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‘The bell of stupidity’: Conservative’s Christmas video lampoons Trump’s latest speech
President Donald Trump was supposed to prioritize the economy at a MAGA rally last week — but instead rambled about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and other familiar foes.
In a Christmas-themed video, The Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson (a Never Trump conservative former GOP strategist) and journalist Molly Jong-Fast brutally mocked the speech for failing to get the desired economic message across.
Jong-Fast told Wilson, "Let's talk about how positively b----- the whole thing is. It was meant to be a rally on affordability. Here's what was not discussed: affordability. Here's what was discussed: Marjorie Taylor Greene. He calls her Marjorie Traitor Brown."
Wilson, sounding amused, interjected, "And I'm also intrigued by how she's somehow a leftist."
Jong-Fast told the Never Trumper, "It has really been a week for Trump."
Wilson laid out a variety of ways in which Trump and the MAGA movement are having a bad Christmas, from the Epstein files to the economy.
"There is no unringing this bell of stupidity," Wilson told Jong-Fast. "They have f----- it up. They have made a giant mistake."
- YouTube www.youtube.com
Trump Supreme Court battle could be dismantled by Congress members’ own history
New evidence is emerging that could deal a major blow to President Donald Trump's case for stripping birthright citizenship to the children of immigrants.
The president has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to restore “the original meaning” of the 14th Amendment, which his lawyers argued in a brief meant that “children of temporary visitors and illegal aliens are not U.S. citizens by birth," but new research raises questions about what lawmakers intended the amendment to do, reported the New York Times.
"One important tool has been overlooked in determining the meaning of this amendment: the actions that were taken — and not taken — to challenge the qualifications of members of Congress, who must be citizens, around the time the amendment was ratified," wrote Times correspondent Adam Liptak.
A new study will be published next month in The Georgetown Law Journal Online examining the backgrounds of the 584 members who served in Congress from 1865 to 1871. That research found more than a dozen of them might not have been citizens under Trump’s interpretation of the 14th Amendment, but no one challenged their qualifications.
"That is, said Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia and an author of the study, the constitutional equivalent of the dog that did not bark, which provided a crucial clue in a Sherlock Holmes story," Liptak wrote.
The 14th Amendment states that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside," while the Constitution requires members of the House of Representatives to have been citizens for at least seven years, and senators for at least nine.
“If there had been an original understanding that tracked the Trump administration’s executive order,” Frost told Liptak, “at least some of these people would have been challenged.”
Only one of the nine challenges filed against a senator's qualifications in the period around the 14th Amendment's ratification involved the citizenship issue related to Trump's interpretation of birthright citizenship, and that case doesn't support his position.
"Several Democratic senators claimed in 1870 that their new colleague from Mississippi, Hiram Rhodes Revels, the first Black man to serve in Congress, had not been a citizen for the required nine years," Liptak wrote. "They reasoned that the 14th Amendment had overturned Dred Scott, the 1857 Supreme Court decision that denied citizenship to the descendants of enslaved African Americans, just two years earlier and that therefore he would not be eligible for another seven."
"That argument failed," the correspondent added. "No one thought to challenge any other members on the ground that they were born to parents who were not citizens and who had not, under the law in place at the time, filed a declaration of intent to be naturalized."
"The consensus on the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause has long been that everyone born in the United States automatically becomes a citizen with exceptions for those not subject to its jurisdiction, like diplomats and enemy troops," Liptak added.
Frost's research found there were many members of Congress around the time of the ratification of the 14th Amendment who wouldn't have met Trump's definition of a citizen, and she said that fact undercuts the president's arguments.
“If the executive order reflected the original public meaning, which is what the originalists say is relevant,” Frost said, “then somebody — a member of Congress, the opposing party, the losing candidate, a member of the public who had just listened to the ratification debates on the 14th Amendment, somebody — would have raised this.”
Man sentenced for sending 12,000 threatening calls to Congressional offices
A New Yorker who sent thousands of threatening phone calls to members of Congress was sentenced to prison Tuesday, federal prosecutors said.
Ade Salim Lilly, of Queens, was sentenced Tuesday to 13 months in prison and three years of supervised release, prosecutors in Washington, D.C. said in a news release.
Authorities said Lilly threatened to kill a Congressional staffer and unleashed a "campaign of pervasive harassing communications" against lawmakers.
Lilly pleaded guilty May 30 to interstate communications with a threat to kidnap or injure and repeated telephone calls.
ALSO READ: The real reason corporate media won't cover Trump's attacks on democracy
Court documents showed Lilly made 12,000 calls for about 21 months beginning in February 2022 to about 54 offices in Congress across the country, both in district offices and offices in the nation's capital. Of those, about half were to offices in Washington, D.C.
Most of the calls were answered by staffers or interns, and in some of them, Lilly became enraged, using vulgar and harassing language, authorities said. Lilly tried to disguise his calls and at one point threatened to kill or harm one of the people who answered.
"I will kill you, I am going to run you over, I will kill you with a bomb or grenade," he told the employee.
Man sentenced for sending 12,000 threatening calls to Congressional offices
A New Yorker who sent thousands of threatening phone calls to members of Congress was sentenced to prison Tuesday, federal prosecutors said.
Ade Salim Lilly, of Queens, was sentenced Tuesday to 13 months in prison and three years of supervised release, prosecutors in Washington, D.C. said in a news release.
Authorities said Lilly threatened to kill a Congressional staffer and unleashed a "campaign of pervasive harassing communications" against lawmakers.
Lilly pleaded guilty May 30 to interstate communications with a threat to kidnap or injure and repeated telephone calls.
ALSO READ: The real reason corporate media won't cover Trump's attacks on democracy
Court documents showed Lilly made 12,000 calls for about 21 months beginning in February 2022 to about 54 offices in Congress across the country, both in district offices and offices in the nation's capital. Of those, about half were to offices in Washington, D.C.
Most of the calls were answered by staffers or interns, and in some of them, Lilly became enraged, using vulgar and harassing language, authorities said. Lilly tried to disguise his calls and at one point threatened to kill or harm one of the people who answered.
"I will kill you, I am going to run you over, I will kill you with a bomb or grenade," he told the employee.
Judge: RFK Jr. must remain on Michigan ballots and officials can ignore candidate ‘whims’
A Michigan judge ruled Tuesday that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. must remain on the ballot in that state, even after he suspended his campaign in there and threw his support behind former President Donald Trump.
The environmental lawyer and conspiracy theorist suspended his independent campaign last month and vowed to take himself off the ballot in every battleground state, to avoid stealing votes from Trump.
In Michigan, Kennedy sued and asked to remove his name from the ballot after Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said it was impossible for minor party candidates to withdraw.
"Minor party candidates cannot withdraw, so his name will remain on the ballot in the November election," Cheri Hardmon, senior press secretary for Benson, told Axios in a statement last week.
ALSO READ: Dem leaders keep shrugging off Moms for Liberty — even as Trump keeps grooming them
RFK sued on Friday and said the election could the 2024 election "could be drastically changed, and the electorate's votes diminished and rendered invalid, if the Michigan Bureau of Elections places a name on a ballot for an individual that withdrew' from the race, Axios reported.
However, Michigan Court of Claims Judge Christopher Yates ruled in favor of the secretary of state, and said elections are "not just games, and the Secretary of State (SOS) is not obligated to honor the whims of candidates for public office."
The news won't come as a surprise to many experts.
Analysts have said Kennedy cannot take himself off the ballot in Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin due to various state laws and passed deadlines.
In Wisconsin, the state's Elections Commission voted that Kennedy could not be removed from the ballot.
Trump’s ‘desperate’ and ‘half-baked’ IVF proposal incompatible with platform: columnist
Donald Trump's running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), has been drawing widespread criticism not only for his attacks on "childless cat ladies" and "childless Democrats" who have decided against having children, but also, for his insensitivity to couples who have struggled with fertility. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris' running mate, and his wife Gwen Walz have been calling Vance out.
Gwen Walz, during an "Educators for Harris-Walz" event on August 30, commented, "Now, I read that JD Vance said he was really disturbed by teachers who don't have biological children. Well, for a long time, Tim and I were teachers who struggled with infertility, and we were only able to start a family because of fertility treatments. So, this is really personal for me, and I think it is for millions of Americans. We do not take kindly to folks like JD Vance telling us when or how to start our families."
Trump, meanwhile, has responded to the IVF controversy by campaigning on free IVF (in vitro fertilization) treatments for women — a proposal that The Guardian's Arwa Mahdawi slams as "desperate" and "half-baked" in a biting September 3 column.
ALSO READ: Something broke Trump’s brain
"While it may be half-baked, Trump's free IVF policy makes it clear that he is desperate to woo female voters," Mahdawi argues. "Women have registered and voted at higher rates than men in every U.S. presidential election since 1980, and now — for obvious reasons — they are leaning heavily towards Kamala Harris. I'm not sure a last-minute IVF policy is going to cancel out the fact that abortion rights are a key issue in this election and Trump has boasted about being the guy who overturned Roe v. Wade. Nor will it cancel out the fact that Trump is a legally defined sexual predator who can't stop himself from saying every misogynistic thought that creeps into his little head."
According to the New York Times, Vance applauded a series of essays from the Heritage Foundation — creators of the controversial Project 2025 — that included vehement opposition to IVF.
Mahdawi stresses that IVF is incompatible with Republican "fetus personhood" proposals, which means that "Trump seems to be running on a platform where IVF would be free but also effectively illegal."
"Free IVF may sound like a progressive policy on the surface," Mahdawi writes, "but for many on the right, it is linked to a belief that women are nothing more than baby-making machines designed to pass on the legacy of men. A future Donald J. Trump Insemination Institute may not be as far-fetched as it sounds."
Arwa Mahdawi'sfull column for The Guardian is available at this link.
Defamed Georgia election workers ask court to give them control of Rudy Giuliani’s assets
Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the two Georgia election workers who were defamed by former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani in the wake of the 2020 presidential election, have taken a bold step to collect the damages that jurors awarded them last year.
Politico's Kyle Cheney flags a new filing from Freeman and Moss's attorneys in which they ask the United States Court for the Southern District of New York to give their clients control over Giuliani's assets.
In their filing, the attorneys argue that Giuliani has tried to evade accountability for months by using assorted stall tactics, and that it's now time for the court to put its foot down.
"Mr. Giuliani has spent years evading accountability for his actions -- first in litigation in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (the 'D.C. District Court'), and then in chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings that Mr. Giuliani commenced in this District," they write. "In this motion, Plaintiffs seek two remedies to which they are entitled under New York law: an order requiring Mr. Giuliani to turn over personal property in his possession in satisfaction of the judgment, and an order appointing Plaintiffs as receivers with the power to take possession of, and sell, both real and personal property that Mr. Giuliani does not turn over."
ALSO READ: Trump's old tricks lose power as Harris' mojo gains momentum
The attorneys went on to describe these measures as "overwhelmingly justified under New York law," especially since Giuliani "has proven time and again that he will never voluntarily comply with court orders."
They then cite Giuliani's decision to "willfully ignore" the discovery process during their defamation lawsuit.
"At every step, Mr. Giuliani has chosen evasion, obstruction, and outright disobedience," the filing emphasizes. "That strategy reached the end of the line here."
After the 2020 election, Giuliani falsely accused Freeman and Moss of working to steal the election from former President Donald Trump on behalf of President Joe Biden.
After an investigation was conducted, it was determined that Giuliani's allegations were completely false and a jury determined that he defamed Freeman and Moss.
‘I’m trying not to cry’: Gold Star mom wounded by Trump’s thumbs-up photo near son’s grave
A Gold Star mother condemned Donald Trump for staging a campaign event just feet away from where her son is buried.
Karen Meredith's son, First Lieutenant Kenneth Ballard, was laid to rest in Section 60 – known as the saddest acre in America – after he was killed in Najaf, Iraq, in 2004, and the California resident is angry that the former president and current Republican nominee recorded a video nearby to use for his re-election campaign, reported The Atlantic.
“It’s not a number, not a headstone,” Meredith said. “He was my only child.”
ALSO READ: The real reason corporate media won't cover Trump's attacks on democracy
Trump took part in a wreath-laying ceremony honoring 13 American soldiers killed three years ago in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan, posed for a thumbs-up photo with two Gold Star families who spoke at the Republican National Convention and then shared video of the occasion on TikTok.
“We didn’t lose one person in 18 months," Trump says in the video's narration, "and then [the Biden administration] took over, that disaster of leaving Afghanistan.”
A cemetery employee attempted to remind the campaign staff that campaign activities, especially photos and videos, are expressly forbidden under federal law, but two Trump staffers shoved her aside and a spokesman later suggested she was suffering from mental illness and his campaign manager called her "despicable" and asked for her dismissal.
“Partisan activities are inappropriate in Arlington National Cemetery," the regulations state, "due to its role as a shrine to all the honored dead of the Armed Forces of the United States and out of respect for the men and women buried there and for their families.”
Meredith said the area where her son is buried has hosted family get-togethers that are not exactly solemn, because children are often present, but she's shocked and disgusted by the former president's blithe indifference to the sanctified setting.
“We laugh, we pop champagne," Meredith said. "I have met men who served under him and they speak of him with such respect, and to think that this man came here and put his thumb up—”
“I’m trying not to cry," she added, taking a gulp of air.
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‘The bell of stupidity’: Conservative’s Christmas video lampoons Trump’s latest speech
President Donald Trump was supposed to prioritize the economy at a MAGA rally last week — but instead rambled about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and other familiar foes.
In a Christmas-themed video, The Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson (a Never Trump conservative former GOP strategist) and journalist Molly Jong-Fast brutally mocked the speech for failing to get the desired economic message across.
Jong-Fast told Wilson, "Let's talk about how positively b----- the whole thing is. It was meant to be a rally on affordability. Here's what was not discussed: affordability. Here's what was discussed: Marjorie Taylor Greene. He calls her Marjorie Traitor Brown."
Wilson, sounding amused, interjected, "And I'm also intrigued by how she's somehow a leftist."
Jong-Fast told the Never Trumper, "It has really been a week for Trump."
Wilson laid out a variety of ways in which Trump and the MAGA movement are having a bad Christmas, from the Epstein files to the economy.
"There is no unringing this bell of stupidity," Wilson told Jong-Fast. "They have f----- it up. They have made a giant mistake."
- YouTube www.youtube.com
Trump Supreme Court battle could be dismantled by Congress members’ own history
New evidence is emerging that could deal a major blow to President Donald Trump's case for stripping birthright citizenship to the children of immigrants.
The president has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to restore “the original meaning” of the 14th Amendment, which his lawyers argued in a brief meant that “children of temporary visitors and illegal aliens are not U.S. citizens by birth," but new research raises questions about what lawmakers intended the amendment to do, reported the New York Times.
"One important tool has been overlooked in determining the meaning of this amendment: the actions that were taken — and not taken — to challenge the qualifications of members of Congress, who must be citizens, around the time the amendment was ratified," wrote Times correspondent Adam Liptak.
A new study will be published next month in The Georgetown Law Journal Online examining the backgrounds of the 584 members who served in Congress from 1865 to 1871. That research found more than a dozen of them might not have been citizens under Trump’s interpretation of the 14th Amendment, but no one challenged their qualifications.
"That is, said Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia and an author of the study, the constitutional equivalent of the dog that did not bark, which provided a crucial clue in a Sherlock Holmes story," Liptak wrote.
The 14th Amendment states that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside," while the Constitution requires members of the House of Representatives to have been citizens for at least seven years, and senators for at least nine.
“If there had been an original understanding that tracked the Trump administration’s executive order,” Frost told Liptak, “at least some of these people would have been challenged.”
Only one of the nine challenges filed against a senator's qualifications in the period around the 14th Amendment's ratification involved the citizenship issue related to Trump's interpretation of birthright citizenship, and that case doesn't support his position.
"Several Democratic senators claimed in 1870 that their new colleague from Mississippi, Hiram Rhodes Revels, the first Black man to serve in Congress, had not been a citizen for the required nine years," Liptak wrote. "They reasoned that the 14th Amendment had overturned Dred Scott, the 1857 Supreme Court decision that denied citizenship to the descendants of enslaved African Americans, just two years earlier and that therefore he would not be eligible for another seven."
"That argument failed," the correspondent added. "No one thought to challenge any other members on the ground that they were born to parents who were not citizens and who had not, under the law in place at the time, filed a declaration of intent to be naturalized."
"The consensus on the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause has long been that everyone born in the United States automatically becomes a citizen with exceptions for those not subject to its jurisdiction, like diplomats and enemy troops," Liptak added.
Frost's research found there were many members of Congress around the time of the ratification of the 14th Amendment who wouldn't have met Trump's definition of a citizen, and she said that fact undercuts the president's arguments.
“If the executive order reflected the original public meaning, which is what the originalists say is relevant,” Frost said, “then somebody — a member of Congress, the opposing party, the losing candidate, a member of the public who had just listened to the ratification debates on the 14th Amendment, somebody — would have raised this.”
