court packing Archives - The Automatic Earth

https://twitter.com/KirkLubimov/status/2094455512821879045?s=20 https://twitter.com/MAGAVoice/status/2094225618443682274?s=20 https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2094139964439376307?s=20

Broken up work day today. Had to go to hospital for tests. The Matisse must make up for all that’s off.

• Trump Says Iran’s Regime Killed 100,000 Freedom Protesters (Salgado)

The Iranian regime’s massacre of its own people who want a freer and more democratic country has now climbed to 100,000, according to President Donald Trump. If the genocidal Iranian regime falls, which we all pray will happen in the near future, Trump seems to be contemplating Nuremberg-style trials, which is something we haven’t done for mass murderers in far too long. The president posted on TruthSocial on August 31 about the runaway inflation in Iran and how many freedom protesters have died in government crackdowns since the initial January slaughter that left 50,000 dead.

“Iran is officially a Failed Nation. IT IS DEAD!” Trump began in his usual exaggerative style. “They have no Navy, they have no Air Force, they have no currency, they are not paying their soldiers or police, Inflation is at 300%, and their leadership is in total disarray and incapable of properly representing the country. The only thing they have is FAKE NEWS from the USA, a willingness to kill their protesters (now over 100,000 people dead. They must be tried for war crimes against humanity!), and a good line of ‘BULLS**T.’ Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
Over the weekend, the Trump administration ordered strikes on Larak Island, where the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had missile launchers. Unfortunately, the IRGC still seems to have enough missiles left to continue firing at American troops.

"U.S. forces in Jordan are under missile attack."

FOX News' @TreyYingst reports Iran is attacking U.S. bases in Jordan in response to American strikes on Iranian missile launchers on Larak Island.

"There are efforts underway to shoot down this incoming fire," Yingst reports, as… pic.twitter.com/mTh23RgmbK
— Fox News (@FoxNews) August 30, 2026

The people of Iran have shown their courage in the face of death all throughout this year in a way that history should immortalize. But tragically, until and unless the United States and Israel eliminate the rest of the top ayatollahs who indiscriminately kill Israelis, Americans, Persians, and Arabs alike, the slaughter will never end, and regime change will never happen. It is unfortunate that none of the weaponry the Biden administration abandoned to the Taliban in Afghanistan will be available for the Persians to take on their own terrorist government. I would much, much rather that the Persians who are pro-American have it and overthrow a regime that never stops screaming “death to America” than that Afghani terrorists who hate us should have and use it.
Unfortunately, for some reason, American weapons never do seem to end up in the hands of people who are willing to further our interests. Then again, perhaps there is an alternative to Americans and Israelis taking out the murderous mullahs directly.
Perhaps the U.S. government could stop sending so many weapons to Ukraine, where so many men have died in a stalemate war, and smuggle them to the Kurds or the Persians. Four more Americans died recently in Iranian strikes. It’s time to stop that Iranian terrorism once and for all. And there is a whole army of Persians and Kurds just waiting for the weapons and the opportunity to do the job for us.

Not the Left, it’s the MSM that has made Trump a caricature.

• The Left Would Hate for You to Know These Things About Trump (Margolis)

The mainstream media have spent pretty much every moment since Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president of the United States portraying him as an evil, cruel, empathy-free tyrant who couldn’t manage a kind word for anyone outside his own family. Joe Biden practically built his entire 2020 campaign on that same premise, insisting that the election came down to character, and that Trump simply didn’t have it.

This is the same Joe Biden who spent years refusing to acknowledge his own granddaughter, Navy Roberts, the daughter Hunter Biden had with a former stripper. It’s the same Joe Biden who checked his watch through the dignified transfer ceremony for the 13 American troops killed in the terrorist bombing outside Kabul’s airport. And it’s the same Joe Biden who let the country believe he was sharp as ever while his own team quietly managed a cognitive decline he denied for years. But I digress.
Character, as it turns out, was never really the point. But two stories from a Newsmax podcast are the kind Democrats would rather nobody hear because they don’t fit the narrative they’ve been trying to sell to the public. The first comes from Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), who sat down with Greta Van Susteren and described what happened after Trump invited him to Mar-a-Lago back in January 2025. “He invited me to have dinner at Mar-a-Lago back in January of 25, and I took a lot of s**t for that,” Fetterman said. “Why? I don’t understand.” But the big reveal came next.
“He also even checked in on my dad. My dad’s having a real difficult situation, health, about his heart, and he absolutely checked in on that,” Fetterman said. He added that he disagrees with the president plenty on policy, but on a personal level, “it’s been more than happy. “The private and the personal, at least in my experience, is very different,” Fetterman said. Van Susteren backed Fetterman up with a story of her own, one that goes back years before Trump ever ran for office. She recalled reporting on a struggling veteran and getting an unexpected phone call.
“Years ago, before he even ran for president, I was covering the story of this down-and-out soldier who had PTSD,” Van Susteren said. “I got a call from Trump asking me what his address was. I said, ‘I don’t know his address. Why?’ He said, ‘Because I want to help the guy.'” “I said, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ He said, ‘Tell you what, I’ll send you a check and you find him,’ so he hangs up the phone,” Van Susteren continued. “The next day I get a FedEx from Donald Trump with a personal check to the guy for $25,000.”
There’s a reason why Van Susteren considered it a big deal. “It’s not something Trump could write off on his taxes. It’s not something that was reported,” Van Susteren said. “He’s pretty gruff, often he says some pretty rough things and tweets some pretty rough things, but he’s got that side of him.” None of this fits the character that Democrats have long insisted was true.

“Carney increasingly reminds me of Fauci. He has that exact same air of technocratic infallibility. . . .” — Hans Mahncke on X

“Mark Carney has made himself a pain-in-the-ass for President Donald Trump.”

No, Trump got rid of one Trudy. He can take out any number of them.

• Oh, Canada (James Howard Kunstler)

You go for decades without even thinking of the place. The Great White North. Very polite people, somewhat Scottish, seems like. There’s poutine! Une invention Québécoise — an indigestible mélange of French fries, gravy, and cheese curds, like something you’d cook up at 4am after a toga party in a frat house. Ice hockey (of course, but was it necessary?) Polar bears. Puffins on the Labrador cliffs. Tar Sands. Plaid upholstery . . . .

Years ago, we used to go up there from college in the farthest reaches of upstate western New York just to get a half-fake buzz of being in “a foreign country.” Niagara Falls was like Times Square without the charm. Bunch of squalid wax museums and ashtray shoppes. Toronto was Rochester on steroids, beyond forgettable.
I once took a choo-choo train from Seattle to Vancouver just to take in the scenery along the Pacific Coast. Bald eagles galore all the way up feeding on stuff out in the Pacific tidal mud-flats. Got to Vancouver. They yanked me out of the customs line and stuffed me in a back office. A female immigration officer swaggered in, said they found a nine-year-old DUI conviction for me on some computer (well. . .. okay. . . a night of fishing with rum). Said she could keep me out of the country if she was in a bad mood. I couldn’t help wising off: “Nice to know Canadian immigration policy depends on your mood.” Whoops. They detained me for an extra two hours just to make me feel the pain. But I was eventually released into that boring city. Thank God for the Chinese restaurants.
And now. . . Mark Carney! He’s a beauty. A refined ectoplasmic manifestation of all the Globalist huggermugger working tirelessly to upend Western Civ. He has a weird glow of semi-transparency — not in the sense of revealing any truths, but more like you can partly see through him . . . he’s only half there . . . a ghost in the geopolitical machine.
More to the point, Mark Carney has made himself a pain-in-the-ass for President Donald Trump. On the surface, this US / Canada rift appears to be all about trade relations. Naw. It’s about Mark Carney being a tool for merry old England attempting to capture the resource base of northern North America to collateralize what little remains of the UK’s once-sprawling, now sinking, empire. England is not so merry these days. It has somehow managed to issue a fatwa on itself and entered a gruesome process of assisted economic and cultural suicide. You can’t even raise a British flag there anymore without risking weeks in the slammer. The home folks get stabbed and beheaded. It’s all blight, rape, kebabs, and hijabs over there. Not a good look if you still want to be that country you dimly remember.
Plus, they want to kick off a big war with Russia. Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Really? Lacking much of a military, Ukraine was Britain’s tool for that. Trouble was the huge expense of that project. Thought they could work-around it by turning Ukraine into a money-laundry, washing, rinsing, and disbursing US-sourced funds to Mr. Zelenskyy, with giant kickbacks to the Democratic Party’s money apparatus. Worked nicely when the phantom “Joe Biden” haunted the White House. He and his sicko son, Hunter, were already in so deep in Ukraine since JB’s felonious veepdom that Mark Carney — then chief of the Bank of England — could hang the Bidens out to dry anytime, if required.
Lo, these many years, then, Britain and NATO have sponsored all that drone-making and missile-launching action from Ukraine deep into Russia — in case you wonder how Zelenskyy carries on this stupid war, considering there are no young men left in Ukraine eligible to reinforce the battle lines in Donbas. Britain and NATO probably also furnish the satellite targeting of Russian assets. You must doubt that the USA is involved in that anymore. Luckily, Mr. Putin has the Christian patience of a true saint.
Our president is sick of Ukraine and the festering geopolitical disease it has been infected with by our increasingly-former allies in Europe. NATO’s aim with Russia is exactly the same as Britain’s push in Canada — a resource grab for the failing nations of Europe, who are getting choked to death by Ursula von der Leyen and her EU flying monkeys. Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain. . . all whirling around the drain. Our president sees all that. (You don’t need magic glasses.)
Maybe it’s time to just send the 82nd Airborne into Ottawa. Flight time: under two hours from Fort Bragg, NC. Drop them on Parliament Hill. Let them hang around a few hours. Then, declare the whole thing a gag and fly them home. It’d be worth it. Or maybe go in and snatch Mark Carney like we did Maduro. Stuff Carney in an adjoining cell at the MDC in Brooklyn. I’m sure the two could amuse each other, swap satisfying gripes and sob stories.
Really, why stop at just re-naming Lake Ontario. Take the whole darn thing like a pie that has been left on the windowsill too long. The Canadian people would get over it five minutes. Everything is easier in the USA. Running a company, especially. They could keep their poutine and their hockey, learn to have a little fun once in a while. Quebec could become a theme park (what else have they got going there?). No more tariffs to get hung about. Honk if you like the idea.

“Such an opportunity for Muslims has not existed for centuries ..”

• Is the Muslim World Rising (Paul Craig Roberts)

Recently there have been striking new developments that imply major changes in the correlation of forces. These developments have largely gone unacknowledged and their implications unexamined. I made the effort in online interviews on Dialogue Works and On Target. I will now attempt to do so in writing.

One of the developments is Iran’s defeat of US President Trump’s attack on Iran. Trump has been desperate to find a way out of the conflict without admitting defeat. His exit strategy is to redefine the conflict from a military one to an economic one and impose new economic sanctions on Iran and those who trade with Iran, while claiming that the Strait of Hormuz is an American territory through which is moving massive amounts of oil shipments. The combination of a redefined conflict with propaganda comprises Trump’s exit strategy.
Another development is the announcement of a mutual security agreement between Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. This development combines conventional military force with oil reserves and nuclear weapons and unifies three separate Muslim ethnicities in a strategic location with a population of 355,390,000 people. These are largely Sunni Muslims.
Another development is the announcement on Iranian news media that Iran, predominantly Shia, has been invited to join the alliance. It true, this would indicate that the schism between Sunni and Shia is breaking down. It would also mean a pact of four countries with 448,700,000 people, larger than the United States, with conventional and nuclear power, a large chunk of the world’s oil reserves, and control over the strategic oil waterways. It would be a bloc of strategic importance to Russia and China as the Muslim four country pact is located such that it protects Russian and Chinese interests. Such a pact could become a de facto alliance of 6 countries.
These developments, if real and not just words, signal the end of any pretense of American hegemony and Israel’s agenda of Greater Israel. Israel’s population of 10 million of which only 7.8 million are Jews is dwarfed by 448,700,000 Muslims. Moreover, the protection offered by the alliance would likely result in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen joining and the end of warfare stirred up by Washington among Muslims. Syria itself could be reconstituted, and Israel could be forced to give back enough of Palestine for a two-state solution to be possible.
Such an opportunity for Muslims has not existed for centuries and the possibility is so extraordinary that it seems likely to pass by due to stupidity, incompetence, and petty bickering. But if the opportunity is seized, the world has changed.
The only news I have of the Iranian response to the invitation is that Iran asked to see the details of the security agreement. Certainly Iran would want to know if the pact had any teeth or was just words, a bluff or an attempt to get attention. I know little of the content of the agreement, and I wonder at the absence of an explanation of its consequences. As it is announced, it is not secret, and you would think it would be of great interests to the world’s foreign policy analysts.
The report that Iran was invited to join came from Mehdi Rahimi, who heads Iran’s parliamentary news agency. However, I have not seen confirmations from the members of the pact or the Iranian executive branch that such an invitation has been issued. If no invitation has been issued, it raises the question whether the pact is an Israeli-American operation directed at Iran. If so, it seems that Trump would be more comfortable with the Iranian situation than he shows himself to be.
We have seen centuries of Muslim impotence due to their inability to unite. In the 21st century we have witnessed Washington destroy three Muslim countries for Israel–Iraq, Libya, and Syria–and attempt to destroy Iran, while Israel has completed its absorption of Palestine into Israel. Just the other day Israeli Finance Minister Smotrich announced that with the “Judaizing” of the remnants of the West Bank, there would now be new Jewish settlements in the Negev and in Galilee.
Possibly the Netanyahu coalition will be turned out in the upcoming election. Such a possibility could be heightened considerably should Iran receive and accept an invitation to join the Mecca pact, as it would show Israelis that the Zionist agenda of Greater Israel had no further prospect and that an accommodation must be arranged with the Muslim Middle East. If peace were to arrive in the Middle East, it could possibly arrive elsewhere.

“..it doesn’t seem to be correct that there was an over-arching official policy from Hitler to exterminate the Jews.”

• The True Story of World War II (Paul Craig Roberts)

[..] The Nuremberg Trials were a travesty of justice. The “trials” served to put all war crimes, including the Soviet ones, on the Germans. I exposed the criminality of the Nuremberg Trials in a previous article on this website. Kristallnacht was a Brownshirts operation. David Irving reports that when Hitler heard of it he was furious. Irving provides the actual documentation. But when I ask AI, the false answer I get is that “it was explicitly orchestrated by top Nazi leadership and approved by Hitler.” I trust David Irving, not a polluted AI data base containing a vast number of lies written by court historians.

Hitler disapproved of the SA (Brownhirts) and destroyed them. As for the Holocaust, Europe has laws prohibiting any examination of the alleged Holocaust. The Zionist allegations must be accepted irrespective of any evidence. This is very curious, because if the narrative is true scholarly investigation would support the narrative. Generally speaking, matters that cannot be investigated are matters that truth does not support.
David Irving reported that after a half century of research, he had not found one word of a Holocaust in any official documents in German, Israeli, Soviet, British, American official archives or in any memoirs, diaries, letters. He even offered a monetary prize to anyone who can offer him some evidence. If memory serves, neither Churchill’s nor Eisenhower’s memoirs mention a Holocaust.
Think about this for a minute. An operation as large as the alleged Holocaust would have required an organization with its own administration, with its own stationary, headquarters, insignia and uniform, but no signs of such an organization exists. It would have required enormous budget expenditures, but no signs of such a budget entry exist. In the last days of the war it would have required special fuel permission overriding the needs of the German Army, but no such orders exist.
Evidence is conclusive that the so-called “death camps” were in fact work camps where synthetic fuel and rubber were made for the German Army. In Germany all labor was valuable, including Jews, as the German work force had been severely reduced to provide the Eastern Front with troops attempting to stop the Soviet advance on Germany. The notion that six million highly valuable workers would be deprived the hard pressed German labor force is difficult to accept.
There is no doubt that Jews in National Socialist Germany suffered discrimination and harsh treatment, both official and ad hoc. Rightly or wrongly, Jews were associated with the internal revolution and Germany’s WW I defeat. Many members of the National Socialist Party advocated and acted against them. But it doesn’t seem to be correct that there was an over-arching official policy from Hitler to exterminate the Jews. David Irving documents occasions when Hitler orders that Jews are not to be harmed, and states that “the Jewish question” will be settled after the war. Hitler’s original plan was to deport them to Madagascar.
With the initial success of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler decided that he would send the Jews to the rump of Russia behind the Urals that he would leave for Stalin. This announcement resulted in Nazi organizations sending Jews into the occupied Russian territories in advance of the expected victory, for which the administrators of the territories had no provision. David Irving says he can document 200,000-300,000 Jews being executed despite Hitler’s orders to the contrary by administrators who had no place to put them. Irving condemns these executions.
The Waffen SS was a large military force of tank and infantry divisions fighting in German front lines. They were often used to open or close breaches in the lines of combat. They were not an organization for the extermination of Jews. As David Irving and others have reported, some 150,000 Germans of Jewish descent, some being full-blooded Jews, served in the Wehrmacht, many as officers including officers in the SS. The last commander of the Luftwaffe was Helmuth Wilberg, a German officer of Jewish descent.

“Talwani is viewed by many as a one-stop-shop judge for forum-shopping.”

• The Long Shadow of Judge Indira Talwani (Turley)

This week, the Trump administration found itself in a familiar position: facing an injunction from Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. Indeed, it had just secured an order from the Supreme Court on its emergency docket lifting her earlier injunction on the U.S. Postal Service requiring voting lists to confirm U.S. citizenship.

The case against the executive order on mail-in ballots has reasonable arguments on both sides, although (as I have said previously) the challengers are likely to prevail in defeating the rule or at least delaying the policy until after the midterm elections. The Constitution gives states the primary responsibility over “the times, places, and manner of holding elections.”
However, the U.S. Postal Service is a federal agency, and the federal government does have a role in the funding and regulation of federal elections. More importantly, the Trump administration is arguing that it is not barring mail-in voting but merely imposing “modest informational requirements.” Non-citizens cannot vote in federal elections, and the new rule “does not displace a single state election law. And it need not and should not prevent a single voter from voting by mail.”
The controversy over Talwani is not necessarily the merits of her decision that the rule convenes the constitutional framework. Indeed, the Supreme Court did not rule on the merits and could well rule in favor of her interpretation. The controversy is the pattern of sweeping injunctions by Talwani and a few other judges.
Litigants have been accused of forum-shopping by going to liberal, Democratically appointed judges to prevent Trump policies from being implemented in a wide array of areas, including immigration, elections, reduction in government bureaucracies, and foreign aid.
Like her colleague in Boston, U.S. District Court Judge Brian Murphy, Talwani is viewed by many as a one-stop-shop judge for forum-shopping. Both have issued hair-trigger injunctions, and both have been repeatedly reversed.
Talwani was reversed on Aug. 24 for imposing an injunction against the mail-in balloting policy. Her injunction was taken to be premature and without a legal injury, since the administration had not issued a formal rule. The truth is, the challengers had her at hello. She did not wait for a showing of a cognizable injury before issuing another injunction, because the decision appeared made before the case hit her own docket.
Previously, Talwani showed the same inclination in other cases. For example, she issued an injunction against revoking the humanitarian parole program for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Her order was lifted on appeal. She also issued an injunction to stop the Trump Administration from defunding Planned Parenthood. That order was also set aside on appeal.
Regardless of the outcome of this latest injunction, Talwani has offered the strongest case in favor of the expanded use of the emergency docket, also known as the “shadow docket.” Liberal law professors and litigants have bewailed the expanded use of this docket at the Supreme Court to resolve cases without the need for a long briefing and oral argument. However, judges like Talwani have created legitimate concerns over the use of the appellate system to slow or freeze new policies. This is why the “shadow docket” has become more prominent.
This year, confidential memoranda were leaked from the court on the use of the emergency docket and published by the New York Times. It was only the latest such strategic leak from a court that was once the paragon of confidentiality and civility.
The internal exchanges of the justices were illuminating as to the majority’s underlying reason for allowing this fast-track review. The immediate issue was a move by the Environmental Protection Agency to impose unlawful regulatory burdens on electric utilities despite a countervailing earlier ruling in Michigan v. EPA. Chief Justice Roberts believed (as did many) that the EPA was using the ongoing litigation to force utilities to spend billions of dollars to comply with new regulations that the Supreme Court had already rejected.
“In other words,” Roberts wrote, “the absence of stay allowed the agency to effectively implement an important program we held to be contrary to law.”
As with the national injunctions that plagued the Trump administration in its first year, this tactic was all too familiar. Litigants would go to liberal judges in Washington, Boston, and other blue cities to secure injunctions that would take years to fully litigate. That approach effectively allowed individual judges to pursue their own preferred policies or to prevent a president from carrying out promises made during an election. At most, the president might have a year left after these cases slogged through the conventional appellate process. It is an administrative version of the old adage that “justice delayed is justice denied.”
What concerned the justices was that many of these injunctions directly contravened earlier precedent, exposing the cynical purpose of these orders. For a president to be able to carry out major changes, he had to run a gauntlet of hundreds of judges, any one of whom could effectively negate reforms. In response, the Supreme Court ramped up the use of the emergency docket and cracked down on national injunctions, quickly reversing the rapidly increasing number of injunctions against the Trump administration.
With the midterm elections rapidly approaching, the odds favor challengers in either running out the clock or prevailing on the merits on the mail-in ballots. But Talwani and some other judges have reinforced suspicions of the Roberts court that some courts are willing allies of partisan groups in seeking to gum up the system.
Ironically, Roberts is one of the most likely conservative justices to be concerned with the Trump administration’s effort to force election integrity reforms on the states. Either way, it is the shadow of these judges, not the docket, that is casting the most ominous concern for many of the Supreme Court justices.

The only way they can win. Change the playing field.

• Penn Professor Demands Politicians Commit to Packing the Supreme Court (Turley)

University of Pennsylvania Professor Michael Mann is the Vice Provost for Climate Science, Policy, and Action and has pushed candidates to commit to major environmental reforms. Notably, he seemed to pivot in an interview with Peter Dominick on a podcast last week, calling for all Democratic candidates to face a litmus test on committing to pack the Supreme Court: promise to pack or get the sack. It is only the latest example of how the hostile takeover of the Court is now the priority for many Democrats in removing a barrier to a radical agenda.

Mann declared: “When it comes to Senate races, there should be a litmus test,” Mann said. “It isn’t just good enough to be a Democrat. You’ve got to be a Democrat who would be willing to expand the Supreme Court…There’s no way not to be partisan. There’s no way not to be political here. If you care about the environment, you’ve got to vote for the Democrats now.” Establishment candidates are offering the mob the Supreme Court to show their bona fides as the far left turns on “institutionists” who support our constitutional system. As I previously wrote, even law professors and deans joined this movement in calling for the rejection of our Constitution on the 250th anniversary of our Revolution.
Once packed, the Court could greenlight a variety of unconstitutional measures. Years ago, Harvard professor Michael Klarman laid out a radical agenda to change the system to guarantee Republicans “will never win another election.” However, he warned that “the Supreme Court could strike down everything I just described.” Therefore, the court must be packed in advance to make these changes possible. That includes an agenda for extreme measures ranging from wealth taxes to reparations to climate control regulations.
Mann raised the need to reverse doctrines limiting agency authority—a barrier to some climate control measures. In so doing, he got the underlying law fundamentally wrong: “It was in a conservative Supreme Court decision within the last few years that introduced the so-called Chevron standard. Basically, what they said was that the EPA no longer had the authority to make rules based on the science and its own determination.”
In 2024, the Supreme Court actually overturned the Chevron Doctrine in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. It also did not rule that “the EPA no longer had the authority to make rules based on the science and its own determination.” Rather, it said that courts would review such decisions without the prior presumptions in favor of agency decision-making. The restored, traditional judicial review is precisely to determine whether agency decisions are based on credible interpretations of the law and science.
Mann has had his own conflicts with the courts. He was sanctioned last year after winning a defamation case against bloggers Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn for attacking his climate control research.
At the time, some of us questioned the award, which awarded just $1 in actual damages but $1 million in punitive damages. In 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court decided a case, BMW of North America v. Gore, striking down a punitive damages award. The case involved the company’s practice of repairing and repainting cars damaged in transit without telling the customers. The jury in the original trial awarded $4,000 in compensatory damages for the car’s lost value due to the lack of a factory paint job and other damage; it then imposed $4 million in punitive damages for the company’s dishonesty.
D.C. Superior Court Judge Alfred S. Irving Jr. reduced the award against Steyn to just $5000 after finding the original award to be “grossly excessive.” The court later learned that Mann’s defense team had allegedly presented false accounts of his losses after the criticism. Mann’s legal team was accused of presenting a chart that listed a grant that Mann allegedly lost due to the defamatory remarks as $9.7 million when it was later found to be worth $112,000. Irving also found a disparity in the grant income figures given to the jury.
The court found the alleged misrepresentations to be “an affront to the Court’s authority” and sanctioned Mann and his legal team “for bad-faith trial misconduct.” After reversing the jury verdict, the court ordered Mann to pay $1.1 million of his critics’ legal expenses.Now, Mann is calling for all Democratic candidates to pledge to pack the Supreme Court as a condition for running. So any Democrat who believes in our institutions and resists this mob will be a persona non grata in the party as an “institutionalist” captured by “nostalgia.”
Mann joins a growing list of figures demanding the hostile takeover of the Court from Kamala Harris to Pete Buttigieg. The priority is telling. Much of what is planned by the far-left will be difficult to accomplish due to constitutional limits. You can remove those limits by eliminating an independent Supreme Court and turning this essential institution into a federal version of state courts packed with partisan jurists.
At its base is a fundamental misunderstanding of the Court’s role. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) not only renewed her previous call to pack the court but said the court was illegitimate for rendering decisions against “widely held public opinion.” However, the court was meant to be counter-majoritarian to protect minority groups and viewpoints from the majority will.
Mann’s advice is different from that of James Carville, who wants Democrats to hide this intended move from the public (which continues to oppose court packing). Carville told Democratic candidates: “If the Democrats win the presidency and both houses of Congress, I think on day one, they should expand the Supreme Court to 13. F—k it. Eat our dust. Don’t run on it. Don’t talk about it. Just do it.”
Mann and others (including former Attorney General Eric Holder) are done with any pretense: “There’s no way not to be partisan. There’s no way not to be political here.” In other words, it is time to make the Supreme Court itself partisan and political. It will then be reduced to just another partisan institution in an age of rage.

It’s their only way to power.

• Clyburn Calls for Packing the Court with “Baker’s Dozen” to Flip Cases (Turley)

On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) added his voice to expand the Supreme Court to a “baker’s dozen,” or thirteen members to allow Democrats to add justices who agree with him and Democratic members on how the law must be interpreted. In the meantime, as discussed earlier, court pack ing is being pushed as the new litmus test for any Democratic candidates. Clyburn’s “baker’s dozen” is a telling description of an effort to bake in partisan views on a Court expanded to create an instant liberal majority. In defending this hostile takeover of the Court, Clyburn bizarrely insisted that the failure to do so might lead to a return to antebellum conditions when blacks were being given fewer rights than whites.

When asked by host Kristen Welker whether he supports the call of former Vice President Kamala Harris to pack the Court, Clyburn responded: “Yes, I do. I think that we are in a position now that calls for some significant actions taken by the Congress and we ought to expand. Thirteen is a pretty good number. A baker’s dozen would be a good number to have on the court. And I would hope we would get people on the Court who will follow the constitutional underpinnings of this great nation of ours.”
Clyburn then made the sensational claim that, without taking over the Court, blacks could be returned to virtual slave conditions. He added: “The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments have been interpreted different ways over the years. And we had in the Warren Court an interpretation of those amendments that I thought would be set for the future of the country. We have now a Supreme Court that has decided to reverse course and take this country back, I say, to those rulings of Justice Taney that said that no black man has any rights that a white man must respect.”
So, while recognizing that interpretations have evolved, Clyburn now demands a takeover of the Court because he disagrees with the current interpretations. It was fine when interpretations aligned with his views, but opposing viewpoints are intolerable and warrant packing the Court with reliable liberal votes. Other Democrats have demanded packing the Court to reverse immigration rulings.
The unhinged rhetoric reflects the importance of taking over the Court by Democrats who view the institution as a barrier to carrying out a radical agenda, including proposals that are considered unconstitutional. Liberal professors and pundits have identified a court takeover as essential to, as one law professor put it, guaranteeing that the Democrats never lose another national election. As former Eric Holder and James Carville have made clear, it is about power and guaranteeing its retention.
Of course, these figures know that it will take a great deal to get Americans to trash core institutions and values. Polls have long shown that a majority of citizens oppose efforts to pack the Court. FDR’s infamous court-packing plan in the 1930s has been widely panned in history, but is now being used as a model by many Democrats to achieve short-term political goals.
In order to overcome this fealty to our constitutional system, citizens must be very angry or very afraid. That is why the rage rhetoric is increasing as we approach the midterm elections. In the last election, the prediction was the imminent end of democracy. Now it is the return to slavery conditions in the United States.
One can disagree with the Court without suggesting that these justices are effective racists or want to return the nation to pre-Civil War slavery conditions. The suggestion that the Court would return this country to the Dred Scott period from before the Civil War is deeply offensive to the conservative justices, including Justice Clarence Thomas, who is African American. It is an absurd suggestion and shows contempt not just for the Court but for Black voters.

https://twitter.com/nicksortor/status/2094437257021186067?s=20

Trump Says He Will Take No Days Off to Help Republicans WIN the Midterms.

“I'm going to go campaign like I did… when we had the presidential election. I took off 120 days, four months. Every single day I was on the trail.”

We can’t let Democrats take back power. pic.twitter.com/cCnBow2S9Z
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) August 31, 2026

I’ve got this feeling in my chest.

People are not ready for Thursday.

I’ve owned Tesla through all the years people said, “It’s just a car company.”

10+ years…

And this is the moment I’ve been waiting for.

The FIRST mass-produced Tesla with no steering wheel.

No pedals.

A… pic.twitter.com/Y7TpzluUpq
— Teslaconomics (@Teslaconomics) August 30, 2026

Many people are still unaware of this fact

The Super Heavy booster that SpaceX successfully caught after Starship Flight 7 was actually used again for Flight 9

SpaceX literally caught a skyscraper-sized rocket with the tower… then sent it back to space pic.twitter.com/aKi81Q3dNX
— X Freeze (@XFreeze) August 31, 2026

Elon predicted that China is going to win the AI race.

And every day makes it look more right.

"There's a good chance that they are the leaders at some point."

Elon is building the biggest AI cluster in America. He has more money than any human alive, first access to Nvidia's… pic.twitter.com/2pBa8E9BFq
— Ricardo (@Ric_RTP) August 30, 2026

Support the Automatic Earth in wartime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

Debt Rattle April 12 2021

Apr 122021

April 12, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:43 am Finance Tagged with: Biden, court packing, COVID, Gaetz, long covid, microchip, Sputnik V, Vitamin D, voter ID, Weimar 57 Responses »

Ernest R. Ashton Evening near the Pyramids 1898

• Pentagon Scientists Reveal A Microchip That Senses Covid-19 In Your Body (DM)

• Report On Addressing Vitamin D Deficiency In Ireland (Oireachtas)

• Vitamin D Insufficiency May Account for Almost 9 of 10 COVID-19 Deaths (MDPI)

• Doubts Raised About Ethics & Efficacy Behind AstraZeneca “Vaccine” (Slog)

• Verdict In Weimar: No More Masks, No Tests And No More Distance For Students (BZ)

• Ardern To New Zealand Border Staff: Get Vaccine Now Or Be Redeployed (G.)

• New Studies Suggest ‘Long Covid’ More Common Than Previously Thought (F.)

• Austria May Buy A Million Russian Vaccine Doses (RT)

• China Considers Mixing Covid-19 Vaccines To Boost Protection Rate (R.)

• Did Joe Biden Pack The Supreme Court Commission To Simply Fail? (Turley)

• Twitter Censors Criticism of BLM Founder Buying $1.4 Million Home (Turley)

• Due Process, Adult Sexual Morality and the Case of Rep. Matt Gaetz (Greenwald)

• Major Corporations Plan To Oppose Election Integrity Measures (DC)

And here’s your microchip!

• Pentagon Scientists Reveal A Microchip That Senses Covid-19 In Your Body (DM)

Pentagon scientists working inside a secretive unit set up at the height of the Cold War have created a microchip to be inserted under the skin, which will detect COVID-19 infection, and a revolutionary filter that can remove the virus from the blood when attached to a dialysis machine. The team at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have been working for years on preventing and ending pandemics. They assess the issues and come up with ingenious solutions, which at times appear more from a science fiction novel than a working laboratory. One of their recent inventions, they told 60 Minutes on Sunday night, was a microchip which detects COVID infection in an individual before it can become an outbreak.

The microchip is sure to spark worries among some about a government agency implanting a microchip in a citizen. Officials who spoke to the 60 Minutes team said the Pentagon isn’t looking to track your every move. A more detailed explanation was not given. Retired Colonel Matt Hepburn, an army infectious disease physician leading DARPA’s response to the pandemic, showed the 60 Minutes team a tissue-like gel, engineered to continuously test your blood. ‘You put it underneath your skin and what that tells you is that there are chemical reactions going on inside the body, and that signal means you are going to have symptoms tomorrow,’ he explained.

He said they were inspired by the struggle to stem the virus’ spread onboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt, where 1,271 crew members tested positive for the coronavirus. ‘It’s like a “check engine” light,’ said Hepburn. ‘Sailors would get the signal, then self-administer a blood draw and test themselves on site. ‘We can have that information in three to five minutes. ‘As you truncate that time, as you diagnose and treat, what you do is you stop the infection in its tracks.’ Troops are likely to be highly skeptical of the new invention.

Yeadon

"It literally keeps me awake at night."

Former Chief Scientist of Pfizer, Dr. Michael Yeadon, reveals his biggest fear concerning the COVID-19 response

Full interview: https://t.co/lXu0AoG3UK pic.twitter.com/Vf85ennnYM

— Taylor Hudak (@_taylorhudak) April 12, 2021

Finally a country’s health board supports vitamin D, but then they recommend a far too low daily dose. Sigh…

• Report On Addressing Vitamin D Deficiency In Ireland (Oireachtas)

The Joint Committee on Health, today launched its Report on addressing Vitamin D deficiency as a public health measure in Ireland. The Committee heard evidence that Vitamin D deficiency is prevalent across the population and the report recommends that public health measures are established to address that deficiency. These public health measures are preventative in nature and are recommended to reduce the risk of respiratory and other illnesses such as osteoporosis. The Committee’s report makes four recommendations:

• That daily Vitamin D supplementation of 20-25µg/day should be recommended to the entire adult population as a public health measure, with higher doses recommended for vulnerable groups under medical supervision.

• That a public health policy, which promotes better knowledge of the benefits of Vitamin D, and which encourages Vitamin D supplementation, should be developed in time for consideration in Budget 2022.

• That reducing the cost of Vitamin D supplementation, in order to promote its uptake, should be considered, through the reduction or indeed the elimination of the current VAT rate; and

• That specific measures need to be put in place for vulnerable groups, and for frontline and healthcare workers, so that Vitamin D supplementation is administered on an opt-out basis, and for the duration of this pandemic, people should be offered Vitamin D supplements when presenting at Covid-19 test centres.

Welcoming the publication of the report, Health Committee Chairman Seán Crowe TD said:“As we emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic, international studies, and the experience of Finland in particular, show just how effective daily Vitamin D supplementation can be when it is implemented as part of an enhanced public health policy. This supplementation represents a safe, practical, and effective means of protecting human health. “The State needs to review preventative measures that might have led to fewer mortalities and lower morbidity. In that regard, the role of Vitamin D needs to be addressed as part of an enhanced public health policy to protect the population against respiratory infections and other illnesses. “

And the vitamin D case really is strong.

From November 2020.

• Vitamin D Insufficiency May Account for Almost 9 of 10 COVID-19 Deaths (MDPI)

Evidence from observational studies is accumulating, suggesting that the majority of deaths due to SARS-CoV-2 infections are statistically attributable to vitamin D insufficiency and could potentially be prevented by vitamin D supplementation. Given the dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic, rational vitamin D supplementation whose safety has been proven in an extensive body of research should be promoted and initiated to limit the toll of the pandemic even before the final proof of efficacy in preventing COVID-19 deaths by randomized trials.

We read, with great interest, the recent article by Radujkovic et al. that reported associations between vitamin D deficiency (25(OH)D < 12 ng/mL) or insufficiency (25(OH)D < 20 ng/mL) and death in a cohort of 185 consecutive symptomatic SARS-CoV-2-positive patients admitted to the Medical University Hospital Heidelberg, who were diagnosed and treated between 18 March and 18 June 2020 [1]. In this cohort, 118 patients (64%) had vitamin D insufficiency at recruitment (including 41 patients with vitamin D deficiency), and 16 patients died of the infection. With a covariate-adjusted relative risk of death of 11.3, mortality was much higher among vitamin D insufficient patients than among other patients. When translated to the proportion of deaths in the population that is statistically attributable to vitamin D insufficiency (“population attributable risk proportion”), a key measure of public health relevance of risk factors [2], these results imply that 87% of COVID-19 deaths may be statistically attributed to vitamin D insufficiency and could potentially be avoided by eliminating vitamin D insufficiency.

[..] Although final proof of causality and prevention of deaths by vitamin D supplementation would have to come from randomized trials which meanwhile have been initiated (e.g., [5]), the results of such trials will not be available in the short run. Given the dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic and the proven safety of vitamin D supplementation, it therefore appears highly debatable and potentially even unethical to await results of such trials before public health action is taken. Besides other population-wide measures of prevention, widespread vitamin D3 supplementation at least for high-risk groups, such as older adults or people with relevant comorbidity, which has been proven by randomized controlled trials to be beneficial with respect to prevention of other acute respiratory infections and acute acerbation of asthma and chronic pulmonary disease [6,7,8,9,10], should be promoted.

Ran the story of this report a few days ago, but it warrants repeating.

“The explosive statement there is ‘immunisation failures account for more serious illness than unvaccinated individuals’”

• Doubts Raised About Ethics & Efficacy Behind AstraZeneca “Vaccine” (Slog)

SP-I-MO stands for Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling. It reports into the SAGE/Secretary of State Number Ten Group. Almost nobody in the UK has ever heard of it, and its pronouncements online are stored in an unexpected place under the “assets publishing service”. What follows aren’t leaks; they’re representative extracts from the latest SPIMO report, issued on March 31st last, and discussed in Downing Street some ten days ago. As far as can be gleaned the data reports are given sporadically….as in, when SPIMO has something to say. [..]

Unsurprisingly – albeit incomprehensibly, given their track-record – SPIMO gives advice entirely on the basis of models. The document under scrutiny here was almost entirely to do with the effects of Boris Johnson’s “roadmap” for exit from lockdown – allegedly a one-way street, but already showing signs of roadworks delays. Taken as a whole, it is at times contradictory and prone to almost surreal conclusions: my IQ is allegedly 142, but having read all 23 pages three times, I confess that, were I the Secretary of State, I’d be utterly confused about what to do. That aside, however, some of the observations are astonishing. This first one below is bare-faced in its admission of failure:

The explosive statement there is ‘immunisation failures account for more serious illness than unvaccinated individuals’. Five pages later, reference is made to data used to make further modelled projections as follows: ”assuming two doses of AstraZeneca provide only 31% effectiveness against transmission”. So in short, SPIMO is working on the basis of a supposed ‘vaccine’ that fails to stop the spread of infection in more than two out of three cases. This is radically different to the impression government publicity has given us – viz, that “even after vaccination, it may still be possible for you to infect others”. It sounds cautionary and responsible, but asking around a sample of acquaintances yesterday, they imagined a figure of around 80% – not 31%. Under 1 in 3 is, let’s face it, a risible result.

But the initial statement cuts the legs off continuing the vaccination rollout, because it rejects the benefit such might bring with the haunting words, “Immunisation failures account for more serious illnesses than unvaccinated individuals”. So much for “Don’t be selfish, get the jab”. But ever the man obsessed with a bone, Hancock is ploughing forward doggedly with a vaccine programme that simply isn’t justified by the facts. Equally however, it further justifies the claim I made a fortnight ago, that government insistence on a causal relationship between vacination on one hand, and reduced cases and deaths on the other is pure baloney. Fast forward to the “further discussion” promised on this topic, and try to contain your laughter at this gem, referring to an associated chart:

“56. This shows that most deaths and admissions in a post-Roadmap resurgence are in people who have received two vaccine doses, even without vaccine protection waning or a variant emerging that escapes vaccines. This is not the result of vaccines being ineffective, merely uptake being so high.” You couldn’t make this up: even without left-field factors, there’ll be a resurgence after lockdown exit, but this is not Astrazeneca’s fault – the “problem” was high uptake. By vaccinating the vulnerable bigtime, we killed more people, but a drug struggling to demonstrate efficacy had nothing to do with it.

Google translate from Berliner Zeitung.

• Verdict In Weimar: No More Masks, No Tests And No More Distance For Students (BZ)

The Weimar District Court has passed a sensational judgment. The court ruled that the “obligation to wear a mask, to maintain minimum distances and to perform rapid tests in schools pose a threat to the mental, physical or emotional well-being of the child”. And said measures are prohibited. After doubts about the authenticity were initially expressed online, Steffen Dittes, Deputy Chairman of the Left in Thuringia, confirmed the authenticity. The judgment has the file number: 9 F 148/21. In the judgment it is said that the “directors and teachers of the schools” of two children, whose parents went to court, are forbidden to “arrange or prescribe the following for these and all other children and pupils taught at these schools:

In class and on the school premises, to wear face masks of all kinds, in particular mouth and nose covers, so-called qualified masks (OP or FFP2 mask) or others, to maintain minimum distances between each other or to other people that go beyond what was known before 2020, and to take part in rapid tests to determine the Sars-CoV-2 virus ”. The judge justified his decision with, among other things, according to the court, “the lack of use of wearing a mask and the observance of distance regulations for the children themselves and third parties”. In addition, the judge cites the “unsuitability of PCR tests and rapid tests for measuring the incidence of infection” as one of the reasons for his judgment. Steffen Dittes, the deputy chairman of the Left in the Thuringian state parliament, confirmed the authenticity of the judgment on Saturday. Dittes wrote on Twitter: “The decision of the AG Weimar is known.” At the same time, he sharply criticized the judgment.

Can a government or another employer force you to get vaccinated with an unapproved substance when you are perfectly healthy? Where are the legal opinions on this?

• Ardern To New Zealand Border Staff: Get Vaccine Now Or Be Redeployed (G.)

Border workers have until the end of April to be vaccinated before being moved to lower risk roles, the prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, has said after a third worker from Auckland’s Grand Millenium managed isolation facility tested positive for Covid-19. “We want everyone to be vaccinated on our frontline,” she told TVNZ’s Breakfast on Monday. “From Monday through until the end of April, that becomes the final window where if people are not vaccinated in that period of time then they are redeployed, they are moved on. And that was always the point we had to get to.” Her comments came hours before it was confirmed that the worker, known as case C, had not been vaccinated, adding to concerns raised last week when it was made public that case B had missed two vaccine appointments.

Case C, a close contact of last week’s case, known as case B, was reported to have the virus late on Sunday. The Ministry of Health said that as they had already been isolating at home there was little additional risk to the community and that they and their partner had now been moved to a quarantine facility. Ardern said 79% of those employed by the security company for which cases B and C worked had so far been immunised, adding that the figure was not good enough. “We believe we have a health and safety obligation to people who are at the frontline in managed isolation,” she said. New Zealand began rolling out its vaccine programme in February, with border staff and managed isolation and quarantine workers at the front of the queue for the Pfizer jab.

Thread on this in yesterday’s comments.

• New Studies Suggest ‘Long Covid’ More Common Than Previously Thought (F.)

A survey earlier this month from the Office for National Statistics in Britain polled more than 20,000 participants who’d tested positive for Covid-19 in the last year and found that one in five survivors reported having symptoms after five weeks—and at 12 weeks, the number was still 13.7% (almost one in seven people). The most common symptoms experienced at five weeks were fatigue (11.8%), cough (11%), headache (10%), and muscle pain (7.7%). (Loss of taste and smell followed, each affecting about 6.3% of participants.) At 12 weeks, the prevalence of symptoms was slightly lower, but still distributed similarly and much higher than a control group who hadn’t had Covid-19.

In terms of the big picture, when the authors extrapolated the numbers to the whole of the UK, they suggest that more than a million residents may have experienced long Covid by the beginning of March 2021. Studies have also shown the striking array of acute effects the coronavirus can have on the body and its organ systems, from cardiovascular to pulmonary to neurological-psychological to kidney and more. That Covid-19 is now considered a multi-organ disease may translate to a wider spectrum of long Covid symptoms than previously understood.

In fact, a new study from researchers at hospitals around the country found that long Covid symptoms included fatigue, shortness of breath, brain fog, loss of sense of smell or taste, anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, headache/migraine, and non-restorative sleep. The authors offer guidelines on how to treat patients with long Covid, and urge a multidisciplinary approach to support both the physical and the mental health of those living with long Covid. “Covid-19 is the first infectious disease that I’ve come across that has such an effect on a wide variety of organs. It’s changed my clinical practice,” said Columbia University’s Elaine Y. Wan in a statement. “No matter what the patient comes in for, I now ask if they ever had Covid-19. It changes the possible range of diagnoses.”

While it seems that people with more severe Covid-19, especially those who were hospitalized, are at higher risk for long Covid (a study from Wuhan found that after six months, three-quarters of these patients still had at least one symptom), this doesn’t mean that people with mild illness are off the hook. A study out last week from the Karolinska Institute reported that among a group of healthcare workers who’d had mild Covid-19, 10% still had at least one symptom severe enough to impact their work, home, or social lives eight months later (the most common symptoms were loss of smell and taste, fatigue, and respiratory problems). While the study was quite small and the results should be interpreted with some caution, other studies have also suggested that even mild initial illness can lead to long-term effects.

“Despite the shortages of coronavirus jabs in the EU, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) seems to be in no hurry to register Sputnik V..”

• Austria May Buy A Million Russian Vaccine Doses (RT)

Austria may soon be purchasing Russia’s Sputnik V jab to give an “additional turbo boost” to its anti-Covid vaccination drive, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz told the media in Vienna after negotiations with Moscow concluded. The negotiations on the contract to acquire Sputnik V have “de facto come to an end,” Kurz announced on Saturday. “It’s now possible to purchase it for us in Austria,” he added. A “million” doses of the vaccine from Russia, which boasts an efficacy of more than 91% percent and lacks significant side-effects, would provide an “additional turbo boost” to Austria’s immunization campaign, the Chancellor said, without specifying when those supplies might begin.

Austria, which has a population of almost nine million, has recorded more than 570,000 confirmed Covid-19 cases and over 9,600 deaths since the start of the pandemic. Kurz also promised to ask questions of the European Union regarding the bloc’s inability to be as fast and efficient as the US and UK in acquiring and approving vaccines against the deadly disease. Despite the shortages of coronavirus jabs in the EU, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) seems to be in no hurry to register Sputnik V, despite all the required paperwork being provided earlier this year. EU laws allow member states the emergency use of vaccines even if they haven’t been approved by the EMA. Hungary and Slovakia have already taken advantage of this clause and started giving Sputnik V shots to their citizens, and Austria may well follow their example.

We don’t see much news about China’s vaccination campaigns.

• China Considers Mixing Covid-19 Vaccines To Boost Protection Rate (R.)

China’s top disease control official has said the country is formally considering mixing COVID-19 vaccines as a way of further boosting vaccine efficacy. Available data shows Chinese vaccines lag behind others including Pfizer and Moderna in terms of efficacy, but require less stringent temperature controls during storage. Giving people doses of different vaccines is one way to improve vaccines that “don’t have very high rates of protection”, Gao Fu, the director of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said on Saturday, without specifying whether he was referring to foreign or domestic vaccines “Inoculation using vaccines of different technical lines is being considered,” Gao told a conference in the Chinese city of Chengdu.

Gao said that taking steps to “optimise” the vaccine process including changing the number of doses and the length of time between doses was a “definite” solution to efficacy issues. Two injections of a vaccine developed by China’s Sinovac Biotech, when given shorter than three weeks apart, was 49.1% effective based on data from a Phase III trial in Brazil, below the 50% threshold set by World Health Organization, according to a paper published by Brazilian researchers on Sunday ahead of peer review. But data from a small subgroup showed that the efficacy rate increased to 62.3% when the doses were given at intervals of three weeks and longer. The overall efficacy rate for the vaccine was slightly above 50% in the trial.

Ol’ Joe Biden had a farm…

• Did Joe Biden Pack The Supreme Court Commission To Simply Fail? (Turley)

With the establishment of his commission to study the possible packing of the Supreme Court, President Biden has adjoined his name to one of the most inglorious efforts of Franklin Roosevelt. Court packing has long been anathema in the United States, and polls have consistently shown the vast majority of Americans oppose the idea. Biden himself once denounced it as a “boneheaded” idea, but that was back in 1983, when there remained a real space in politics for at least the pretense of principle.

Now Biden and others seem to think the Supreme Court must be canceled for its failure to yield to the demands of our age of rage. Many of us were surprised when he pandered to court packing calls in the 2020 primaries. Some of us have called for expanding the court over a lengthy transitional period, but commentators and some Democrats called for an immediate infusion of new justices to give liberals the controlling majority. Unhappy with conservative rulings, Democrats demanded that the Supreme Court be replaced by a much larger and more reliably liberal body.

Washington already looks like many of our campuses, where opposition of such liberal measures results in isolation and condemnation. Take Justice Stephen Breyer. One would think he would be immune from the mob as one of the most consistently liberal justices in our history. However, this week Breyer warned against any move to expand the Supreme Court. He was swiftly denounced by figures like cable news host Mehdi Hasan who called him “naive” and called for his retirement. Demand Justice, a liberal group calling for court packing, had a billboard truck in Washington the next day telling Breyer to retire. Demand Justice once employed White House press secretary Jen Psaki as a communications consultant, and Psaki was on the advisory board of one of its voting projects.

Corporate Marxism?!

• Twitter Censors Criticism of BLM Founder Buying $1.4 Million Home (Turley)

We have been discussing the expanding censorship on Twitter and social media. The latest example involves the story of Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors, 37, and her purchase of a $1.4 million home in a secluded area of Los Angeles whose population is reputedly less than 2% black. The professed Marxist received considerable criticism for the purchase, including from Jason Whitlock, an African-America sports critic who has also been a critic of BLM. When Whitlock called out Khan-Cullors, Twitter promptly censored the tweet — leaving a notice that it was “no longer available.” Last week, various sites like dirt.com reported, “A secluded mini-compound tucked into L.A.’s rustic and semi-remote Topanga Canyon was recently sold for a tad more than $1.4 million to a corporate entity that public records show is controlled by Patrisse Khan-Cullors, 37-year-old social justice visionary and co-founder of the galvanizing and, for some, controversial Black Lives Matter movement.”

It produced a firestorm of critics who noted that Cullors has long insisted that she and her BLM co-founder “are trained Marxists. We are super versed on, sort of, ideological theories.” Critics like Nick Arama of RedState pointed out: “[I]t’s interesting to note that the demographics of the area are only about 1.4% black people there. So not exactly living up to her creed there.” [..] The controversy is illustrative of the age of Internet censors. Tweets, and in some cases Twitter accounts, vanish without explanation. Twitter is notorious for not responding to media inquiries over such censorship and even less forthcoming on the decisionmaking process behind such decisions. [..] The New York Post and other publications have reported that Cullors is eyeing expensive properties in other locations, including the Bahamas.

However, it is not clear if this money came from BLM which has reportedly raised almost $100 million in donations from corporations and other sources. Indeed, Cullors seems to have ample sources of funds. She is married to Janaya Khan, a leader of BLM in Toronto, and published a best selling memoir of her life and then a follow up book. She also signed a lucrative deal with Warner Bros to develop and produce original programming across all platforms, including broadcast, cable and streaming. She has also been featured in various magazines like her recent collaboration with Jane Fonda. [..] Indeed, the greatest irony may not be the home purchase by the corporate support. A professed Marxist, Cullors has not only been paid handsomely by corporations like Warner but is being actively protected by corporations like Twitter. When it comes to free speech, I support them both. The question is whether both have an equal opportunity to speak on platforms like Twitter.

Innocent until…

• Due Process, Adult Sexual Morality and the Case of Rep. Matt Gaetz (Greenwald)

That Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) is a pedophile, a sex trafficker, and an abuser of women who forces them to prostitute themselves and use drugs with him is a widespread assumption in many media and political circles. That is true despite the rather significant fact that not only has he never been charged with (let alone convicted of) such crimes, but also no evidence has been publicly presented that any of it is true. He has also vehemently denied all of it. All or some of these accusations very well may be true and, one day — perhaps imminently — there will be ample publicly available evidence demonstrating this. But that day has not yet arrived.

As of now, we know very little beyond what The New York Times initially reported about all of this on March 30: that “people close to the investigation” told the paper that “a Justice Department investigation into Representative Matt Gaetz and an indicted Florida politician is focusing on their involvement with multiple women who were recruited online for sex and received cash payments.” The article also said the DOJ “inquiry is also examining whether Mr. Gaetz had sex with a 17-year-old girl and whether she received anything of material value.” Both the NYT and, later, The Daily Beast, indicated the existence of financial transactions involving payments by Gaetz to his associate Joel Greenberg, currently charged with multiple felonies. The New York Times article made clear: “No charges have been brought against Mr. Gaetz, and the extent of his criminal exposure is unclear.”

That is still true. But no matter. One is hard-pressed to find people willing to urge that his guilt not be assumed before evidence of it is presented (amazingly, just six months ago, many of the same people now treating these accusations as proven fact had no trouble casually asserting or strongly implying that Gaetz was having sex with a 19-year-old male whom he said he had been parentally raising for years, all without the slightest regard for the impact of such innuendo on that other person). So reckless is the discourse around this case that it is now frequently asserted in major outlets that Rep. Gaetz faces “charges” of sex trafficking and sex with a minor, even though that claim is, at least as of now, blatantly untrue.

Still don’t really get why some are so adamant that people should vote without an ID. And that CEOs want to be part of it is another story altogether.

• Major Corporations Plan To Oppose Election Integrity Measures (DC)

The leaders of over 100 major corporations spoke via Zoom on Saturday about how they could combat election integrity laws similar to the one passed in Georgia, according to multiple reports. The executives on the call reportedly expressed concern about legislation that they view as restricting voting rights. They included the owner of the Atlanta Falcons, who also co-founded Home Depot, the chairwoman of the Starbucks board, and the CEO of AMC Entertainment, the Wall Street Journal reported. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale School of Management professor who helped organize the meeting, told the Washington Post that the corporate leaders on the call “felt very strongly that these voting restrictions are based on a flawed premise and are dangerous.”

“There was a defiance of the threats that businesses should stay out of politics,” he continued. “They were obviously rejecting that even with their presence. But they were there out of concern about voting restrictions not being in the public interest.” Corporations including Citibank, Coca-Cola, Delta, and Microsoft criticized Georgia’s new election integrity bill, SB 202. The law expands early voting opportunities for most counties, while expanding voter ID requirements to include absentee ballots. In response to corporate criticism, Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell slammed the use of “economic blackmail to spread disinformation and push bad ideas that citizens reject at the ballot box.”

Major League Baseball moved its 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver in response to pressure from President Joe Biden and corporate leaders over the law. Colorado also requires voters to present identification when they cast in-person and absentee ballots. Prominent Georgia Democrats, including Sen. Jon Ossoff and former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, were skeptical of the boycott efforts. Companies involved on the call are expected to release a statement expressing their opposition to election law changes like Georgia’s in the coming days, according to the Wall Street Journal.

We try to run the Automatic Earth on donations. Since ad revenue has collapsed, you are now not just a reader, but an integral part of the process that builds this site. Thank you for your support.

Fareed with some honesty on China.

An extraordinary moment of truth and honesty on CNN from @FareedZakaria pic.twitter.com/iVy4yxO6Iv

— Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) April 11, 2021