Satchel

From the NYT: Justice Clarence Thomas delayed releasing his annual financial disclosure form with the justices on Wednesday after recent revelations cast scrutiny on his travel, gifts and real estate dealings with a conservative billionaire donor from Texas. Like Justice Thomas, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. also asked for a 90-day extension to file the forms, which detail gifts, investments and other financial holdings, according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, which handles the financial forms and the database where they are publicly disclosed. The financial disclosures, particularly that of Justice Thomas, have drawn heightened interest after reports that Harlan Crow, a Texas billionaire and longtime Republican donor, had hosted Justice Thomas on luxury vacations aboard his superyacht, flown him on his private jet and paid private school tuition for the justice’s nephew. Mr. Crow also bought the justice’s childhood home, where his mother still lives, according to ProPublica. Justice Thomas did not include those dealings on his financial disclosures

For the four years that Clinton served as Secretary of State, her approval rating often topped 60%. Twice she topped 65%. It’s an old wives tale that she has always been wildly unpopular, kept alive by those who feared her inevitable ascendancy to the presidency. A withering, unrelenting campaign to smear in to her into oblivion worked brilliantly:

I think Desantis is Catholic. He has a bunch of nut bag preachers supporting him, including many within the RCC.

It’s quite possible that said re-litigation triggers those who thought voting for Trump really couldn’t be all that bad

I don’t think so. Had there been a simultaneous announcement of the ongoing investigation into the Trump campaign, she most likely would have won. You can’t underestimate damage done by Comey going rogue, nor could she be the miserable candidate you describe and garner the highest popular vote total in history at the time of her defeat.

Whatever happened to promised invasion of tens of thousands Venezuelan and Guatemalan migrants who were supposed to be here by now? Abbott promised.

Jim Comey defying his boss’s directive to not contravene policy by announcing a nothing burger investigation into Hillary 11 days before the election was the kill shot.

This appears to be Florida’s doing: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/us/migrants-plane-sacramento-california.html A group of Latin American migrants aboard a chartered private plane landed at a small airport in Sacramento on Monday, the second such planeload in three days to arrive in California’s capital city from an airfield in New Mexico. The group of about 20 migrants, who said they were mainly from Venezuela, landed just before 10:30 a.m. Pacific time and was ushered into a room at Sacramento Executive Airport to meet with officials from California’s Justice Department. One of the migrants, David Mata, 28, said he arrived in the United States from Venezuela roughly two weeks ago looking for work. Mr. Mata said that he did not know who had orchestrated his trip to Sacramento, but that whoever did had paid for it in its entirety.

A mother of 4 fatally shot after she reportedly knocked on the door of a white woman's residence to retrieve her child's iPad. It's believed that Owens' children accidentally left the device behind in a field they were playing in, & the woman took it," Crump tweeted. Speaking at a press conference Monday, Owens' mother said the neighbor's door was locked and remained closed during the confrontation. "My daughter, my grandchildren's mother, was shot and killed with her 9-year-old son standing next to her," she said. "She had no weapon, she posed no imminent threat to anyone." In nearby Flagler County, a Florida man was arrested on May 27 for allegedly pointing a gun at a woman's head after her friend briefly turned into his driveway, authorities said. The incident was captured on video. Terry Vetsch, 60, was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon without intent to kill, according to jail records.

Here’s their pitch: just be 25 or older, a citizen for at least 7 years, and act mad about something liberal. You don’t have to be educated, know or care crap about government at all.

Dumb, ignorant conservatives have found a new grift and they’re passing the word around. Run for Congress.

Why not just feed hungry migrants with the money it cost you to charter a private plane to transport them? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/04/us/migrants-california-church-texas.html#:~:text=Sixteen migrants from Venezuela and,Texas migrant center under false Sixteen migrants from Venezuela and Colombia were abruptly flown on a private chartered jet to California and dropped off outside a Catholic church building in Sacramento on Friday, state officials said, prompting an investigation into whether they were transported from outside a Texas migrant center under false pretenses. While it remained unclear on Sunday who had approached the group of migrants outside El Paso and orchestrated their flight from New Mexico to California, the episode mirrored an aggressive tactic used by hard-line Republican governors to protest President Biden’s immigration policies by dispatching dozens of migrants to Democratic-led states and cities with little warning or explanation. Many of the migrants told a nonprofit organization they had no idea they were going to California. On Sunday, a spokeswoman for California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, said the migrants were carrying documents that mentioned the Florida Division of Emergency Management and the state’s “voluntary transportation program.” The documents also named Vertol Systems Company Inc. as the contractor for the Florida program and the one carrying out the transport. That was the same company used for transport in the fall when Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida directed two planeloads of South American migrants from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard, a Democratic-leaning Massachusetts island.

“Since 1912, the Texas constitution has granted cities with a population of greater than 5,000 people broad discretion to make local decisions. It’s the job of state lawmakers to establish minimum protections for the good of all Texans below which local governments may not fall. But when cities use their discretion to exceed state standards, state lawmakers have no business interfering.” We should all oppose preemption.

Other religious leaders need to follow Cardinal Tobin’s lead. We’re awash in guns and things are not getting better as we brace for out next big gun slaughter of innocent Americans.

This is more like Texas apartheid: The NYT Times writes: By reducing the right of localities to make their own decisions, Texas has joined dozens of other states that have asserted their dominance over cities in recent years through a practice known as state pre-emption. One watchdog group has counted more than 650 pre-emption bills in state legislatures this year; the large majority have been introduced by Republican lawmakers to curb policymaking in cities run by Democrats. Additionally, the board concludes conservative tactics enforcing these types of laws fall under a list of "categories," including, democracy and voting; law enforcement and courts; guns and discrimination. Some of the GOP efforts, per the board, include "trying to make it harder for citizens to enact laws or constitutional changes through the referendum process"; trying "to usurp the role of local election boards and officials, restricting attempts to expand voting and making it more difficult for voters in urban areas, who are often people of color, to cast a ballot"; and even trying to "prohibit cities from enacting anti-discrimination protections for L.G.B.T.Q. people."

Finally. Some in the religious community are speaking out: https://cruxnow.com/church-in-the-usa/2023/06/newark-cardinal-asks-americans-to-voluntarily-forgo-right-to-guns NEW YORK – Amid a mounting debate in America over the constitutionality of gun control, Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark has entered the fray with a different argument: That people should voluntarily forgo their Second Amendment rights for the betterment of society. “I honestly believe it is the best thing we can do to change the culture of violence that threatens us today,” Tobin said.

I’ve been making fun of him since he was embarrassing Oklahoma as a US congressman. Incredibly, he has dumb himself down all the way up to the US Senate. I don’t think there’s ever been a more ignorant amalgam of mouth breathing bigots to occupy the Senate. Just look at the pic captured in the above you tube. Neither of the imbeciles featured knew the three branches of the federal government at the time they were elected to federal office. Mullins still can’t believe that most everybody knows about the origins of the concept of race. He and Tuberville were absolutely gob smacked… and these idiots have the nerve to suggest required civics lessons for people other than themselves. Does he even know that Jesus loves me is not required teaching in schools, at least not yet.

She voted for what she called a a shit sandwich. The Temptations would call her a Ball of Confusion.

Shakespeare was right. The evil done by men really does live after them: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, said former President Donald Trump would have lost in Texas in the 2020 election if his office had not successfully blocked counties from mailing out applications for mail-in ballots to all registered voters. Harris County, home to the city of Houston, wanted to mail out applications for mail-in ballots to its approximately 2.4 million registered voters due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the conservative Texas Supreme Court blocked the county from doing so after it faced litigation from Paxton's office. "If we'd lost Harris County—Trump won by 620,000 votes in Texas. Harris County mail-in ballots that they wanted to send out were 2.5 million, those were all illegal and we were able to stop every one of them," Paxton told former Trump adviser Steve Bannon during the latter's War Room podcast on Friday. "Had we not done that, we would have been in the very same situation—we would've been on Election Day, I was watching on election night and I knew, when I saw what was happening in these other states, that that would've been Texas. We would've been in the same boat. We would've been one of those battleground states that they were counting votes in Harris County for three days and Donald Trump would've lost the election," the Republican official 25 years ago, before the GOP’s complete stranglehold on the political process, Texas ranked 14th in the country for ease of voting. Today, Texas ranks 50th, and there are clear reasons why this is the case. Texas grew by 10 million people in ten years between the 2010 and 2020 censuses, with whites comprising only 5% the growth. Rather than making any attempt to appeal to growth sectors within the state, Republicans opted for the predictable. They sought to oppress the votes of blacks, browns and Asians in the state. Their effort to neuter Democratic voter strength in Harris County Is on the beginning. Dallas County is on the clock, because Republicans can count even if they can’t govern worth a damn.

Beyond insisting that he had a right to possess the docs, has Trump ever tried to explain why he wanted them in the first place?

I wonder if there are pics of him escaping through the restaurant window in his way to Cincinnati?

Maybe? A member who has a personal or private interest in any measure or bill, proposed, or pending before the Legislature, shall disclose the fact to the House, of which he is a member, and shall not vote thereon. TX CONST Art. 3, § 22. A member of the legislature may not vote on a measure or a bill, other than a measure that will affect an entire class of business entities, that will directly benefit a specific business transaction of a business entity in which the member has a controlling interest. Tex. Gov't Code Ann. § 572.053. Before introducing, sponsoring or voting on a bill on a subject area in which a lobbyist who is the legislator's spouse or first degree relative, the legislator must file a disclosure statement. Tex. Gov't Code Ann. § 572.0531.

Trump is now using Kari Lake’s dark filter. I guess he didn’t like the pics of him without his makeup on. Man, I’d like the mineral rights to his face when he’s all dolled up.

A funny thing happened on the way to dissolution of the UMC. The conservatives who have been pushing for the breakup, are the ones leaving the connection, while the more progressive congregations are opting to stay. Not surprisingly, most of those leaving are in the Old South footprint of Texas, Florida, and Georgia.

“During the hearing to impeach TX AG Ken Paxton, he had the brass monkey balls to call GOP reps to threaten them with political retaliation if they voted against him. Read again: IN THE MIDDLE OF THE HEARING.”