Meanwhile, Outside

From NOAA:

The August global surface temperature was 1.27°C (2.29°F) above the 20th-century average of 15.6°C (60.1°F), making it the warmest August on record. This was 0.01°C (0.02°F) above the previous August record set last year, and the 15th consecutive month of record-high global temperatures. August 2024 marked the 46th consecutive August (since 1979) with temperatures at least nominally above the 20th-century average.

Science. 

And then there's this:

The June 2024–August 2024 global surface temperature was the warmest June–August period in the 175-year record, 1.24°C (2.23°F) above the 20th-century average of 15.6°C (60.1°F). The past eleven June–August seasons have been the warmest such periods on record.

More science. 

Of course Project 2025 calls for the end of NOAA:

Break Up NOAA. The single biggest Department of Commerce agency outside of decennial census years is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which houses the National Weather Service, National Marine Fisheries Service, and other components. NOAA garners $6.5 billion of the department’s $12 billion annual operational budget and accounts for more than half of the department’s personnel in non-decadal Census years (2021 figures). (pg 674) [Bolding in original.]

But not because the science is wrong but for this reason:

Together, these form a colossal operation that has become one of the main
drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future
U.S. prosperity.

Of course.

It's getting warmer out there.  It'll still get warmer if NOAA is broken up and no one knows but that's ok because business is boomier!

 

That Morning

The Debate Summed Up

VP Kamala Harris could have started every rebuttal with:

Nothing Donald Trump just said is actually true.

In short:

• Immigrants are not stealing their neighbor's pets for food.
• No one "aborting" children after they're born.

If you support the guy who said so during the debate, you're supporting a guy with little (if any) contact with reality.

More On Trump's Politicization of the DOJ

So when our right wing friends claim that Biden/Harris/Walz has politicized/is going to politicize the DOJ, just mention this:

A new report from Rolling Stone claims that former President Donald Trump wanted to use the United States Department of Justice to go after late-night comedians who made fun of him.

In a lengthy report on Trump's second-term ambitions, sources told the publication that Trump believed that comedians who mocked him on television were guilty of giving what amounted to illegal campaign contributions to Democrats.

And:

"During his 2024 campaign, according to a source with direct knowledge, Trump has raised this topic again, venting about the need to punish late-night comedians for giving “illegal” campaign contributions to the Democratic Party — in the form of jokes and on-air satire."

Free speech, anyone?

The story was mentioned in The NYTimes:

An article in Rolling Stone said that while Trump was president, he tried to persuade Justice Department officials to use campaign finance laws and equal-time broadcast regulations to rule that anti-Trump jokes on late-night shows were illegal. Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel were among those on Trump’s list of targets.

Lest we forget:

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.

And, since all those late-night jokes are regarding politics and/or a politician positioning himself in a political arena, isn't political speech kinda sorta uber-protected?

Well, yes. From The Congressional Research Service:

The Court has long considered political and ideological speech to be at the core of the First Amendment, including speech concerning “politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.” This speech can take forms beyond the written or spoken word, such as funding or symbolic acts.

So,  next time our MAGA friends warn about how Biden has politicized DOJ, gently remind them that the felon Trump has already looked into it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TWENTY YEARS AGO TODAY! (Reprise)

And this is how I started here at 2PJ.

It's good to be here. Now there are truly 2 political junkies present.

If memory serves, it would be some time before I was posting here exclusively.

My first post here, as I see it now in 20/20 hindsight, was perhaps a tad optimistic as it was about how the reporting at the time burst the bubble of George W. Bush's military heroism.

In case you missed it, Dubya won that election.

Oh well. 

Trump's Promise to Politicize The DOJ

It's right here:

CEASE & DESIST: I, together with many Attorneys and Legal Scholars, am watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely because I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 8, 2024

Except there was no evidence of of any of this happening in 2020.

Look, for example, here:

The various claims of evidence alleging a stolen 2020 election have been exhaustively investigated and litigated. Judges heard claims of illegal voting and found they were without merit. (Learn more about how the changes that have happened since 2020 will affect the 2024 election and beyond.)

Rep. Liz Cheney, the former chair of the House Republican Conference, stated on February 23, 2021: "The president and many around him pushed this idea that the election had been stolen. And that is a dangerous claim. It wasn't true," she said. "There were over 60 court cases where judges, including judges appointed by President Trump and other Republican presidents, looked at the evidence in many cases and said there is not widespread fraud."

Or here:

After the 2020 US presidential election Donald Trump refused to concede, alleging widespread and unparalleled voter fraud. Trump’s supporters deployed several statistical arguments in an attempt to cast doubt on the result. Reviewing the most prominent of these statistical claims, we conclude that none of them is even remotely convincing. The common logic behind these claims is that, if the election were fairly conducted, some feature of the observed 2020 election result would be unlikely or impossible. In each case, we find that the purportedly anomalous fact is either not a fact or not anomalous.

 Or here (this one has ties to Pennsylvania):

Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are seri-
ous. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations
and then proof. We have neither here.

The Trump Presidential Campaign asserts that Pennsylvania’s 2020 election was unfair.
But as lawyer Rudolph Giuliani stressed, the Campaign “doesn’t plead fraud. . . . [T]his is
not a fraud case.” 

And so on.

So when a Republican (any Republican) complains about how President Biden has "politicized" the DOJ - they're just projecting their Trump wet dreams.

Uber-Conservate Cheneys Gonna Vote For Harris

First there's the former member of the House, Liz Cheney: 

Republican former Rep. Liz Cheney will vote for Vice President Kamala Harris in November, she said during remarks at Duke University, according to audio obtained by CNN.

The former Wyoming congresswoman noted the importance of voting for Harris in states like North Carolina, where she appeared on Wednesday.

“I think it is crucially important for people to recognize, not only is what I just said about the danger that Trump poses something that should prevent people from voting for him, but I don’t believe that we have the luxury of writing in candidates’ names, particularly in swing states,” Cheney said.

She made the announcement in North Carolina specifically because it is a battleground state, according to a source close to Cheney.

“And as a conservative, as someone who believes in and cares about the Constitution, I have thought deeply about this, and because of the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but I will be voting for Kamala Harris,” she continued. 

Then there's her dad, the former Vice President: 

First, the statement itself:

In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again.   

As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.

For those who perhaps don't remember Dick, here's the Times' one paragraph bio:

Mr. Cheney served as White House chief of staff under President Gerald Ford; secretary of defense under President George H.W. Bush and vice president under President George W. Bush, when Mr. Cheney was the architect of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He was viewed by Democrats as such a force of darkness that he earned the nickname Darth Vader.

This is how far into teh crazie Trump's MAGA party has become. It's too dangerous even for the guy who okayed this:

It is now well established that following the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operated a global, state-sanctioned program in which it abducted scores of people throughout the world, held them in secret detention—sometimes for years—or “rendered” them to various countries, and tortured or otherwise ill-treated them. While the program officially ended in 2009, the cover-up of these crimes appears to be ongoing.

Many detainees were held by the CIA in pitch-dark windowless cells, chained to walls, naked or diapered, for weeks or months at a time. The CIA forced them into painful stress positions that made it impossible for them to lie down or sleep for days, to the point where many hallucinated or begged to be killed to end their misery. It used “waterboarding” and similar techniques to cause near suffocation or drowning, crammed detainees naked into tiny boxes, and prevented them from bathing, using toilets, or cutting their hair or nails for months. “We looked like monsters,” one detainee said of his appearance while in CIA custody.

Dick Cheney thinks Donald Trump is such a threat to democracy that he's now voting for VP Kamala Harris.

 

It Was TWENTY YEARS AGO Today!

Check this aht.

That's the first blog post at this here blog.

Check aht the date:

September 6, 2004.

Twenty years ago today. 

This blog is officially twenty years old.

As such, I'd like to wish the OPJ a happy bloggerversary.

And for those of you who don't know the genesis story of this blog, I'll do my best to tell you what I remember.

It was early 2004 and I was, as they say, between jobs.  I'd met Maria a few months before - we were both volunteers with the local Howard Dean folks.  Anyway, there's only so many resumes you can send out a day when you're unemployed and so I had a lot of time on my hands and so I spent way too much of it watching TV. Enough said.

On local cable (PCNC, to be precise) there was a morning program called "Honsberger Live!" It was an hour long program hosted by the late Fred Honsberger, he of KDKA radio in the afternoons.  The program ran from 10am to 11am and Fred was a local version of Rush Limbaugh - right wing talk show host.

Maria and I had been emailing back and forth and she let me know that she was the "Maria" who called in frequently to Fred's show.  I figured that as I had the time and a phone, I'd do the same.

Our first blog "Honzman is a liar" was born out of fact checking Fred Honsberger.

It lasted through that summer and Maria started this blog as she wanted to write about something other than what Fred was spinning.  So early September, 2004 she set up this blog and started writing on more general, national topics. 

My first blog post here was on Sept 9. More on that in a few days.

Happy Bloggerversary!!

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

 

Something very important happens tomorrow.

Fulton County, PA IN THE NEWS!

From CNN this weekend:

A Pennsylvania judge has determined that three 2020 election deniers must pay nearly $1 million in fees as the result of a years-long legal dispute with state officials over voting equipment used during the last presidential race, according to recent court filings.

Recommendations from the judge, who was appointed to serve as a special master overseeing the case, attach a dollar figure to sanctions previously imposed by the state’s Supreme Court against two Republican county commissioners and their attorney for allowing an outside firm to examine voting equipment after the 2020 election – despite a court order prohibiting them to do so, according to the new filings. 

The case, which dates back to 2021, involves actions taken by two Fulton County, Pennsylvania, commissioners – Stuart Ulsh and Randy Bunch – who sought to have Dominion voting equipment examined by a third-party after the 2020 election. Many of former President Donald Trump’s allies falsely blamed Dominion’s software for his election defeat. 

Uh-oh.

We wrote about this some time ago - 11/21/2022.

In writing that piece we found this from Reuters: 

Pennsylvania's top election official has decertified the voting equipment of a rural county that participated in an audit of the 2020 election requested by a Republican state lawmaker and staunch ally of former President Donald Trump.

Acting Secretary of State Veronica Degraffenreid said on Wednesday that Fulton County violated the state election code by giving a third party access to its election databases and other certified equipment in an audit of the 2020 results.

 

The audit was conducted in December at the request of Republican state Senators Doug Mastriano and Judy Ward, who asked county officials to allow Wake Technology Services Inc to probe the county's results, according to media reports.

 Does Doug Mastriano have any comment on the million in fees his co-conspirators are now facing?