<....These trash posts belong in the Kibitzer Cafe or your own forum, not here.>

<The audience at ABC’s The View gasped on Thursday after co-host Joy Behar said, in a discussion about the East Palestine train derailment disaster, that being unsafe was what they voted for.

As the show’s hosts were talking about the political ramifications of and culpability for the disaster in Ohio, as well as Republican criticism of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg‘s handling of the situation, Behar brought up the fact that residents of the district where the derailment happened voted for Donald Trump.

Alyssa Farah-Griffin was pointing out that Norfolk-Southern gives large donations to both parties, and added that central Ohio is “Trump country,” which led to the comment from Behar about the particular district.

“I don’t know why they would ever vote for him, for somebody who, by the way, he placed someone with deep ties to the chemical industry in charge of the EPA’s chemical safety office,” said Behar.

“That’s who you voted for in that district,” she said, pointing directly into the camera. “Donald Trump, who reduces all safety.”

The audience audibly gasped in reaction to Behar’s comments.

As they headed to the break, co-host Sunny Hostin said, “I think this is Donald Trump’s fault.”

“It’s his fault and then he shows up,” agreed Behar, referring to Trump dropping in on the district this week to give short remarks, as his 2024 campaign continues to spin up.>

<Appearing on MSNBC early Saturday morning, a former Republican Party lawmaker suggested that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has a fragmented caucus that he can't control and that could be dangerous as tensions increase around the world and nationally.

Speaking with host Katie Phang, ex-Rep. Dave Jolly (R-FL) addressed McCarthy's relative silence about comments made by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) that hint at proposing another civil war, and host Phang asked whether McCarthy has any control at all.

'David, you served in Congress, you were at the United States capital serving alongside with Democrats and Republicans," host Phang began. "Is that the case that, because Kevin McCarthy will not gatekeep, and will not keep people in control that we are facing this problem now?"

"Yeah, in many ways, he was overrun by unserious legislators," Jolly replied. "And I actually worry about that. That the House has become a bit of a playground, and not able now to respond to an international or national crisis for some of the leadership you occasionally see from that have been there for a while."

"And the ignorance of Marjorie Taylor Greene's comments shows it and it is a perfect reflection," he added. "Lady, last I checked, Georgia is trending blue. So Marjorie, if you want a national divorce, welcome to all your new Democratic colleagues. I hope you can work well with [CA Gov.] Gavin Newsom, because of how stupid of a comment can you make?"

" As much as we make light of it, it's not just a call for civil war," he continued. "It's when you wrap it in her declaration that she is a Christian white nationalist, we need to be a nation of white nationalism. That's when you get to the real danger">

<Attorney Andrew McCarthy said Emily Kohrs, the forewoman of a special grand jury as part of the Georgia criminal probe into former President Trump, may have dealt "a terrible blow" to prosecutors with her unusual media tour this week.

In a pair of appearances on CNN and NBC News, Kohrs appeared to strongly hint that Trump was among those recommended for criminal charges while laughing, joking and making animated facial expressions that seemed to provide answers she knew she shouldn't be offering. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, believes any "fair-mind lawyer" [sic] would object to her behavior.

"This is a terrible thing. She basically flouted the secrecy rules of the grand jury. She flouted the judge's order, and she makes the whole enterprise down there in Georgia look like it's a, you know – Trump called it a kangaroo court," McCarthy said.

"Whether it really is a kangaroo court or not, in that colorful sense, we'll have to see as the proceedings go by. But it's absolutely true that it's a terrible blow for their legal system and for this particular investigation, which has already had problems, because, you know, the [Fulton County] District Attorney [Fani Willis] is an elected Democrat who had a lot to say publicly about Trump even before this investigation opened," he continued. "This doesn’t help them present the impression that they’re running a tight, ethical, professional investigation."

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney previously ordered that any recommendations on who should, or should not, be prosecuted would remain secret – for now – to protect their due process rights. The special grand jury did not have the power to issue indictments, and it will ultimately be up to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to decide whether to seek indictments from a regular grand jury.

Kohrs has irked liberal CNN and MSNBC pundits this week with comments made to their own colleagues that may have inadvertently helped Trump’s legal team.

But CNN and NBC News provided Kohrs with the platform, and she drew attention to both networks during the pair of viral on-camera interviews. While legal experts think Kohrs’ media blitz may ultimately benefit the former president, McCarthy feels liberal pundits from CNN and MSNBC can’t be mad at their own networks for putting Kohrs in front of the camera. He said the news side of media organizations must make decisions that will sometimes annoy their colleagues....>

<...."I think no matter what your political predisposition is, a jury forewoman who comes out to talk publicly and a high-profile case is a newsworthy event that they would believe they had to cover," McCarthy told Fox News Digital.

"So, I don't fault the news side for regarding it as a news story and covering it," he continued. "You can quibble with whether or not they skewed the news as they reported it. That's a different issue, but whether it's a news story, I think it is a news story."

Shortly after her interview with CNN's Kate Bolduan on Tuesday, her colleagues Anderson Cooper and Elie Honig reacted in astonishment.

"First of all, why this person is talking on TV, I do not understand," Cooper said. "She's clearly enjoying herself. But, I mean, is this responsible? She was the foreperson of this grand jury!"

"This is a horrible idea," said Honig, a CNN legal analyst. "And I guarantee you that prosecutors are wincing, watching her go on this… It’s a prosecutor’s nightmare."

On MSNBC, "Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough was heard saying "Oh, God" as co-host Mika Brzezinski offered a recap of all the interviews Kohrs gave, which also included the Associated Press, New York Times and Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

MSNBC columnist and former prosecutor Barbara McQuade wrote Thursday that she was "mortified" about Kohr's "reckless" media tour. MSNBC shared the column on Twitter, tweeting, "Loose lips sink ships — and can surely do the same for investigations. Emily Kohrs' media tour is reckless."

The special grand jury spent about seven months hearing testimony from witnesses, including high-profile Trump allies, such as attorney Rudy Giuliani and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and top Georgia officials like Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Gov. Brian Kemp.

While Kohrs has been criticized for joking and giggling during her CNN and NBC News interviews, McCarthy thinks a more serious foreperson would have still inadvertently helped Trump’s legal team with such a media blitz.

"I was a prosecutor for 20 years. What you want as the prosecutor is to convince the public that the investigation has been done by the book, in accordance with the rule of law, and that the tribunal is reliable and also following the law," McCarthy said.

"So, any time you have somebody violating the law in a very blatant way, even if that person were more articulate and seemed to have, you know, both feet on the ground and be a more serious, grounded person than the jury foreman, it would still be very bad for the prosecution and really for the court, and the court’s reputation for integrity," he continued.

"It would be bad to have somebody in such a big case flouting the rules this way. So that's the big problem for them. The fact that she also happens to seem like an oddball is, you know, that's more of a gift for Trump, because the more you watch these clips, the more you kind of roll your eyes about the whole enterprise down there." >

Is she for f***ing real?

Takes all kinds.

<....Don't go believing anything perfidious says about me. pee just makes @#$% up every day for character assassination; there's hardly no truth at all in his bear statements....>

Translation: that wretched <perd> got too close to the truth, so I must savage him before all and sundry to cover my embarrassment at being exposed by someone who is beneath me.

<....pee's bored of attacking me and prefers trashing Marjorie instead. I have her on ignore....>

This from the pathological liar who claims he never follows others.

<....I said Trump cut taxes (and negotiated trade deals, and made NATO pay their fair share, etc.) - great for American business without a doubt, great for job creation, and the economy took off like Usain Bolt...>

The long-term effect (think 2027 and thereafter) will not be, shall we say, satisfactory for we hoi polloi. Time for you to serve your masters as you shill for them.

<....Hillary's gonna run AGAIN if Joe doesn't. She's been in hiding and now she's coming out of the woodwork here and there always for a photo op smile. I'm expecting to see her on Bob Villa's [sic] show any day now. She'd let China invade Japan and Korea too.>

<Sidney Powell, a Trump lawyer who peddled false claims about the 2020 presidential election, avoided disbarment after a Texas judge tossed the case against her because some of the plaintiff's evidence exhibits were out of order.

According to court documents filed Thursday, Collin County District Court Judge Andrea Bouressa gave Powell a temporary reprieve after dismissing the case brought by the Texas State Bar's attempt to discipline her for conduct during and after the 2020 presidential election.

Bouressa, a Republican, said in her ruling that the Commission for Lawyer Discipline had "failed to meet its burden" in part because of "difficulty locating materials cited in the Commission's brief."

The judge said the commission's motion had listed exhibits A through F, but the "actual documents attached to the response were marked Exhibits A through H, and did not match the documents described in the brief." When the court contacted the Commission about the errors, the latter responded that "no corrective action was necessary," according to Bouressa's ruling.

She added that in "light of the numerous defects in the Commissions exhibits," she did not consider much of the submitted exhibits. As a result, just two of the documents cited by the Commission were considered, Bouressa wrote in Thursday's order. The decision is appealable, the judge said.

It is unclear if the commission plans to appeal. Powell may still face repercussions from her voter fraud claims as several other Trump lawyers have faced sanctions, criminal charges, and suspensions, according to Forbes.

Representatives for Powell and for the commission did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment on Saturday.>

< Everything that you are not, and don't aspire to be??>

<the product of a perfect storm of f***ery, an unholy mélange of algorithms and anxiety>

Scott Adams: <By Monday, I should be mostly cancelled.' So most of my income will be gone by next week. My reputation for the rest of my life is destroyed. You can't come back from this.>

<Commanders owner Daniel Snyder infuriated NFL owners and restarted conversations about potentially voting him out, according to reports from the Washington Post on Monday. Twenty four hours later, Snyder continues to look even worse after he allegedly was charging the franchise $10 million a year to use his own private jets as well as an additional $4.5 million to put the team's logo on his personal plane, according to ESPN.

In documents acquired by ESPN, Snyder called the $4.5 million charge "an advertising fee" despite the team's then-minority owners claiming Snyder's personal jet "provides little or no advertising value." The charges of $10 million annually and the one-time $4.5 million fee are also an issue because the minority owners who were in possession of 40% of the team did not consent to the spending.

Minority team owners Dwight Schar, Frederick W. Smith, and Robert Rothman, said Snyder was using the franchise as his "personal piggy bank," according to an arbitration petition filed with the league per ESPN. The alleged lack of ethics regarding the team plane spending, however, is just the tip of the iceberg regarding Snyder's unapproved financial decisions since some details of an FBI and IRS investigation into the team are centered around even bigger alleged financial misconduct, according to ESPN.

Snyder allegedly took on a $55 million loan through the Commanders without informing the minority owners and receiving their approval, which is critical because it came 16 months before buying out the individuals who held a combined 40% share of the team. This loan has reportedly been a key area of focus for federal prosecutors who are investigating financial misconduct.>

<This sort of nothing tells us nothing that petro didn't say in a much better way.>

<Hey <lostemperor> it took sundevil only 15 1/2 years to figure out that you are right. Congratulations.>

<As the Supreme Court heard arguments this week over President Joe Biden’s student loan debt relief plan, the justices asked about the definition of relevant statutory language and whether the plaintiffs had standing to sue, as well as constitutional questions around the separation of powers. These are all typical matters to discuss during judicial review. But the conservative justices also spent a good deal of time asking about a more nebulous subject: fairness.

The fairness issue arose during arguments in Department of Education v. Brown, a case in which two individual student borrowers challenged the Biden plan because they did not qualify for any or all of the relief offered.

“Since we’re dealing in a case with individual borrowers or would-be borrowers, I think it’s appropriate to consider some of the fairness arguments,” Chief Justice John Roberts said.

Roberts then presented a hypothetical scenario involving two high school graduates, neither of whom can afford college. One takes out a loan to go to college, while the other gets a loan to start a lawn care service. The one who goes to college, “we know statistically,” Roberts said, “is going to do significantly financially better over the course of life than the person without.”

“And then along comes the government and tells that person, ‘You don’t have to pay your loan,’” he said. “Nobody is telling that person who is trying to set up the lawn service business that he does not have to pay his loan.”

For a court that often pretends to sit above the political fray, this is a line of argument that appears purely political in nature. The court is not judging whether policies are fair. Indeed, the chief justice acknowledged that his opinion on fairness doesn’t matter.

“You may have views on [the] fairness of that, and they don’t count,” Roberts said to Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar. “I may have views on the fairness of that, and mine don’t count.”

So why, then, is the chief justice wondering about the fairness of the government’s plan?

The answer is that Roberts was trying to shoehorn the political debate over fairness into what is known as the court’s “major questions” doctrine.

“We would like to usually leave situations of that sort, when you’re talking about spending the government’s money, which is the taxpayer’s money, to the people in charge of the money, which is Congress,” Roberts said.

“Why isn’t that a factor that should enter into our consideration on our major questions — where we look at things a little more strictly than we might otherwise when talking about statutory grants of authority to make sure that this is something that Congress would’ve contemplated?”

The major questions doctrine has emerged in recent years as a favorite tool of the court’s conservative supermajority to squash executive branch actions it does not like. The doctrine states that agency regulations of “vast economic and political significance” must be specifically authorized by Congress.

The major questions doctrine, as currently stated by the high court, “directs courts not to discern the plain meaning of a statute using the normal tools of statutory interpretation, but to require explicit and specific congressional authorization for certain agency policies,” write Daniel Deacon and Leah Litman of the University of Michigan Law School in a draft paper on “The New Major Questions Doctrine.”

The Supreme Court deployed the doctrine in recent cases striking down the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for big employers, pandemic eviction moratorium and, in the 2022 case of West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, not-yet-proposed regulations limiting greenhouse gas emissions at power plants.

“EPA claimed to discover an unheralded power representing a transformative expansion of its regulatory authority in the vague language of a long-extant, but rarely used, statute designed as a gap filler,” Roberts wrote in the West Virginia case. “That discovery allowed it to adopt a regulatory program that Congress had conspicuously declined to enact itself. Given these circumstances, there is every reason to ‘hesitate before concluding that Congress’ meant to confer on EPA the authority it claims.”.....>

<....The key issue here is a concern about the separation of powers — namely, that Congress is the proper venue for the adoption of economically and politically significant regulatory actions. As Roberts stated about the potential Biden administration actions on greenhouse gas emissions, Congress did not enact the exact regulatory scheme in that case.

But the student loan forgiveness program rests on fairly strong footing in terms of statutory authorization.

The HEROES Act of 2003 allows the secretary of education to “waive” or “modify” the terms of student loans held by the federal government during a declared national emergency. The COVID-19 pandemic is such an emergency. And the education secretary both waived and modified the terms of certain student loans according to the law Congress passed in providing up to $20,000 in forgiveness.

During arguments over whether the major questions doctrine should apply to the student loan relief plan, the conservative justices questioned whether forgiving debt fit the definition of waiving or modifying, and whether a benefits program is the same a regulatory action. Prelogar argued that Congress gave the authority to the education secretary to waive or modify any or all of the student loan terms.

Roberts’ injection of the political issue of fairness then came as a way to expand the major questions doctrine beyond whether Congress authorized the secretary to forgive some loans. Even if Congress authorized the waiver or modification of loan terms, did it consider whether that would be fair? And wouldn’t Congress be the only body that can judge fairness?

“I don’t see any evidence that they took the person who is trying to start the lawn service because he can’t afford college — I didn’t see evidence they took him into account,” Roberts said in response to Prelogar.

The other conservatives followed suit. Addressing the solicitor general, Justice Samuel Alito demanded to know whether the administration’s education secretary thought the plan was fair.

“Why is it fair?” Alito asked. “Why isn’t the answer to say that it was ‘wanted’? Maybe it was wanted, but why?”

“It was fair because in the absence of this relief, it’s undisputed that there are going to be millions of student loan borrowers who are not going to be able to pay their student loans,” Prelogar replied. “They will default in delinquency, and the HEROES Act was specifically designed for the situation. This is Congress telling the secretary, ‘You don’t have to let that happen.’”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh declared that the plan creates “big winners and big losers,” and he speculated that Congress could “try to hear all about all of that and factor all that in.”

“Should any of that factor into how we think about whether to give a broad reading to waive or a narrow reading?” Kavanaugh said.

“No, I don’t think that that should factor into how to interpret the statute,” Prelogar responded. “The court needs to consider that text on its own terms.”

Prelogar was asking the conservative justices to stick to the bounds of the major questions doctrine that they stated in prior case history, instead of trying to expand the doctrine to include whether Congress fully considered the fairness of the actions authorized by its laws.

The major questions doctrine has been criticized as a judicial power grab that enables conservatives to strike down executive actions they don’t like without revisiting their precedents. This entire line of questioning during the student loan arguments underscored that critique.

When presented with a policy that doesn’t quite fit the bounds of the current major questions doctrine, the conservative justices reached to expand it.>

<Another unnecessary comment. pervicious has no business being an editor misbehaving like this as he so often does.