Now it's time for Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages and we start, as we usually do, with the Clowns.Our first Clown is the US Supreme Court.
On January 25, the Supreme Court simply and it appears without dissent threw out everything related to suits over Tweetie-pie having violated the emoluments clause of the Constitution, that is, having profited off his presidency. Which he clearly did, maintaining an interest in his businesses and profiting off the numerous foreign and domestic officials who sought to buy his favor by staying at the Trump International Hotel.
But the Court just didn't care about that. The justices did three things: They threw out Trump’s challenge to lower court rulings that had allowed the two related lawsuits to go forward, plus they ordered those lower court rulings also be thrown out, plus they directed the two involved appeals courts to dismiss the suits completely.
Why? Because, the court said, Tweetie-pie is no longer in office so the whole matter is moot, there is no longer an issue in dispute, there is nothing for us to decide.
This is stupid.
According to Steve Vladeck, a CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law, "Ordinarily, the Court pursues such a step only when the prevailing party moots a case while the appeal is pending." That is, it's usually done when the side which won in the lower court does something that removes the cause of the dispute. Which clearly is not what happened here.
What's more, there clearly is still is an issue in dispute. Walter Shaub, former chief of the Office of Government Ethics, who called the decision "insane," noted that Tweetie-pie still has the money, saying in a tweet that "When any other federal employee violates the emoluments clause they have to forfeit the money."
Calling this case moot because Tweetie-pie is out of office is like investigating a bank executive suspected of embezzling money and then saying you're going to drop the whole thing because they've taken a different job.
So why was it mooted? According to Vladeck, it shows that the court is "increasingly willing to invoke this doctrine to avoid highly charged political disputes." In other words, because they don't have the guts to make the decision.
What makes this even more idiotic is that there's another pending suit charging that Tweetie-pie violated the First Amendment right of people to petition the government by blocking them from his Twitter account and some experts are saying that the Court will not use mootness to wipe away a lower court ruling that went against Tweetie-pie because Blahden also has a Twitter account.
What, and no future president will have business interests? No future president can violate the emoluments clause? And those that do can just keep the money?
The Supreme Court has acted like a bunch of damn Clowns.
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Next, on Janury 28, hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman, with an estimate net worth around $3 billion, reacted to the retail investors who banded together to drive up GameStop shares and so wreck a plan by short-selling hedge funds to profit by the company's expected failure by sneering at people "sitting at home, getting their checks from the government, trading for no commissions." In other words, those damn unwashed, non-elitist masses. How dare they mess up our game.
He also denounced a financial transaction tax and other measures to battle inequality, calling the idea of a "fair share" as "a bullshit concept" and "just a way of attacking wealthy people."
Yeah, well at least in going after a Clown like Leon Cooperman, they're aiming at the right target.
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Meanwhile, the Stultifyingly Dense championship has been won by Jamie Allard, a member of the Alaska legislature who defended a license plate with the legend "3REICH."
In a Facebook post, Allard said "If you speak the language fluently, you would know" the the English translation is "realm." Actually, "empire" is a better in-context translation, but no matter, as she continued by saying "The progressives have put a spin on it and created their own definition."
Allard is a now former member of the Alaska State Commission for Human Rights.
Allard insisted she was the victim of unfair attacks but agreed to resign in order to spend more time with her fam- I mean spend more time on her Assembly duties.
A trip to the Holocaust Museum might also be a good use of her time.
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Finally, I had to include this one. Just last time, I cited Terry Jones, a GOPper member of the North Dakota legislature, who introduced a bill under which any state form that asks for racial information would be required to list "American" as the first choice. He claimed that would unite people, including black Americans, who are, he said, "glad their ancestors were brought here as slaves."
It turns out he's not a one-hit wonder.
He has also introduced a bill that pretty much rewrites the dictionary in order to control how the state deals with LGBTQ+ issues.
What the bill does, essentially, is to declare that the idea of LGBTQ+ rights is based on the supposed "religion" of secular humanism and therefore any assistance to or even acknowledgement of the existence of LGBTQ+ people in any way is an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.
It’s all just, as someone called it, a conservative Christian bigot’s fever dream - which is, admittedly, a natural product of a Clown.
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