Sue me, sue me, what can you do me?

Faith Prince and Nathan Lane. If you don't know the show, what makes it sublime is that he really does have to go to a prayer meeting, not because he's got religion but because he's lost a bet.

All right, explain this to me like I'm a five-year-old. I mean with a fairly big vocabulary for a five-year-old, but some innocence:

Rudy Giuliani, who served as a lawyer for former president Donald Trump, is no longer contesting as a legal matter that he made false and defamatory statements about two former Georgia election workers — but argues in a new court filing that what amounted to false claims about vote-rigging in the 2020 presidential election was constitutionally protected speech and did not damage the workers.

"So I made a bunch of false and defamatory statements about you, that's some kind of reason for taking me to court?"

Yes, Rudolf, that's supposedly how it works. He was sued by Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the mother and daughter working on the Fulton County ballot count who were seen on video doing something Giuliani described as pulling fake ballots out of suitcases, like drug dealers "passing out dope", and "crooks" who "obviously" stuffed ballots, an accusation subsequently taken up by then-president Donald Trump, with the result that the two women's lives were completely upended, as they told the House January 6 committee a little over a year later: 

For the Record: Prayers and Thoughts

A really awful Supreme Court decision handed down today in a church-state case from Maine, where a private-school voucher program to compensate for the lack of public high schools in rural areas forbade funding for "sectarian" schools in which religious instruction was part of the program:

It doesn't exclude them at all. They exclude themselves by refusing to go to public institutions. That's a nonsensical argument.

— Woke Mob For Taxing Billionaires (@Yastreblyansky) June 21, 2022

Yes, that's the question the justices should have argued, though they'd still have been wrong. Instead they went into the insanely radical territory of French's tweet. Have you bothered to look at the oral arguments? https://t.co/YV32NA3XX3

— Woke Mob For Taxing Billionaires (@Yastreblyansky) June 22, 2022

First Amendment Follies

 

Drawing by Patrick Chappatte, New York Times, February 2017.

If you're confused about the First Amendment argument, that poor Donald can't be punished for exercising his free speech rights, don't be. Rand Paul's argument

Paul also noted that Trump was within his First Amendment rights when he addressed a crowd of supporters before the attack on the Capitol that led to the deaths of five people, including a Capitol Police officer.

“People are going to have to judge for themselves … are we going to potentially prosecute people for political speech?” Paul ​questioned​.

H​e said if that becomes the case and speech is criminalized, then Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, could be impeached over ​their fiery rhetoric against Trump​, his allies, as well as the lawmakers who stirred up protesters last summer.

in addition to showing some remarkable ignorance (he's been in the Senate how many years and he still doesn't know that impeaching a senator isn't a thing that the Constitution allows for?), is a pure red herring, and it's starting to smell, because in the first place the president doesn't have free speech rights. No government employee does, if they are speaking in their official capacity: 

For the Record: The Rice and Fall

Updated

John Podesta's creamy risotto as reconstructed by Julian Assange and Food & Wine. No, Assange had nothing to do with the culinary part. To paraphrase Count Dracula, "I never cook... food." Photos by Tara Fisher and David Becker/Getty Images.

LEAKED: Wikileaks hack reveals John Podesta's secret to creamy Risotto pic.twitter.com/A5dW4mG9c6

— Allan Smith (@akarl_smith) October 11, 2016

Sour, sour day. I see Podesta doesn't know the difference between "its" and "it's", but I can assure you he's right about the risotto. I find it's also necessary to add grated cheese, even if it means contradicting the laws of Italian cooking by combining cheese with mushrooms or seafood, to endow the creaminess with body.

Democrat logic right now:

1) Hillary Clinton deletes thousands of emails from a private server.
- Dems: “Nothing to see here!”

2) AG Barr releases an entire 488-page Special Counsel report with only light redactions.
- Dems: “It’s a cover up!”

— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) May 5, 2019

link for FBI judgment on email deletions: https://t.co/ocfK5penRs
link for FBI judgment on Trump obstruction: https://t.co/3sUTI2AmY8 pic.twitter.com/7QM9COhENn

— See Pinned Tweet (@Yastreblyansky) May 5, 2019

Well Said, Mr. POTUS

John William Waterhouse (1845-1917), The remorse of Nero after the murder of his mother, pen and ink, via Artnet.

Do I detect—this is going to sound weird—a note of remorse in our poet-president's response to the newspaper office slaughter in Annapolis on Thursday? Because what does he mean, otherwise, with "shocked the conscience of our nation"? What "shocks the conscience" other than the awareness of guilt?

I'd Like to Address

By Donald J. Trump

I’d like to address the horrific shooting
that took place yesterday at Capital Gazette
newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland.
This attack shocked the conscience of our nation
and filled our hearts with grief. Journalists,
like all Americans, should be free from the fear
of being violently attacked while doing their job.

Horrible, horrible event, horrible thing happened.
In your suffering, we pledge our eternal support.
The suffering is so great... My government will not
rest until we have done everything in our power
to reduce violent crime and to protect innocent life.

I always feel the formula "I'd like to address" is apologetic in its own right, in the sense of if you'd like to, why don't you just do it? But yes, I'm thinking about the intemperate violence of the president's language toward journalists, the way he keeps them caged at his rallies and mocks them for the delectation of the fans, and the failure of society at large to recognize the signs, especially in the murderer's Twitter feed, as reported in the Baltimore Sun:

Political hypochondriacs: Optimism report

Roller Coaster, by gechalx/DeviantArt. Nowhere to go but up! What's that you say?

It's so weird how we live now, like political hypochondriacs, constantly checking the national temperature for clues to how sick we are.

And that goes for Team Optimist as well as the despairing. I'm really pumped because yesterday was a Good Day, where Dutch voters decisively rejected fascism, I think, and Judge Derrick Watson in Honolulu and Judge Theodore Chuang in Greenbelt, Maryland both concluded in separate cases that President Trump's "travel order" is meant as the fulfillment of his often repeated campaign promises of a "complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering this country until our country's representatives can figure out just what in the hell is going on."

At long last, Pam, have you no—Jeez, what am I thinking?

Joseph Welch addresses Senator McCarthy. Via FilmFanatic.

Just learned from Steven D at the Frogpond that the Da'esh has claimed "responsibility" for the bloody stupidity in Garland, Texas, at the Pamela Geller–sponsored, Geert Wilders–consecrated hatefest and "Cartoon Contest", where a couple of gunsels, at least one of them now reportedly well known to the FBI's counterterrorism operations, tried to shoot up the security outside the event and got themselves killed. I'm glad the guard appears not to have been badly hurt.

Whatever goal the Da'esh thinks it may have attained by this waste of time and its own adherents' lives, whether or not they actually had anything to do with it, or why they'd like to have the "credit", is unclear. It may be that for these conservatives as for our own the important thing is just to keep drawing that line between Them and Us.

Geller, of course, is thrilled, because her whole life at this point is drawing that same line and this is making her look like such a Serious person. Things couldn't have gone more according to plan:

North Carolina Terrorists Win

The strange, evil foreign muezzin sending waves of sharia out across defenseless Durham. No wait, it's only a Duke student, Ibrahim Saber, rehearsing the three-minutes-a-week performance inviting his friends to perform their religious obligations, which is now not going to take place because some heavily armed Christians seem to object. Photo via WRAL radio.

That is, the plan for the Muslim Students Association at Duke University to use the chapel bell tower as a minaret to broadcast one Friday call to prayer each week—prayers have been held in the chapel basement for years, and nobody's complained about that—has been scrapped.

Not apparently because of the efforts of Reverend Franklin Graham and his brothers in bigotry to get university donors to make financial threats to the university:

He's a tenther!

Uncredited, from the National Catholic Register.

Archbishop is out there with former part-time Governor Palin and the rest of the Tenth Amendment rights-reserved-to-the-states crowd, as suggested by this, quoted from the Times:

“Never before,” Archbishop Dolan said, setting the tone, “has the federal government forced individuals and organizations to go out into the marketplace and buy a product that violates their conscience. This shouldn’t happen in a land where free exercise of religion ranks first in the Bill of Rights.”

 See, before it was only state governments forcing individuals and organizations to go out and violate their consciences!

Also, too, free exercise of religion does not rank first:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It's the establishment clause that comes first, thanks, and I think that implies that free exercise of religion does not include bishops of any particular denomination dictating exceptions to the law.

Just say Noah

The previous post on the subject of homophobia--the pathological fear of gay cooties that might infect an otherwise sober-living person at any time--got me to thinking back on the subject of an earlier post concerning that strange version of Islamophobia in which the victim imagines that he or she is being somehow swallowed or enveloped by a foreign legal system, the so-called Sharia.

The trope of mental illness works here, too, as explanation for that sense of the code as not a code but something hideously physical, like a wave of slime lapping at your feet and then climbing, climbing, sort of itching and stinging and approaching your ankles, and you want to scream but.... Etc.

The nightmare quality, in which you can't be sure you won't find yourself suddenly in a Baghdad public square, strapped into a suicide vest whose detonation is under someone else's control, and it's all because of something Obama did, is why it is a waste of time to sit down and tell people that they don't have to worry. Nightmare is what it is all about, and it is not subject to rational discussion.

In the meantime, though, I have run across some evidence that it is possible for our country to be secretly taken over by a religious legal code, and that it may have happened already--in 1991! And by something a lot more haimish than Sharia, too...[see below the jump]

Image (mis)appropriated from Yeshuist Rabbi Matt of Seattle, who may not appreciate Levitical levity. The dysperspective is probably just Photoshop, but doesn't it have a haunting Caligari quality?