Scranton or Wilmington .
Biden's America Last Program
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Scranton or Wilmington .
Toxick
Splat
Is this you talking, or the article - because I made like 3 exhibits in the Nixon library and I wanted some feed back
Is the flag half empty or half full? A silly non-controversy concealed the latest Democrat effort to criminalize the President. Yesterday, the Tallahassee Democrat ran a snarky story headlined, “DeSantis orders flags at full-staff in Florida for Trump's inauguration day.” In doing so, Florida joined Texas, Alabama, Iowa, Tennessee, and Nebraska, all defying Joe Biden’s executive order requiring flags to remain lowered through the Inauguration in honor of President Carter’s death.
Biden’s executive order was unnecessary, a childish dig at Trump. The federal Flag Code, 4 USC § 7(m), already requires the American Flag to be flown at half-staff for 30 days following a former President’s death. Since former President Carter croaked on December 29th, flags should be cranked-down until January 28th, which unfortunately throws a depressing wet blanket over all of Inauguration week.
But on the other hand, the immediately preceding section of the Flag Code, 4 U.S.C. § 6(d), titled ‘Time and occasions for display,’ provides that “The flag should be displayed on all days, especially on … Inauguration Day, January 20.” Sane legal readers interpret the word “displayed” to mean “at full staff.” So, in highly unusual circumstances like this one, § 6 creates potential tension with § 7.
Lawmakers never considered this type of flaggy conflict arising between living and dead presidents. I mean, what are the odds?
In any case, the statute was meant to provide a reliable list of common flag standards, not create a legal quagmire. The U.S. Flag Code is not enforceable. It has no penalties for violations, neither civil nor criminal (as flag-burning protestors know well). Plus, the Code expressly allows a sitting President to modify any of the flag rules, 4 U.S.C. § 10, so Trump could immediately order the flags raised right after being sworn in.
Similarly, under § 10, Biden could easily have modified the rules in his executive order to allow full-height flags on Monday, but he didn’t — a deliberate oversight. Since there’s already a flag law, Biden’s executive order lowering the flag was wholly redundant — he did it intentionally, just to show he could have modified the rule but didn’t.
Biden was tilting the flagpole toward dishonoring the incoming President.
But even Biden’s symbolic middle finger isn’t enough for partisan Democrats, who would surely complain if they were hung with a new rope. Probably too scratchy or something. Yesterday’s Miami Herald headline:
(What do I always say about headlines that ask questions? They never answer them.) They are making a big deal about this because Democrats are trying to gin up a stupid narrative that, true to form, Trump’s term began with a crime. But it isn’t going anywhere because, as always, it isn’t illegal, and Trump did nothing anyway.
Yesterday, it was Florida’s great Governor Ron DeSantis who joined several other Southern State governors and ordered state officials to raise the flag everywhere in Florida to its full, glorious height on Monday, to honor President Trump. Flags will return to half-staff on Tuesday for President Carter. DeSantis wrote, “In light of the importance of this day, and on this patriotic occasion, I hereby order all flags to be raised to full-staff at the Florida Capitol and across all state buildings, installations, and grounds for the inauguration of the 47th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.”
And as for the Capitol grounds, where President Trump will take the oath, House Speaker Johnson suspended Carter's 30-day mourning period to allow flags at the U.S. Capitol to fly at full staff for Trump's inauguration next week. Everywhere else in DC they’ll remain at half-mast.
I hope that President Trump orders them right back up.
☕️ COMING UNTRUE ☙ Wednesday, January 15, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠
Hegseth confirmation in the bag; flag fracas symbolizes Democrats’ latest attempt to criminalize the President; massive Starbucks culture shift; incredible new peer-reviewed study tanks shots; more.
www.coffeeandcovid.com
SEC Sues Musk for Acquiring Twitter at 'Artificially Low Prices' - Here's Why the Suit Is Absurd
Here's more:
Along with 2024 Republican presidential primary candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Musk will head Trump's newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Do we smell a rat here?
Having spent nearly 30 years in the securities market, I have a few relevant thoughts. Let's start with the 27 percent jump in Twitter stock after Musk first announced he had joined Twitter's board of directors.
First, the equities (stock) market is generally a leading indicator, meaning investors purchase stock in anticipation of a rising market. In this case, an expected increase in the value of Twitter stock after Musk made his announcement, whereas the fixed-investment (bond) market is a following indicator. Investors who thought Musk would put an end to Twitter's blatant censorship of conservative content and restore free speech on the platform were encouraged to jump in, in anticipation.
Second, Musk's $150 million "underpayment," if even true, represented an infinitesimal percentage of his estimated net worth of $426 billion as of January 2025, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Here's the salient point:
Why would Musk risk giving the Biden administration's SEC another (fake) opportunity to hound him? He wouldn't.
Clem72
Well-Known Member
He should start with banning coke from the white house. No, not coca cola.
In four days, it will be banned.
The Times wasn’t done burnishing Biden’s bunions. It ran a front-page story this morning headlined, “In Farewell Address, Biden Warns of an ‘Oligarchy’ Taking Shape in America.” In a 17-minute farewell that only felt like an hour and a half, Joe used his whispery, slow voice to interminably say goodbye. You know the one, the voice with less emotional range than a talking doll, each sentence repetitively sighed out with the exact same rhythm and cadence, the emphasis always landing on the final syllable. Maybe talking that way hypnotizes Democrats or something.
CLIP: Jesse Watters’ summary of Biden’s extended farewell (1:13).
It might not have been the longest presidential farewell in American history, but it felt like it. Joe’s speechwriters failed. It was so enervating that none of the headlines quoted a single sound bite, perhaps fearing the written version would stun readers into sleepy boredom. Most tellingly, out of all the half-dozen long-form, magazine-style articles the Times ran about Joe’s long goodbye (17-minutes!) and his wonderful “legacy” — not one included a clear picture from last night’s address. I had to grab the one above off Twitter.
Sometimes, we can learn more about what the corporate media thinks by what it doesn’t report.
In typical Biden style, his speech was a pugilistic opportunity to settle some final scores. After spending four years calling Republicans “dangerous” (especially MAGA supporters), Biden directed his dangerous ire into dark warnings about Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Trump, and even Congressional Democrats, since Nancy Pelosi pushed him out and nobody stuck up for him.“It literally threatens our very democracy,” Joe began, repeating his most-used line, misusing the word “literally” again, and obscuring which problem “it” referred to.
All of “it,” I suppose. Or, Joe was full of “it.” Your choice.
Since Elon Musk helped the Republicans win the most recent election, Joe has —too late— discovered the awful threat of “oligarchs” —meaning billionaires— influencing politics. Oh, it was perfectly fine when George Soros and Mark Zuckerberg did it to help Democrats undermine our representative form of government. But now, Joe practically feels like fainting at the thought any billionaire could courageously align with conservatives — despite the risk of Democrat retaliation. But I digress.At bottom, it was embarassingly obvious that Joe was just mad at Elon, so his handlers wrote a song about it. That’s all it amounted to. Not one reportable soundbite. (Media loved the word “oligarch” though, so expect a lot more of that over the next four years. And Joe should know about oligarchs; some of his best business deals involved them.)
In what his speechwriters probably expected to be Biden’s most clever moment, the Old Man recalled Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex —a prophetic warning we completely ignored— and offered his very own version: the looming danger of the rising ‘tech-industrial complex.’ Hearing that piqued our interest; maybe Biden would talk about the dangers of AI, self-directed weapons, gene editing, and photo fakery—truly threatening technologies that nobody seems able to get an arm around.
But no, whatever promise was offered by all that history and the dramatic rhetorical setup immediately fizzled. It turned out all Biden meant by “tech-industrial complex” was the lack of government control over ‘free speech.’ He’s just mad that Zuckerberg threw him under the bus this week, so he was getting in a few licks.
Finally, the speech’s physical characteristics amounted to a kind of gloomy metaphor for Biden’s presidency. Joe started in the basement without anyone but family, no rallies, events, or press conferences, only the continuous flicker of his ever-fading Zoom presence and the discordant dripping of his endless teleprompter gaffes. And now, in a very similar manner, his failed presidency has ended, again alone, again in a room with no one but family, no supporters, no fans, no allies, no ceremony — just Joe, reading his script, winding it down.So that’s about it! There’s no need now to watch Joe’s Long Goodbye (you’re welcome). How we have longed for this happy day! Seeing Joe go was almost worth watching the whole 17 minutes. Almost.
☕️ OVERLONG GOODBYES ☙ Thursday, January 16, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠
MidEast peace deal offers hostage return but media complains; Biden's baffling long farewell settles political scores not much else; Florida's great Governor leads immigration from the front; more.
www.coffeeandcovid.com
Biden Says He Ratified New Constitutional Amendment, Despite Opposition
“It is long past time to recognize the will of the American people,” Biden said in a statement. “In keeping with my oath and duty to Constitution and country, I affirm what I believe and what three-fourths of the states have ratified: the 28th Amendment is the law of the land, guaranteeing all Americans equal rights and protections under the law regardless of their sex.”
Biden pointed to how Virginia in 2020 became the 38th state to ratify the ERA, which would prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender.
The U.S. archivist and U.S. deputy archivist said in late 2024 that the president could not ratify the amendment because the amendment did not receive the required support from three-fourths of the states by the deadline Congress imposed, which was June 30, 1982.
The Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2020, while Donald Trump was president, and in 2022, after Biden took office, also said that ratification cannot occur unless Congress or the courts extend or remove the ratification deadline.
However, the American Bar Association (ABA) is among the organizations that have offered a different view: that Virginia’s ratification was sufficient to meet the three-quarters requirement, and the deadline is not relevant.
“I agree with the ABA and with leading legal constitutional scholars that the Equal Rights Amendment has become part of our Constitution,” Biden said.
The Equal Rights Amendment Is Back, and Old Joe Biden Says It’s Now the Law of the Land
The ERA was a central preoccupation of the 1970s when the outgoing figurehead was just beginning his storied career as a leftist prevaricator, character assassin (see Clarence Thomas for details), and premier corruptocrat in the United States Senate. Feminists bombarded Americans with propaganda slogans including “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” and “A woman’s place is in the House… and the Senate.”
But when Congress approved the ERA on March 22, 1972, it set a deadline of seven years for the necessary three-fourths of the states to approve it. That deadline came and went on March 22, 1979, with only 35 states approving of the amendment. Thirty-eight were needed, so that was that. In 2017, however, as the #MeToo movement was cresting, Nevada became the 36th state to approve the ERA, with Illinois following in 2018 and Virginia in 2020.
So the amendment was over the line, with just one problem: the seven-year deadline had passed over forty years before Virginia ratified the thing. Even before Virginia ratified the ERA, Alabama, Louisiana, and South Dakota tried to head off its post-deadline passage, filing a federal lawsuit in 2019 to stop any other states from ratifying the amendment.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, demonstrating an admirable and rare degree of common sense, explained: “The people had seven years to consider the ERA, and they rejected it. To sneak it into the Constitution through this illegal process would undermine the very basis for our constitutional order.”
But when the man who sicced the corrupt and politicized justice system on his principal political opponent hears about something that would undermine our constitutional order, all he says is, Hold my beer. And so on Friday, Old Joe issued a statement:
Well, of course, you do, Joe, but it ain’t necessarily so. The president of the United States, even one as arrogant, self-righteous, and authoritarian as Old Joe, cannot simply declare that something has become part of the Constitution. The validity of the post-deadline ratifications still has to be hashed out.
Also, if Virginia’s ratification made the ERA part of the Constitution, why did Old Joe wait until nearly four years after that ratification to declare that the amendment was now a done deal? Could it have anything to do with the fact that going back all the way to 1972, objections to the ERA have noted that the amendment would subject women to being drafted, as the formidable ERA opponent Phyllis Schlafly noted? The nation has just been treated to the spectacle of feminist harridans in the Senate harassing Pete Hegseth over his opposition to putting women in combat roles; if the ERA really does become a part of the Constitution, Hegseth’s efforts to end that harmful fantasy-based policy will be hamstrung.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell didn't engineer a soft landing as he gave Biden and the Democrats a delay in reckoning. It didn't do them any good on election day, but as you can see, Trump's final term is littered with deadly landmines.
Those are the seeds Biden planted — poison ivy where once a lush lawn grew.
That's his legacy. That's what Trump must somehow undo.
Because I'm filled with love for my fellow humans of all political stripes [I just choked on that, Steve —Editor], I would be remiss if I didn't bring the fairness and balance, and remind you of the positive parts of Biden's legacy.
[awkwardly long thoughtful pause]
OK, I think I have something.
By hanging on long past his sell date and well into the campaign season, Biden accomplished two things of lasting importance. First, by becoming the first presidential nominee forced off the ticket in an undemocratic intra-party coup, Biden sullied his reputation in a way that even the friendliest historians might find it impossible to hide. Biden's legacy is less than a one-and-done failure, like Jimmy Carter or George H.W. Bush.
Second — and even better — was Biden's endorsement of his vice president, Kamala Harris, as his replacement, effectively short-circuiting Democrat hopes of holding an "insta primary" that might have produced a winnable candidate. Instead, Biden gave the country an unprepared mid-wit with just 107 days to put together a campaign. Not only did Biden screw the party that had screwed him, he effectively ended Harris's national aspirations.
I guess that's three things. So we've got that going for us, which is nice.
pjmedia.com
Those are the seeds Biden planted — poison ivy where once a lush lawn grew.
That's his legacy. That's what Trump must somehow undo.
Because I'm filled with love for my fellow humans of all political stripes [I just choked on that, Steve —Editor], I would be remiss if I didn't bring the fairness and balance, and remind you of the positive parts of Biden's legacy.
[awkwardly long thoughtful pause]
OK, I think I have something.
By hanging on long past his sell date and well into the campaign season, Biden accomplished two things of lasting importance. First, by becoming the first presidential nominee forced off the ticket in an undemocratic intra-party coup, Biden sullied his reputation in a way that even the friendliest historians might find it impossible to hide. Biden's legacy is less than a one-and-done failure, like Jimmy Carter or George H.W. Bush.
Second — and even better — was Biden's endorsement of his vice president, Kamala Harris, as his replacement, effectively short-circuiting Democrat hopes of holding an "insta primary" that might have produced a winnable candidate. Instead, Biden gave the country an unprepared mid-wit with just 107 days to put together a campaign. Not only did Biden screw the party that had screwed him, he effectively ended Harris's national aspirations.
I guess that's three things. So we've got that going for us, which is nice.