the stench of the piece by (non-Doctor of any kind) Joseph Epstein, a former editor of the Phi Beta Kappa magazine.  Epstein cites the fact that he, for some reason, was granted an honorary doctorate as a reason the title “Dr.” doesn’t really mean much anymore, although people who get an honorary doctorate are not typically referred to as “Dr.” in any serious setting.

Epstein “jokes” about his thin list of academic achievements, which includes getting a B.A. when he was in the military in the 1950s… and little else.  He was a lecturer at Northwestern University where, according to him, people mistakenly addressed him as “Doctor”–more evidence, he claims of the meaninglessness of the title. 

During a Friday meeting at the White House, a furious lame duck president Donald Trump pondered the possibility of firing Attorney General Bill Barr because Barr did not release information about an FBI investigation into Hunter Biden before the election, CNN reports.

The FBI investigation related to tax issues about reporting income Hunter Biden alleged made through his work in Ukraine and China.  Trump is upset Barr didn’t publicly release the information, which Trump believes would have damaged President-elect Joe Biden’s campaign.

Trump is also reportedly upset with news reports that Barr is considering leaving the administration before Biden takes office in 39 days.  It appears that Trump wants to play the “You didn’t break up with me….” game.

Politico: “President Donald Trump has made grievance a primary feature of his life and presidency, from the thousands of lawsuits he has filed to, most recently, his repeated claims of national election fraud. His opponents, and even many of his supporters, have wondered why he can’t seem to control his urges to lash out at perceived enemies. I am a violence researcher and study the role of grievances and retaliation in violent crime. Recently, I’ve been researching the way grievances affect the brain, and it turns out that your brain on grievance looks a lot like your brain on drugs. In fact, brain imaging studies show that harboring a grievance (a perceived wrong or injustice, real or imagined) activates the same neural reward circuitry as narcotics.”

“It’s worth asking whether this helps explain Trump’s fixation on his grievances and ways of exacting retribution for them. The hallmark of addiction is compulsive behavior despite harmful consequences. Trump’s unrelenting efforts to retaliate against those he believes have treated him unjustly (including, now, American voters) appear to be compulsive and uncontrollable. The harm this causes to himself and others is obvious but seems to have no deterrent effect. Reports suggest he has been doing this for much of his life. He seems powerless to stop. He also seems to derive a great deal of pleasure from it. The science of addiction provides another cautionary insight: Trump’s revenge habit hurts not only himself and the targets of his retaliatory wrath, but the rest of us, too.”

The Supreme Court had ZERO interest in the merits of the greatest voter fraud ever perpetrated on the United States of America. All they were interested in is “standing”, which makes it very difficult for the President to present a case on the merits. 75,000,000 votes!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 12, 2020

New York Times: “The Supreme Court repudiation of President Trump’s desperate bid for a second term not only shredded his effort to overturn the will of voters: It also was a blunt rebuke to Republican leaders in Congress and the states who were willing to damage American democracy by embracing a partisan power grab over a free and fair election. The court’s decision on Friday night, an inflection point after weeks of legal flailing by Mr. Trump and ahead of the Electoral College vote for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Monday, leaves the president’s party in an extraordinary position. Through their explicit endorsements or complicity of silence, much of the G.O.P. leadership now shares responsibility for the quixotic attempt to ignore the nation’s founding principles and engineer a different verdict from the one voters cast in November.”

“Many regular Republicans supported this effort, too – a sign that Mr. Trump has not just bent the party to his will, but pressed a mainstay of American politics for nearly two centuries into the service of overturning an election outcome and assaulting public faith in the electoral system. The G.O.P. sought to undo the vote by such spurious means that the Supreme Court quickly rejected the argument. Even some Republican leaders delivered a withering assessment of the 126 G.O.P. House members and 18 attorneys general who chose to side with Mr. Trump over the democratic process, by backing a lawsuit that asked the Supreme Court to throw out some 20 million votes in four key states that cemented the president’s loss.”

I have been doing this. I agree! https://t.co/1YTTGwxlxx

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 12, 2020

Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, ostensibly in DC for a MAGA protest rally outside the Supreme Court on Saturday, was apparently invited to the White House to meet with Trump, per his Parler:

Why did all the MAGAchurch Evangelicals waste all their prayer energy on killing the venerated liberal justice if her replacement was just going to toss the Texas lawsuit to overturn the election result in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin? We know at least one prominent MAGAchurch preacher guy did. And we know Trump’s whole objective in nominating Amy Coney Barrett was to help keep him in office, he said it like ten times on camera. It’s pretty safe to conclude many Evangelicals prayed for RBG to die and their prayers were answered.

Now I know the MAGA Evangelicals like to say things like “The Lord works in mysterious ways” and “His intent is unknowable” but that doesn’t apply here. It’s quite obvious that their prayers for the Supreme Court to overturn the election were answered with “Sorry, you have an insufficient balance in your Prayer Power Points™ wallet” since they burned them all on causing an old woman to die. There simply weren’t enough Sundays left before the election and then the Texas petition to refill the balance. It was a poor choice on their part and now they’re paying for it. If they were smarter, they would have prayed for the Almighty to morph into a giant God-zilla and lay waste to Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia – a divine intervention which would have definitely resulted in an electoral college victory for Trump. Sucks for them.