How to Steal a Horse Race: Get to the Finish First

Ruidoso Downs, New Mexico.

 

How to rob a bank: go to your bank, make a withdrawal not exceeding the available funds in your personal account, walk out counting your cash. pic.twitter.com/ruDFpgge7q

— Tyler Hansen (@tjhansen) December 27, 2021

Speaking of ignorant tweets by contenders for the Most Obnoxious Republican Senator title. Paul doesn't seem to notice that the process he describes as "done in a legally valid way" is done in a legally valid way, or, in short, is legal. Like, he's waxing indignant at the way Democrats win elections by getting more votes.

In reality, the article he links to, by somebody called William Doyle at Rod Dreher's American Conservative, does have a suggestion of some nefarious and possibly illegal activities, but doesn't make it very explicit, possibly because he knows he's lying, and poor Rand evidently can't follow the argument,  so he just posts this quote from it, hoping the sound of it will be scary enough.

The story Doyle is trying to convey is not what the extracted paragraph seems to be saying, that Democrats somehow cheated by successfully getting out the vote in 2020, but rather that Mark Zuckerberg, that well known radical leftist firebrand, did it:

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: 

Inaugural

 

Candle stand, 1830s, from the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing ("Shakers") of Mount Lebanon, New York, collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

I take the same general feeling from the inauguration festivities, watching TV all day, as so many of us, of immense relief and consolation, of reassurance that we have a working government again, with kind and caring and reasonably truthful people at its head, which doesn't mean they're going to fix everything but that we're back in a place from which it's possible to navigate. We all found ourselves in unexpected tears at one point or another, and for me one of the oddest points was that first normal press briefing in four years from Jen Psaki, State Department spox under Obama and now Biden's press secretary.

There's a concept from the British ordinary language philosopher Paul Grice of the four "conversational maxims" that make discourse possible: you must assume that your interlocutor will try to be informative, truthful, pertinent, and clear. These are things that you don't get from arguing with Gish-galloping conservative trolls, and we didn't get them from the communications of Trump or his official representatives, of course, and the freshness of Psaki, just being well-prepared, level-headed, on point, freely admitting to not knowing what she didn't know, and having no reason to lie about anything, seemed miraculous and somehow out of the nowhere, and it really did fill my eyes with tears. I think it's a kind of PTSD: like Londoners in the Blitz, we've been living disoriented and fearful from the constant bombardment of gaslighting language, and as welcome as the silence is it's filled with our own emotions, the ones we haven't been able to listen to for such a long time.

Unmask This

Opening of Grenell's list, via Adam L. Silverman/Balloon Juice.

"The fact that Vice President Biden and all of the president's inner circle, President Obama's inner circle, individually requested to unmask Gen. Flynn is very troubling," he said. "Unmasking involves revealing the identity of an American's private phone conversation without a constitutional warrant to eavesdrop on that conversation." (Senator Rand Paul, quoted on Fox News)

Q: Dad, what's unmasking?

A: I thought you'd never ask. I found out around the beginning of the Republican attempt to discredit the case against Michael Flynn, in April 2017, and first wrote about it then. Actually I sort of found out earlier than that, during the days of High Greenwaldianism following the Snowden leaks of 2013, but didn't pay the same kind of attention.

Cheap shots: Bye-bye Curly!

Bye-bye!

Senator Dr. Rand Paul: Secret Muslim, or just seeing which way the wind blows? The Goat Rodeo is gonna miss you! Photo by Gary Cameron/Reuters via Slate.

In your Groundhog Day surprise, Senator Dr. Rand Paul finally saw his shadow, appropriately enough, and scurried back to the family business of soaking the rubes for souvenirs and holy relics. Sadly, this does not mean the presidential campaign will end now or six weeks from now. But it's not impossible.

Bonus:

Fact check  (Lynn Vavreck/The Upshot, NYT)

Donald Trump recently appeared on the Fox News Channel show “Fox and Friends” to declare, “Everybody hates Ted.”

He meant Senator Ted Cruz, of course, who is the latest candidate to challenge Mr. Trump’s lead in the polls. But does everybody hate Mr. Cruz? The answer is a clear no. In fact, some people like Mr. Cruz a lot.

I hate to defend Donald, but I think he meant not "everybody" as in the entire human population but everybody who has ever met Cruz. The evidence Vavreck offers does not disconfirm this. Two Gepettos, Lynn.

Well, I just happen to have the Fourteenth Amendment right here with me, and...

Italian immigrants at Ellis Island, 1905. Photo by  Lewis Hine via Locust St.

Sam Stein and Amanda Terkel at HuffPost, on support among the GOP clown car for Steve King's bill to end birthright citizenship in the US:

When Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul first ran for the Senate in 2010, he said he didn't "think the 14th Amendment was meant to apply to illegal aliens."

Matter of fact, he was right about that, though possibly not for the right reasons: it wasn't meant to apply to "illegal aliens" because they didn't exist when the 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868. There was no law restricting the presence of noncitizens on US soil until Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 (starting off with an explicitly racist bang). It clearly applied to legal aliens, but that was the only kind of aliens we had.

When the question did come up, it was with reference to the Chinese Exclusion Acts, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), a US citizen born around 1871 to Chinese immigrant parents in San Francisco who had traveled outside the country and was being denied re-entry. The Supreme Court ruled

that the citizenship language in the Fourteenth Amendment encompassed essentially everyone born in the U.S.—even the U.S.-born children of foreigners—and could not be limited in its effect by an act of Congress.

That is, an act such as the Chinese Exclusion Act. Or Representative King's unconstitutional bill. It applied to the children of undocumented migrants as soon as anybody thought to ask the question, and it still does. (Paul, along with Graham, now calls for a new constitutional amendment to "fix" the "problem" according to Stein and Terkel, which is at least not legally illiterate; Trump, Walker, and Jindal double down on idiocy, and Santorum seems to think birthright citizenship is already illegal but nobody noticed.)

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog. Update: NTodd has the particulars of the Senate debate over the 14th Amendment, May 1866, when proponents made clear that the birthright citizenship provision was indeed meant to apply to children of (specifically Chinese) immigrants. 

Cheap shots: The gray divorcé

Well, that cat is out of that bag, as I learn from our genial comrade Driftglass (h/t Redhand). Our Mr. Brooks's amphibolic divorcery has disambiguated on national TV:

And I don't want to personally, I don't want to legally talk about it, but yes, I am divorced.

I guess that must mean he's been talking about it illegally all along, and that's why we couldn't be sure.

White House Fool Report: Power

Little did these guys imagine that one day adult white Republicans would be in an almost identical position, suffering from somebody not getting deported. Via Libraries Linking Idaho.

So young senator Rand Paul thinks there's a parallel between the Obama order to delay deportation on 5 million undocumented immigrants last week and Franklin Roosevelt's order of February 1942 to throw 120,000 documented Japanese residents (barred on racial grounds from becoming citizens but nearly all of them either living in the country for a minimum of 34 years or born here, since no immigration had been allowed since 1908) into internment camps?

Hahahahaha. I guess they had in common that both were entirely legal. (Some people might claim that the victims of internment had a worse time than the victims of, um, say, who are those victims?)

The president probably wouldn't mind having the kind of congressional cooperation FDR got over the internment of Japanese, as BooMan reminds us, with the Senate and House practically competing that March to see which could move their legislation out fastest, and only one mild dissenter, Mr. Republican, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, who complained that the penalties for disobeying the law (basically, for being Japanese in an unauthorized area meaning more or less everywhere outside of a camp) weren't stiff enough:

Internish evidence

Joel Pett/Lexington Herald-Leader. Via Down With Tyranny.

Senator Paul Meets the Press (via PoliticsUSA):

Well, you know, I mean the Democrats one of their big issues is they have concocted and says Republicans are committing a war on women. One of the workplace laws and rules that I think are good is that bosses shouldn’t prey on young interns in their office, and I think really the media seems to have given President Clinton a pass on this.

You see what he did here, right? Beyond the fact that, like Sarah Palin, he doesn't speak in sentences because he doesn't have a message to transmit as much as an attitude of equal parts paranoia and spite and because his English isn't very good.

He has no intention of discussing any of the issues revolving around the alleged Republican War on Women (though he personally happens to be in moderately good odor on this front himself at the moment, having signed onto Kirsten Gillebrand's effort to do [jump]

Cheap shots and word rustlers

No squat teams in Paramus. In Hoboken, on the other hand...

Swat's that you say?

The terrifying public suicide of Richard Shoop at the Garden State Plaza on Monday wasn't funny, but I liked this glimpse of Kathryn Jean's inner life:

The squat teams and bergen county sherifs couldn't be gentler protectors in a situation like this #paramus
— Kathryn Jean Lopez (@kathrynlopez) November 5, 2013

Maybe Special Quiet Understanding And Tactics?

The War on Bros and much, much more below the fold...

Aqua Buddha made me do it.

Sen. Rand Paul wants Secretary of State John Kerry to remember how terrible war is. http://t.co/wLI1gM65Mu
— Red Alert Politics (@RedAlert) September 2, 2013

Kind of like, Senator Paul wants to remind Dr. King that African Americans have feelings too.