Jon Stewart said it so well I cannot possibly improve on it.
The comedian critiqued magnificently the 45th POTUS’s description of the Battle of Gettysburg, arguably the most decisive battle of the Civil War.
The former Orator in Chief launched into a flood of ignorant platitudes. I will leave it at that.
Take a look here at what Stewart had to say about it.
Jon Stewart Tears Donald Trump Apart Over Civil War Speech (msn.com)
Our nation’s founders, the men who crafted a federal judiciary they intended to remain “above politics,” surely are doing somersaults in their graves.
The nation’s federal judiciary has become a third political branch of government, not a branch intended only to determine the constitutionality of laws enacted by Congress and signed by the president.
Democratic senators have signed a petition that aims to stop “judge shopping” by conservative activists seeking judges who they believe will rule in their favor. Of particular concern is the federal court based in Amarillo and which is presided over by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who was nominated for that seat by the 45th POTUS. Kacszmaryk succeeded a judicial legend in the Texas Panhandle, the late Mary Lou Robinson, of whom no one ever complained was being “too political” in her rulings.
Robinson was nominated by President Jimmy Carter in 1980 and served with distinction and high honor. Now comes Kaczmaryk, whom conservatives seek to overturn policies enacted by Democratic and progressive members of Congress and presidents.
Schumer, McConnell introduce judge shopping bills | The Texas Tribune
“As I have said before, the problem with venue shopping is not a judge in North Texas,” Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell said from the Senate floor. “It’s a national problem driven by the ability of single judges everywhere to grant injunctions that are national in scope.”
The founders couldn’t possibly have envisioned this kind of mess developing within a judicial system they created.
Judges are supposed to stay above and apart from political battles, at least that’s what I always have thought.
Oops. Not so fast. A Texas Supreme Court associate justice said the other day he believes Democrats are going to rig the 2024 election to keep the presumed Republican nominee from being elected president.
Justice John Devine needs to have his mouth washed out with soap. According to the Texas Tribune: “Do you really think the Democrats are going to roll over and let Trump be president again?” Devine asked in a keynote speech at the Texas Tea Party Republican Women’s 2023 Christmas event. “You think they’re just going to go away, all of a sudden find Jesus and [there will] be an honest election? I don’t think so.”
What is he saying? Is he implying crookedness in the election? Looks like it to me! It’s also totally inappropriate for a judge — who well might hear a case involving a two-party political dispute — to shoot off his mouth in such a fashion.
SCOTX Justice implies Democrats will cheat in 2024 election | The Texas Tribune
This is crap! The judge ought to know it, too.
“Judges should be honestly evaluating and applying our state’s laws, not giving partisan speeches baselessly accusing members of a different political party of ‘cheating’ in elections,” Houston County Attorney Christian Menefee said.
Justice John Devine needs to step away from the political fight.
Just kidding with the headline on the top of the blog post.
Although I am driving tomorrow to the scene of where more than 1 million acres of grassland burned in what has been described as the worst wildfire in Texas history.
Amarillo is my destination, where I will attend Easter services and catch up with friends I haven’t seen in more than a year. The massive fire didn’t encroach the city limits, but it brought plenty of misery and tragedy to communities nearby.
The Fritch fire chief perished as he sought to save someone trapped by the blaze. Thousands of livestock died in the fire, along with several other human victims.
I haven’t yet heard if the fires have been extinguished, although I do know they’ve been contained.
I hear snippets of good news. The grass is recovering nicely from the charred remains of what the fire did to our good Earth. I look forward to seeing it in person in short order.
it’s always good to go back to where my wife and I called home for more than 20 years. Amarillo was the longest stay during our 51 years of marriage.
Friends await and I look forward to feeling the love.
Of all the members of the U.S. House who should be laughing out loud at the shenanigans of the MAGA cult, it is the most recent Democrat to hold the office of speaker of the House.
That is Nancy Pelosi, who now carries the title of “House speaker emerita,” which I guess is a way of declining to identify her as just another member of the House, representing her Bay Area, Calif., district.
Oh, no. She is a woman of supreme accomplishment, serving as the only (so far!) female House speaker. She served two stints as the Lady of the House, from 2007 to 2011 and from 2019 to 2023. Yes, she had more comfortable majorities than what the current Republican speaker, Mike Johnson, has working with him; although Pelosi’s Democratic majority in the 117th Congress was just 10 seats, which gave her little wiggle room to enact legislation.
She still got the job done.
Moreover, while Speaker Johnson and his immediate predecessor in office, Kevin McCarthy, have battled the MAGA crowd in the House, Pelosi had to do battle with her own intraparty demons. They comprised an equally vocal cabal of ultra-progressives who wanted her to veer far from traditional Democratic orthodoxy. Pelosi’s response to The Squad and others on the far left? Pipe down and be quiet!
She never lost control of the House, which is happening now with Johnson having to fend off challenges to his own leadership from within his own party.
The House managed to approve many landmark bills during her watch as speaker, most notably the Affordable Care Act, when she held the Democratic caucus together to see the ACA become law.
So … let’s not vilify the speaker emerita just because she is a “liberal Democrat.” I choose to recall with admiration and respect the job she did as the No. 2 person in succession to become president of the United States.
She was a powerhouse … period and full stop!
For the past few years I have been presuming that collegiality and civility have died a slow, painful death, that they have been replaced by rancor and hatred for those with opposing points of view.
Then I read an editorial in the Dallas Morning News that told me to hold on, that it ain’t so.
The editorial talks about two justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett and Sonia Sotomayor, who spoke to the National Governors Association. They talked about how the justices can differ, but they do not see each other as enemies.
The editorial states, in part: Civility and compromise are values in our democracy that, as of late, are buried in bitter arguments or smothered in misinformation.
Barrett is a deeply conservative member of the high court; Sotomayor is an equally fervent progressive jurist. The editorial notes: “When we disagree, our pens are sharp. But on a personal level, we never translate that into our relationships with one another,” Sotomayor told the crowd at one event.
The DMN editorial takes particular note of the extraordinary friendship forged long ago by two justices, the late Antonin Scalia and the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Their friendship became a talking point around the country as to how people with widely divergent points of view can retain personal affection.
The editorial is posted here: Two Supreme Court justices are reminding us how to act like adults (dallasnews.com)
Barrett said: “We don’t speak in a hot way at our conferences,” Barrett said. “We don’t raise our voices no matter how hot-button the case is.”
I am heartened to hear the words of two jurists who have told the world what goes on behind closed doors at the nation’s highest court. May their secret be repeated in other governmental chambers — such as the Congress — where the principals do raise their voices and speak ill of each other.
I am at a complete loss over this issue … which deals with measuring political strangeness.
The past two election cycles produced campaigns that competed for the title of Weirdest Campaign in Political History. The 2016 campaign resulted in the fluke for the ages when Hillary Clinton lost the Electoral College vote while garnering 3 million more votes than the nimrod who won.
Then came the next four years of chaos and confusion.
The 2020 election resulted in the aforementioned nimrod losing the White House to Joe Biden. Then the Liar in Chief refused to concede the election loss, depriving the president-elect of the “peaceful transition of power” that he deserved.
Those two elections were weird.
Now comes the third in a row. How in the world do we measure its bizarre quotient.
It’ll be the same two men, apparently, competing for the presidency. Joe Biden is the incumbent this time. His opponent will be the moron he defeated four years ago. Polls show the Republican challenger leading, but by the slimmest of margins.
Will these two men debate each other? Hah! I am not going to wait for that to occur. Because they likely won’t. And why is that?
Do you think the challenger wants to answer questions about the upcoming trials that await him? He has been charged with felonious conduct relating to (a) the theft of classified documents, (b) whether he incited the mob assault on the Capitol on 1/6 and (c) whether he interfered with the 2020 election by demanding that Georgia officials “find” enough votes to overturn that state’s 2020 presidential election result.
To be sure, President Biden has some walls to scale if he wants to be re-elected. He has to deal with the immigration crisis; he must find a solution to the war in Gaza; he needs to keep the heat on Russia as it continues its illegal war of aggression in Ukraine. The GOP challenger is making hay on the border crisis … but he has no solutions to offer.
Biden’s State of the Union speech the other evening was a stemwinder. He has set the table nicely for a spirited campaign. However, I hate the notion of this presidential election causing one to nibble on his or her nails.
It should be a cakewalk for the incumbent. The nature of the challenger’s hold on so many MAGA minions, though, lends a quality that, for my money, makes this race the weirdest of them all.
North Texas Republicans politicians appear to be suffering from the malady that has gripped the national Republican Party in the era of the 45th POTUS.
If they vote a certain way, or if they oppose certain high-profile pols, they become victims of the “primary disease” that spawns opponents within their own party.
I want to single out a couple of North Texas legislators who are fighting this intraparty squabble: Candy Noble and Jeff Leach.
Noble represents little ol’ me and my neighbors in Princeton. She has drawn fire from within her own party. Her “sin’? She voted to impeach Paxton. She has been accused — incredibly, I must add — for wanting to bring “Sharia law” into Texas public education classrooms. What … the … hell?
I put my mitts on a Noble campaign flier that declares she “fought for cutting property taxes, parental involvement in education, better health care options and securing our southern border.”
Wow! Radical stuff, eh? Her MAGA foes, though, say she favors Muslim interests over, um, Christian interests. They want to start a religious tussle within the party? Not a good look. Abraham George, a former Collin County GOP chair, is running against Noble in the primary.
Leach is a Republican legislator who this past year took part in the impeachment trial of GOP Attorney General Ken Paxton. He voted to impeach the AG and then served as a prosecutor in the Senate trial that ended up with Paxton’s acquittal.
Paxton then vowed to go after all the Republicans who stood against him … the jerk! A primary opponent emerged to run against Leach, who continues to tout his conservative bona fides. And they’re real.
Daren Meis is the MAGA candidate opposing Leach. He is a former Allen city councilman who didn’t bother to take part in the Dallas Morning News interview process with the candidates.
So many of these Republican challengers are campaigning on hatred for those who stand on principle. As the DMN said in its editorial endorsement of Leach’s primary bid:
“We don’t think most Republicans take them seriously. But we hope this sort of politicking does cause voters to reflect on just how bad things have gotten in their party.”
Kevin McCarthy might have gone down as the worst-ever speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives … were it not for the arrival of Mike Johnson as his successor.
There you have it. The MAGA crowd that once demanded that McCarthy refuse to work with Democrats now has installed one of its brethren in Johnson. The mob of malevolent MAGA misfits ousted McCarthy because he had the balls to work with Democrats on funding the government … temporarily.
The MAGA crowd installed Johnson, who has shown no such proclivity. And what has it gotten the GOP caucus? Only more scorn from the rest of the non-MAGA voters out here in the country. Why is that?
Because Johnson, for one thing, refused to back a bipartisan bill that would have strengthened our southern border, something the speaker and his allies insisted on doing. Why do you suppose Johnson scampered into the tall grass? Because the immediate past POTUS who’s running for the office he lost in 2020 demanded it of him. The ex-POTUS did not want President Biden to score any political points prior to this fall’s election.
So, there you go. The speaker of the House works for the former POTUS and not “the people” he purports to represent as speaker.
Johnson is trying to “lead” the House with the narrowest of “majorities” imaginable. He cannot get his GOP caucus to agree on much of anything and he damn sure has no support among Democrats who, these days, are feeling their oats as they gain strength in the House.
And, of course, he faces the same threats of removal that eventually undid McCarthy’s brief tenure as speaker. He dares not do a damn thing to rile the MAGA mob, which I should add comprises a small minority of the total GOP caucus. But, oh man, it is a vocal crowd and manages somehow to outshout the rest of the legislative body at virtually every turn.
Do I wish for a McCarthy return to the House? Not even …
I do wish for a display of guts from his successor, who so far has shown himself to be a gutless wonder.
Rarely can I boast about being ahead of the curve on political trends, as I mostly am wrong far more than I am correct.
As it involves the 45th president and his unfitness to hold — let alone run for — public office, well, I take a back seat to no one on that matter.
I made such a declaration long before he and his wife rode down the escalator in the office tower that bears his name. I noted that the future POTUS had zero public service experience, that his entire professional life was geared only toward self-enrichment. I argued vehemently on this blog that American voters must never let him near the Oval Office.
Well, as with most things, the voters didn’t heed my warning. He got elected in an Electoral College fluke, losing the popular vote by more than 3 million ballots, but being elected by pilfering key states and being awarded their electoral votes.
I truly wanted him to succeed. It couldn’t happen, though, because of that damn lack of public service background thing.
I said “I told you so” a time or three during his term in office. But again, the MAGA followers who happen to read High Plains Blogger were dismissive. I need to get over myself, some of ’em said.
Eight years later, the former POTUS is at it again. Only this time he has lost more than a step in speaking to the critical issues of the day.
He recently confused fellow GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley with Hillary Clinton, prompting Haley to declare — for the first time and way later than I ever did — that the GOP frontrunner is “unfit for public office.”
Well, no sh** Sherlock!
These missteps are going to chip away where his previous insults, gaffes and hideous pronouncements couldn’t.
Hold your applause if you’re so inclined to congratulate me. Hey, I was just stating the obvious. If only those MAGA followers would follow suit.