ANNOY SQUIDWARD DAY UPDATES
One More Crabby Patty, Please!
-For those of you who thought the actions of former Vice President Mike Pence on January 6, 2021 were heroic and not the bare minimum he could do to prevent Ex-President Trump from overtuning the election he lost, look no further than the news that his attorneys are attempting to quash the subpoena he received from January 6 Special Prosecutor Jack Smith. The apparent legal reason he is using to try to do so is being laughed at by legal observers – Pence is arguing that, as head of the Senate on that day, anything he said up to that day falls under privileged protection under the “speech and debate clause” which allows legislators to more or less say anything while discussing legislation and not get sued.
-According to said experts, the basic problem with that argument (even going beyond the fact that most exemptions like that are negated if a CRIME is being committed) (and beyond the fact that Pence’s actions on that day are ceremonial and not strictly legislative on HIS part) is that there has already been an attempt to use that clause to stop testimony in a criminal proceeding (that would be Sen. Lindsay Graham’s attempt to not testify in the attempt by Trump in GA to ALLEGEDLY (eye roll) find 11,780 votes) – and the courts soundly rejected the argument.
-The real reason for the filing? The hunch is, Pence doesn’t want to be seen as the final nail in any potential Trump indictment out of fear that he won’t be able to expand his 5% of the GOP primary vote in 2024.
-In any event, the move is not expected to work, with the only question being how long the delay will be if courts wish to hear the case. Stay tuned …
-In a different Trump legal proceeding, prosecutors investigating Trump’s removal of hundreds of super-classified documents have subpoenaed an attorney who, according to a different attorney, signed off on a document that said Trump had turned over all the classified documents he has in his possession – a claim that was proven laughably wrong just this past weekend with yet another set of attorneys giving the National Archives (and said prosecutors) scanned files on a flash drive and A LAPTOP COMPUTER, and a claim that would expose the aforementioned attorney to lots of criminal liability. The move is seen as very aggressive and a signal that the document investigation is also moving to some kind of resolution (read: indictment?).
-There was also a physical folder full of some of those documents turned over with the digital files, with a rather … interesting excuse by Trump attorneys: see, they said the folder was next to Trump’s bed, see, and there is an old-fashioned telephone next to the bed, see, and there was this blue light on the old-fashioned telephone next to the bed that flashed all the time and would wake Trump up, see, so he took the folder with the classified documents and put it on top of the old-fashioned phone so the light wouldn’t flash and wake Trump up and he forgot it and that was why he forgot about those documents! SEE!?!?!
-The derailment of a train full of toxic chemicals that led to the chemicals being burned off near the town of East Palestine, OH, has gotten some rather surprising coverage on Fox News – although, as you can imagine, the reasons for their coverage are not simply about the potential grave danger of what those chemicals are and could be doing to life in that area.
-Fox hosts used the accident to attack the EPA for being lax in their enforcement that led to the accident happening (never mind that the regulations that allowed for more toxic chemicals to be carried by rail were relaxed by the Trump administration), that the order to burn off the chemicals must also have come from the senile Biden administration letting it (never mind that the GOP Governor of OH, Mike DeWine, contacted the White House immediately and has been praising their cooperation and responsiveness), that clearly the existence of Pete Buttigeg as Transportation was a trigger for the disaster (because GAY WOKE GAY WOKE GAY GAY GAY), and, according to GOP party leader Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the accident is further proof of stupid policies like the EPA’s support of (and I’m not kidding) bird- and whale-killing windmills and wind turbines.
-Last Sunday’s Super Bowl was the third-most-watched TV event in history, averaging 113 million viewers, reaching a peak of 118 million viewers for the halftime show by Rihanna. But billionaire weirdo Twitter CEO Elon Musk did not have a good Super Bowl. Multiple news reports claim Musk was so enraged that his pro-Philadelphia Eagles Tweet got about 10 million less likes than the pro-Eagles Tweet that First Lady Dr. Jill Biden got that Musk flew back from the game (which he saw with members of the Fox News-owning Murdoch family) and immediately contacted Twitter engineers to rejigger the Twitter algorithms so that Musk Tweets would get more circulation and more likes than any other individual Twitter user.
-In case you needed to find one of the other Twitter-like social media platforms …
-On this date in 1898, the USS Maine exploded off the coast of Cuba – and while it is now believed the disaster was an accident, it was used by then-Navy Secretary Theodore Roosevelt to create the Spanish-American War. On this date in 1933, an assassin attempted to shoot President Franklin Roosevelt in Miami - he instead shot Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, who died three weeks later from the wound. On this date in 1965, Canada adopted it now-iconic maple leaf national flag. And on this date in 2005, YouTube launched.
-Happy Birthday to Galileo, Cyrus McCormick, Charles Lewis Tiffany, Susan B. Anthony, Ernest Shackleton, John Barrymore, Harold Arlen, Cesar Romero, Harvey Korman, Graham Hill, Brian Holland, Glyn Johns, modern classical music and opera composer John Adams, Art Spiegelman, Ron Cey, Jane Seymour, Melissa Manchester, Matt Groening, Hugh Padgham, Chris Farley, Mark Price, Josh Marshall, Gloria Trevi, Shepard Fairey, Jaromir Jagr, Alex Borstein, Seattle Slew, Brandon Boyd, Adam Granduciel, Conor Oberst, Gary Clark Jr., and Megan Thee Stallion.
-Rest in Peace/Rest in Power to Nat King Cole, Wally Cox, Mike Bloomfield, Ethel Merman, Richard Feynman, McLean Stevenson, Howard K. Smith, Vanity, and P.J. O’Rourke.