Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Politics In General Flimsy evidence and made-up hypotheticals: The Rwing destruction of democracy

In the recent SCOTUS ruling 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis ruled that Colorado graphic designer Lorie Smith does not 'have' to make a website for a gay couple's wedding.

Noted SPLC-labeled hate group the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) - which also defended the Jack Phillips' case. The Colorado state court had found that baker Jack Phillips' decision to turn away David Mullins and Charlie Craig in 2012 was unlawful discrimination.

Rghts groups feared the ruling against the couple could set precedent for treating gay marriages differently from heterosexual unions. But the Supreme Court's verdict instead focused specifically on Mr Phillips' case.

Back at it again, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) took to defend Smith's graphic design and web design business, arguing that her work was "art" and that she shouldn't be required to produce "art" for people who are doing things that are against her religion.

The Supreme Court ruled that Smith does not "have" to make websites for same-sex marriages, regardless of Colorado's anti-discrimination law barring discrimination against LGBTQ+ people.


Judge Neil Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion:
This decision opens the door for any business to discriminate against protected classes of people so long as they claim that what they are doing is "art" or some other form of personal expression. Given that many people feel that way about their work, it's going to go a lot further than just some rinky dink graphic designer in Colorado. Literally anyone in a customer-facing position could also claim that helping or interacting with someone of a protected class is "compelled speech."

According to various media reports, the Colorado web designer who the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Friday could refuse to make wedding websites for gay couples cited a request from a man who says he never asked to work with her - making this hypothetical case - the first in SCOTUS history, to be ruled upon. This is historic.

This decision has also effectively made protected classes second-class citizens taking second position to a business owners sincerely held beliefs.

Recently Republican House Chairmen began resorting to immunizing crimes in an attempt to gin up scandals to use against Joe Biden.

This began with the Gary Shapley’s testimony. IRS agents are prohibited from leaking details from private tax returns - yet that is exactly what Shapely did in talking about an investigation into Hunter Biden.

To permit Shapley to do so, the House Ways and Means Majority Counsel first laid out that Shapley was sharing information as a whistleblower, effectively waving a magic wand to let Shapley ignore this prohibition.

Shapley then answered a bunch of questions, some of which were unrelated to his core allegations. days after the Hunter Biden settlement was reached. Under an agreement detailed last Tuesday in a filing in federal court in Delaware, Hunter Biden will plead guilty to a pair of misdemeanor tax charges. Prosecutors have also charged him with possessing a firearm while being a user of illegal drugs - a felony - but have agreed to dismiss that charge if he completes a two-year period of probation.

House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith released Shapley’s transcript, after which Shapley has run to the right wing media to repeat his allegations. Biden’s failure to pay all his taxes has been a focus of the ongoing Justice Department investigation - but Biden ended up paying all of it recently. While wiping out his liability does not preclude criminal charges against him, the payment makes it harder for prosecutors to win a conviction or a long sentence for tax-related offenses, according to tax law experts, since juries and judges tend to be more sympathetic to defendants who have paid their bills.

Shapley’s media appearances might constitute a crime. But how is Merrick Garland’s DOJ going to prosecute it, now that the right wing has made Shapley a hero for floating the latest manufactured scandal about Hunter Biden? Shapley is going to be the cornerstone of an attempt to impeach Garland, not for prosecuting Shapley for breaking the law, but because Garland let a Trump appointee prosecute the President’s son unimpeded.

That’s Garland’s sin: Letting a US Attorney appointed by Donald Trump prosecute the son of the most powerful man in the world, something that should be a remarkable, however sober, feat of due process, but which Republicans want to undermine because a Republican US Attorney didn’t find enough crime for their needs, because they need this story to go on and on and on.

This "whistle-blower" leak is consistent with other Rwing leaks that always appear just before elections and are intended to influence an election. Rwing scandal ginning was done in 2020 to Joe Biden (Hunter Biden/Ukraine) and Hillary Clinton in 2016 (Private server/Classified info).

It’s not just tax law that Rwing sources violated by leaking details about the Hunter Biden investigation. It may well be grand jury information - something included in IRS whistle-blower's Shapley’s disclosures.

Republicans are using the confidentiality guaranteed as part of due process to create more scandal. In the wake of the transcript release, Republicans released a letter demanding more testimony from people who would not normally, and won’t now, be able to comply, especially given that this an active investigation.

Media has been complicit in flaming scandals without explaining to its readers and viewers by not acknowledging recipients won’t comply and won’t be able to and shouldn’t be able to due to active investigations.

This issue is that Shapely shouldn't know what he testified to because information is was leaked to him, and he went running to anyone who would listen to him. Republicans are now initiating investigations with information based upon rumor to keep Joe Biden "scandals" alive to harm him in the next election. This is a dangerous precedent and harmful for democracy.

The Supreme Court's recent decision that affirmative action for college admissions is unconstitutional, has an interesting consequence: There is now a lawsuit claiming that legacy admissions are not merit-based, therefore violate this decision as well. At Harvard for example, there have been way more legacy admissions then affirmative action admissions. Once we get rid of both, and admission is strictly based on merit, way more Asian and Jewish kids are going to be admitted! Those two groups have suffered because of reverse discrimination, many qualified applicants being denied to "increase diversity" or other such racially-based arguments.

It will be funny to see how top schools attempt to redefine the meaning of "merit". Important lesson for conservatives: Be careful what you wish for.

Today's Rwingers are infamous for not thinking things through and, as result, having unintended consequences for their actions.

Speaking of "hypothetical case", I typed in 2016 someone should have brought suits against Trump for every imaginable possibility of Constitutional criminal activity while occupying the WH. Had that had happened we would have all manner of Constitutional opinions which would have made it very easy to prosecute his misconduct (read that as Constitutional crimes). Thus we would have had the leader of the insurrection, and all his cronies and allies in Congress, behind bars long ago. Alas that did not happen and now we have this morass of legal activity which will drag on into election season, and when a Republican wins the general all these insurrectionists will be pardoned and given pensions for the "patriotic" duty to reinstall the criminal Trump as occupant of the WH.

If you're thinking we still have some hope ... well I don't need sunglasses as the future don't look so bright from where I sit

It's not just "today's" right wingers. They have for some time been guilty of short sightedness. I attribute that to influx of intellectual buffoons, and delusional bigots into Republican party. I have to wonder what Harvard is teaching these characters, like Sen Cruz and Hawley. Dishonest and down right stupid is how I could describe their best features. If this is the best we have, then we need to home school more people to bring up the quality of intellects in the Republican party.

I think I;m gonna be sick .... yuck

Another one bites the dust: Larry Householder, former Republican Speaker of the Hose for Ohio was sentenced today for bribery racketeering. He got the full recommended 20 years in federal prison, starting immediately. He was led out of the courthouse in handcuffs, and right into the prison transport van. None of this pussyfooting around with pre-appeal release. He now has his orange jump suit and cellmate.

He spent years as one of the most powerful politicians in Ohio, using his position for all sorts of strong-arming in the name of politics. Well, it turns out crime committed for political reasons is still crime! His co-conspirator got just 5 years after accepting responsibility and apologizing. Householder refused to accept that he did anything wrong, so he got the full 20.

Remind you of anyone?

District Judge Terry Doughty issued an injunction on the 4th of July (...guess he chose to miss his family's BBQ) blocking the Biden administration from communicating with the social media platforms at all regarding disinformation.

The Biden Administration was sued on the theory that Administration coerced and/or conspired with social media platforms to censor conservative messages and speakers. They claim that this turned Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube into government actors, and so when they booted, downgraded, or appended notes to anti-vax content, it violated the First Amendment.

Judge Doughty, a Trump appointee, has previously issued nationwide injunctions against the Biden administration's ban on new federal leases for oil and gas drilling, as well as its vaccine mandate for healthcare workers.

Doughty wrote in his opinion:


In other words, Doughty states that the Biden Administration targeted conservatives because conservatives are the ones known to promote false claims and conspiracy theories on social media.

You see, when social media sites contact the federal agencies like the CDC for accurate health information, and the government says "no, horse dewormer is a not an effective treatment for COVID," that violates the free rights of people who want to claim horse dewormer kills viruses and then can't because Facebook downranks their posts.

Conservatives get so grrrrrrrr mad about the downranking of their asinine "theories” and misinformation that they promote on social media - what passes for conservative speech today, is mostly crackpot ideology dressed up to appear normal.

It is also quite telling that Doughty conflates batcrap crazy ideas and conservatism. Sometimes Rwingers inadvertently tell the truth.

Marcy Wheeler is an independent journalist specializing in national security and civil liberties. At her website, Emptywheel today, SU 07/09/23, Ms. Wheeler points out the forensic evidence that the infamous "Hunter Biden" laptop that Rwingers have been yammering about for the past three years doesn’t have the same data as the original hard drive because Rwingers have added data and manipulated the data - so much so, that the hard drive no longer represents anything Hunter Biden once owned.

Essentially, Rwingers gained access to Biden’s laptop in the late summer 202O via iCloud, imaged the hard drive, added data, manipulated data, inserted it onto a new laptop, and “left” this computer at a repair shop in Delaware, claiming that Hunter Biden left it for a blind computer repair guy to restore and never picked it up. The big tell that this story is made-up is that Rudy Guilliani was in possession of this laptop for a period of time.

This was done to manipulate the 2020 election results, just as James Comey had done in 2016 to Hillary Clinton, when he re-opened a previously closed investigation into Clinton’s handling of classified material on a private server so close to the election, and just as quickly re-closed the investigation once the damage had been done.

Rwingers will do anything to steal an election to foist their fascist doctrine onto us decent Americans. This laptop “story” is indicative of just how sick and emotionally unwell these Rwingers truly are.

Now chair of the Oversight Committee, James Comer (R-KY), is holding hearings as to why the FBI didn't make hay of this manipulated hard drive in the fall of 2020 to harm Joe Biden's efforts to become POTUS. After all, the FBI did it once before helping Republicans in 2016.

On SA 07/08/23, U.S. Representative Darryl Issa (R-CA), alleged to have burned down his auto alarm company in the 1990s to collect the insurance money, was on Fox News asking the question: Why is Joe Biden spending time with his only living son who is a recovering drug addict and allowing him into the White House?

These Rwingers are the worst kinds of human beings there are.

Five days ago on the 23rd of July, Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) led a group of twenty-three Republican senators in calling on the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to commit to protecting agency whistleblowers who disclosed the existence of FBI records alleging a criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and a foreign national.

Chuck Grassley released an almost unredacted FD-1023 after dire warnings from the FBI.

If you want to pursue the allegation, you do everything you can to protect the FD-1023 and the informant. If you want to fuel a controversy, you release the FD-1023, even at the risk of getting the informant killed.

Fueling controversy is exactly what Grassley has done. Grassley went against FBI recommendations of releasing the FD-1023, risking risk getting the informant killed. Grassley must think that releasing the document is worth having the information killed - anything to ease their panic to do something to stave off the Hunter Biden guilty plea this week - and perhaps to bail Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler (who are represented by lawyers tied to Chuck Grassley) out of wild and in some cases inconsistent claims they made in their House Oversight debut.

Republicans cannot win elections the old fashion way: Doing the hardwork of having a platform that folks will vote for.

Republicans now-a-days will lie, invent, gerrymander, ask officials to 'find' ballots, create fake electors, spread rumor and innuendo against the POTUS' only living son - to win an election.