Supreme Court Blocks Restrictions On Biden Administration Efforts To Get Platforms To Remove Social Media Posts (nbcnews.com) 148
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: The Supreme Court on Friday blocked in full a lower court ruling that would have curbed the Biden administration's ability to communicate with social media companies about contentious content on such issues as Covid-19. The decision in a short unsigned order (PDF) puts on hold a Louisiana-based judge's ruling in July that specific agencies and officials should be barred from meeting with companies to discuss whether certain content should be stifled. The Supreme Court also agreed to immediately take up the government's appeal, meaning it will hear arguments and issue a ruling on the merits in its current term, which runs until the end of June. Three conservative justices noted that they would have denied the application: Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch.
"At this time in the history of our country, what the court has done, I fear, will be seen by some as giving the government a green light to use heavy-handed tactics to skew the presentation of views on the medium that increasingly dominates the dissemination of news. That is most unfortunate," Alito wrote in a dissenting opinion. GOP attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri, along with five social media users, filed the underlying lawsuit, alleging that U.S. government officials went too far in what they characterize as coercion of social media companies to address posts, especially those related to Covid-19. The individual plaintiffs include Covid-19 lockdown opponents and Jim Hoft, the owner of the right-wing website Gateway Pundit. They claim that the government's actions violated free speech protections under the Constitution's First Amendment.
"At this time in the history of our country, what the court has done, I fear, will be seen by some as giving the government a green light to use heavy-handed tactics to skew the presentation of views on the medium that increasingly dominates the dissemination of news. That is most unfortunate," Alito wrote in a dissenting opinion. GOP attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri, along with five social media users, filed the underlying lawsuit, alleging that U.S. government officials went too far in what they characterize as coercion of social media companies to address posts, especially those related to Covid-19. The individual plaintiffs include Covid-19 lockdown opponents and Jim Hoft, the owner of the right-wing website Gateway Pundit. They claim that the government's actions violated free speech protections under the Constitution's First Amendment.
The dissent is hyperbolic, and wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
The outcome doesn't go the way they wanted it to.
This does not let government dictate what these companies do. The lower court order was clearly wrong in preventing the government from contacting tech companies. If the govt was exerting undue pressure the tech lawyers are smart enough and well paid enough to get the govt. to back off. The 5th Circuit is spending too much time pushing its political agenda. That is far more dangerous than the executive branch placing a call to Silicon Valley.
Re:The dissent is hyperbolic, and wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Kagan said it best in EPA v WV
It seems I was wrong. The current Court is textualist only when being so suits it. When that method would frustrate broader goals, special canons like the “major questions doctrine” magically appear as get-out-of-text-free cards.
The so called "letter of the law" Justices have deviated in erratic ways on topics that are usually Executive deference by tradition and sometimes by stare decisis. Good point is Dobbs where the majority held.
But the opinion concluded that stare decisis, which calls for prior decisions to be followed in most instances, required adherence to what it called Roe’s “central holding”—that a State may not constitutionally protect fetal life before “viability”—even if that holding was wrong
And then founds the rationality for overturning long held precedent as "to save kids lives" basically the Court indicates the States have rights to protect children that can override things the Supreme Court held prior. BUT for some reason, the court completely ignores the argument of "protecting children should be paramount to prior court cases" when it comes to their textualiation of the Second Amendment, "OH WELL we have to strictly read the second amendment and our hands are tied, because that protecting children argument doesn't hold water here because we're strict readers of the Constitution." And if that logic seems somewhat circular, congrats! That's how frustrating the current court can be these days.
They are so all over the place with their double speak. Where major doctrine applies and child rights reign supreme, except when it doesn't because we decided to not use that argument today. I think that's what killed me the most about the EPA case. The law indicates that the EPA has to include the environmental cost, BUT because the law didn't explicitly say CO2, the EPA can't regulate that. Then Congress adds a 400 page amendment to explicitly cover CO2 and all the other various gases and who might emit them, and then everyone is like "HOW DARE THEY ADD A 400 PAGE AMENDMENT!"
Pick a fucking lane. Either we have executive discretion or we have textualist, but we can't have Judges that just randomly select which one they want to be based on who the current President is and get all huffy when Congress actually writes out every single possibility in black and white. I mean at some point we can't enforce the endangered species act because the law doesn't literally list every single animal that needs to be protected. We can't fund highways because the law doesn't list every single mile of road that needs improvement and indicate what kind of improvement it needs.
The current mix on the Supreme Court really needs to pick which one they're going to be. Are you going to read the letter of the law or pull out magic cards like Major Questions? I'm glad Judges like Kagan are calling them out for their more waffles than a Waffle House can serve in a year. This case, they're outraged by the stay on a basis that isn't even founded in the original argument, it's one the lower courts invented and the dissent is just running with it, because they're supposed to support the lower one for "insert whatever reason that they failed to give".
But hypotheticals are just that—speculation that the Government “may suffer irreparable harm at some point in the future,” not concrete proof
But this same Motley Crew is the one that indicated that they needed to wipe the DC Circuit's ruling on if the House could openly question the border wall in court, because then President Trump said that "it would really, really, I pinky swear promise, would make life difficult." And that was apparently good enough for the Court. Concrete not needed.
I mean you just can't anything with this Court because they'll just contradict themselves in another case and provide magic cards, smoke, and mi
Re:The dissent is hyperbolic, and wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd say for this kind of case any private communication by government with the companies constitutes undue pressure, due to power imbalance.
Power imbalance can negate consent in other contexts. If you take the same line here, the mere communication is a first amendment violation on the part of government.
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Lets stick to social media and leave Apple and Microsoft out of it ... they have other incentive structures and more reason to go against government occasionally. Social media were accommodating to mr. Trump, until they could afford not to be. They rode a fine line on Covid because politics and popular opinion was riding a fine line.
Social media censorship sways with the forces of politics, popular opinion and mainstream media. Secret negotiations for politicians would be a force multiplier.
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Whenever someone advocates creating or expanding a power, especially an executive branch power, they seem to never consider that someday the other side might win an election and will have that power. Imagine for 5 seconds that Trump wins, do you want him to have the unfettered ability to "contact" tech companies and ask them what they plan to do to prevent people from posting "unpatriotic" things, or to "suggest" that they stop censoring anti-trans posts?
Re: The dissent is hyperbolic, and wrong (Score:3)
It is not unfettered. Reasonably functional judicial system will reign in undue pressure.
The problem with the lower court was then deciding beforehand that ANY contact is problematic.
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The legal process is very slow. By the time they get around to charging someone, the wannabe dictator would have consolidated the power and can simply dissolve the courts.
Keep in mind it just so happens that Trump's policies were disliked by tech CEOs, so they worked against him. This will not be true of all future threats to democracy.
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Re: The dissent is hyperbolic, and wrong (Score:2)
Re: Silver lining (Score:1, Insightful)
Last I checked, it was the israelis that were the oppressor and illegal colonists expelling the palestinians from their housesâ¦
Re: Silver lining (Score:4)
Re: Silver lining (Score:1)
That's like saying Quebec is being settled by Canadians and being driven off their land...
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Can you point me to a single time Canadians have showed up in Quebec with guns to run out the inhabitants, and bulldozers to raze their houses?
That's happened quite a few times in Gaza.
So no, it's not like saying that.
Were you well paid for your propaganda?
(Note: Both sides deliberately provoke violence from the other to create an external threat, because they need that threat to suppress internal dissent. There are no good guys here. Neither Israel nor the Palestinians can survive without that external thr
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That's happened quite a few times in Gaza.
Other than the time Israel pulled its own citizens out of Gaza who had lived there since before the current Israeli government even existed, or retaliation (arguably it's more defensive to limit further attacks) for rockets being fired into Israel from Gaza, like when?
So no, it's not like saying that.
You're right actually, Palestine is and always was Israel for all of recorded history (the Canaanites were likely proto-Israelites as there's no evidence that they were conquered by foreigners or their ancient cities being abandoned, they're m
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Depends how far back in history you want to go. At one point, it was the Jews brought back into the land the British controlled that were being pushed into the sea. It didn't really go how the arabs thought it would though.
Of course, before the British it was controlled by the Ottoman Empire and before that the Holy Roman Empire and before that the original Roman Empire and I think Egypt before that.
It's a fight over land ownership with a religious backdrop for justification of whatever anyone wants to do.
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Cuts both ways. (Score:1, Troll)
This would also mean if a certain buffoon were to get elected president he wouldn't be able to use his power to quell "the liberal media" as he wants, either.
Re:Cuts both ways. (Score:4, Informative)
The decision actually says that the administration cannot threaten or coerce the media companies to act (in a round about way). What it doesn't do is gag the administration from coordinating with social media companies.
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The decision actually says that the administration cannot threaten or coerce the media companies to act (in a round about way). What it doesn't do is gag the administration from coordinating with social media companies.
This! The plaintiffs will have their day in court, what they don't get is this over reaching injunction until it's settled.
Re:Cuts both ways. (Score:5, Informative)
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The lower court ruling was effectively that the administration could not contact social media companies. There is a big difference between "contacting" and "threatening." As long as the social media companies are free to make their own decision without reprisal, Bob's your uncle.
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Nice social media site you got there, be a shame if something happened to it.
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The US justice system has clearly become politicised so you can no longer have objective, fair arbitration for the benefit of everyone.
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Zuckerberg is a very lefty liberal. Elon is not on the topics he's public about.
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Or perhaps 'lefty liberal' means something else over there in 'Murica'?
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Zuck has done a few trivial things that don't fit your extreme left agenda so that makes him a far right winger, eh? Btw, conservatives hate Christie.
On the whole the guy is very left wing. The exceptions do not make the rule.
The guy has pumped hundreds of millions into the blue team. Because right wingers fund blue team with huge cash injections? Ok. Whatever.
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One of the few things that has bipartisan support in the USA is keeping the left out of politics. They both regularly refer to social democracy as socialism/communism & use socialism as if it were a dirty word, FFS.
No, Zuckerberg has run programmes like XCheck which exempt certain political leaders & pundits, often right wing extremists, thereby enabling them spread populist right wing propaganda to wide audiences. In that sense,
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Wow you're so far left you think the blue guys are right wingers.
Had I realized how extreme your views are I wouldn't have bothered trying to talk with you about politics. I'll try to remember that in the future. There's no point in trying to talk with fanatics.
Btw, are you American or from elsewhere?
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BTW, being called extreme leftist by an American probably puts me at centre-right in the grand scheme of global political ideologies. In fact, I'm far, far worse than that; I'm a socialist. I don't mean social democrat, like we have in Yurp, I mean actual socialism. I think that puts me at poli
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The nationalist card? Lol, it is called, "you are not a citizen and therefore your opinions of the internal situation in foreign country are irrelevant".
You can have any opinion you want about anything. But it is worthless in this case. Have all the worthless opinions you want but there is no point in discussing such things with someone who has an outsider perspective and is essentially clueless about my country. I hear the same shit from my Canadian relatives. It is amusing to hear their views on Amer
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Funny that you missed the entire point because it doesn't fit what you wanted to hear. There is a very high correlation between people saying stupid embarrassing shit they shoot from the hip and checking the AC box. Almost as if they intuitively understand they're saying something embarrassing.
TLDR: you're embarrassing yourself.
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By then it can be reintroduced and the SCOTUS will find a reason why it's a-ok then.
Posts saying they're naked under their robes (Score:3)
They must be dealt with!
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Who'd want to see old geezers naked?
Dude, no kinkshaming, allright, but there are fucking LIMITS!
Superficial reading... (Score:2, Insightful)
...the GOP's lower levels are trying to ensure they can continue to spread misinformation and propaganda, while their higher levels are trying to ensure a future Republican administration can control social media with an iron fist.
I suspect the votes on the appeal will change depending on what option looks best for the next election.
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The gaslighting is strong with you, sir.
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You're obviously a partisan idiot. After all, everything I stated is right there in the summary, party affiliations and all.
Republicans are just shitty human beings with no sense of decency, honesty, or integrity. You're sad people and it's very disappointing that there are so many of you in the US... but that's what generations of fostering ignorance will get you.
Re: Superficial reading... (Score:2)
Good! (Score:1)
If we don't allow conspiracy loonies to propagate bullshit, we will never get this pandemic restarted and it will be way harder to bury that RTO bullshit for good.
First amendment all the way! (Score:5, Insightful)
An unsigned order doesn't give a hint either way how the court will rule but it is good to see them take up this issue.
I believe strongly in the FA. Posting stupid shit is not a crime. Posting incorrect shit is not a crime. Posting known incorrect shit is not a crime. Even posting foreign propaganda written by hostile states is not a crime.
I'd much rather the net be filled with silly shit than the government decide what we're _allowed_ to say and ruining or forcefully silencing anyone who disagrees. That goes against everything this country is supposed to be about.
Even if the government has good intentions (lolololololol), we know what the road to Hell is paved with.
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Even posting foreign propaganda written by hostile states is not a crime..
Are you sure about that? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:First amendment all the way! (Score:4)
We also interned thousands of innocent Japanese. Do you want to repeat that?
The dumb shit we did during ww2 is not a good look for how we should behave as a free people.
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I don't need to be reminded.
An internment camp was set up at Banff and Castle Mountain in Dominion Park from July 1915 to July 1917 mostly imprisoning Ukrainian immigrants.[8] The prisoners of the internment camp were used as slave labour to build the infrastructure of the national park.[9]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Free speech is fine right up until it is weaponized, like it is now with Russia pumping millions into it's foreign troll farming operations not to mention outright buying a significant chunk of the republican party. How long is this supposed to continue before it brings everyone a bad end?
Speaking of dumb shit... Appeasement is definitely on that list, and the people that are feeling it now are the same one's claiming victim status every five min
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Free speech is fine right up until it is weaponized, like it is now with Russia pumping millions into it's foreign troll farming operations
I'm certain that us giving up on free speech would be the ultimate accomplishment for Russia. What better way to put out that bright, burning American light of freedom that's lasted for a quarter of a millenium?
Also, please explain to me, how is it that so many on the left suddenly have no fucking clue how freedom of speech works? You can't possibly believe that the Russian and Chinese model of speech suppression is superior?
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It does NOT work so well, you're just not paying attention. Confirmation bias and all.
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Just jook at the attempt to remove Jordan Peterson's Psychiatry license.
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You're a moron and a fascist.
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Whooptey doo.
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Doing it for free isn't a crime, but being a paid agent of a foreign state without registering with the State Dept is a crime [wikipedia.org]
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Sure. Agreed. But I think you'd agree the vast majority of people posting things the government didn't like and got silenced for it weren't paid foreign agents.
There's a huge distinction between a foreign agent doing shit and some dumbass posting the same thing. The key difference is the latter is protected speech while the first is a crime. The crime btw is not the speech but being an unregistered foreign agent.
As long as you agree with the party in charge (Score:2)
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I agree that there needs to be a lot of transparency in this, perhaps a bipartisan agency controlling their communications, but I also think the government does need to be able to communicate with social media.
not what you think it is (Score:2)
Scotus is sick and tired of "emergency" appeals, which have totally ballooned in number, as everyone thinks their thing is an emergency. So, they now routinely refuse to do anything about them, and schedule them for regular order of business.
The Westminster Declaration (Score:3)
Read this: https://westminsterdeclaration... [westminste...ration.org]
Government has a voice to speak its own opinion, but ONLY its opinion. It absolutely does not have an unfettered right to control what others say. This case is about the government jawboning private companies to do the censorship they are not legally allowed to do.
They are taking your money and using it to restrict your fundamental human rights. In the process, they are corrupting social media.
This is one of the most important cases of this term.
It appears (Score:2)
In this day and age:
" You have the right to speak your mind, but the Government appears to have the right to ensure no one can hear you. "
Bully pulpit (Score:2)
The term bully pulpit is a superlative not a pejorative. It's the right and perhaps obligation of people in positions of prominence to advocate for causes. Moreover it's something expected of politicians not something they are supposed to avoid. So it's quite normal
Now one can ask if it goes beyond advocacy to coercive. We've seen that in a past administration where like a mafia don the advocacy would be "nice bussiness you have there, shame if the government messes it up for you".
In this case I don't s
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Goodness slashdot. Update your character encoding.
So you would like /. to support Unicode or even Punycode? Do you really understand the risks of posting stuff in Unicode or Punycode?
If /. added such support we would have to deal with crap like this --> https://www.bleepingcomputer.c... [bleepingcomputer.com]
Re: Good (Score:4, Informative)
They don't have to support Unicode. All they need to do is convert two or three well-known byte sequences that certain Apple devices emit into proper ASCII apostrophes and quotes.
Since that one-man-day coding task hasn't happened after all these years, I assume that they're either intentionally keeping it this way in a vain attempt to force Apple to relent, or else no updates at all have been done to the code on this site in the past decade. (Is it still implemented in PERL? I remember back in the day how proud Cmdr Taco and his team seemed to be of their PERL skills.)
Re: Good (Score:4, Insightful)
In the short term, do you know how easy it is to turn off "smart quotes" in iOS?
To disable this auto-conversion on iPhone:
Open the "Settings" app.
Go to "General" and then go to "Keyboards"
Locate the setting for "Smart Punctuation" and turn that to the OFF position.
The quote symbols are so small on phone screens it doesn't really add much to have typographical quote characters replacing straight quote characters. Yeah, I know it isn't the iPhone owner's responsibility to fix the problem, but if that person is a frequent /. poster it might be worth the three seconds to do it.
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Speaking as an Android/PC user, can you carefully explain to me how I'm supposed to turn off smart quotes on the iOS devices of people who are posting to Slashdot?
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This is the only site I've ever seen this happen, very weird.
And it's just regular "perl", or "Perl". Although the backronym is occasional considered "canon", I don't believe it is since Larry's first name of the language was "Pearl", no?
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Indeed, I was going to post something like that in TFA (https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=23/10/19/1821219) but I was afraid to be called a racist. /s
Plenty of hack and vulnerabilities based on UTF-8 and Punycode.
Re: Good (Score:2)
Accept Unicode input, discard characters outside of the latin-1 character set. Convert a handful of punctuation to html entities. I'm sure if I had 10 years to code it up I could figure it out.
Re:As much as I *want* to disagree with this rulin (Score:4, Informative)
like they're doing with 4 separate, transparently political, and each unprecedented, prosecutions against Trump.
How are they transparently political? You don't think someone stealing national secrets, keeping them in the bathroom, lying about having national secrets, trying to prevent the recovery of national secrets, and showing them to whomever the highest bidder is isn't a crime?
You think calling up an elected official and telling them to "find" votes to change the outcome of an election isn't a crime?
You think running a coordinated campaign to provide fake "electors" to overturn the results of an election isn't a crime?
If you don't think any of the above is crime then you cannot say one word when a Democrat does the same thing. Not one word.
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You don't think someone stealing national secrets, keeping them in the bathroom, lying about having national secrets, trying to prevent the recovery of national secrets, and showing them to whomever the highest bidder is isn't a crime?
Not really. Previous presidents have done very similar stuff, including Biden, and frankly, your characterization is grossly overstated and political sounding. Normally, the National Archive is calm and patient and cooperative about working with former administrations to get those documents returned, but this one didn't because Trump Derangement Syndrome drove one bureaucrat and Biden's FBI and DOJ to charge him with ridiculous, never before considered crimes to keep him from running in or winning the nex
Re:As much as I *want* to disagree with this rulin (Score:4)
"Either both or neither should be prosecuted. "
Specifically regarding the documents: for the instances where the Trump and Biden circumstances are similar, there are getting similar treatment. For any document that was returned without the FBI having to get a search warrant to retrieve it, there is no prosecution. Any document which is citied in the charges required a search warrant to retrieve.
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That's not how the law works.
Simply having them is a crime. Returning them doesn't "undo" or "lessen" the crime in any way.
The laws are very very clearly written.
I've worked in secure document facilities and had document handling training. What Biden did would have ended my career for sure and very very very likely have put me in prison for decades and probably fined a few hundred thousand, too.
But I'm not special like Joe.
Re:As much as I *want* to disagree with this rulin (Score:5, Informative)
Documents: Biden did the same to a larger extent, for longer and even as VP had no right to take documents anywhere.
Oh fuck off. Stop with the pathetic attempts at gaslighting. When it was discovered there were classified documents in Biden's possession he turned them over. He didn't try to hide them. He didn't lie about not having them. He didn't try to enlist others to help hide them. He didn't whine that he had every right to keep them. He cooperated and turned them over. And not only did he turn the documents over, anyone else who may have been involved in packing those documents was offered up to the relevant authorities to provide their side of the story.
Phone call to Georgia: go read the transcript. The level of blatant misquote on that is criminal.
Sure thing. Here is the entire transcript [cnn.com] of that phone call. You'll note the barrage of lies the orange criminal spewed out. More importantly, he keeps repeating one specific number: 11,779. Why would that specific number keep being repeated? What was so special about that number? Oh right, that's how many votes he needed to win Georgia. And since you'll deny the evidence, I'll put it here for everyone to read:
So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.
Fake electors: totally legal and has happened before. By Democrats. No prosecutions previously.
And the bullshit keeps coming. Cite any time Democrats put up fake electors. Go for it.
The amount of willful ignorance and willful lies you idiots put out is truly stunning. It's like listening to Kim Jung Un or Vladimir Putin speaking. Completely divorced from reality. A sure sign of being in a cult [imgur.com].
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Accusing people of gaslighting while gaslighting. Expertly done.
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You don't understand secure document handling law.
The crime is simply having them. Period. Returning them doesn't undo the crime. It doesn't work that way.
I'm sorry if legal reality doesn't fit your political beliefs.
I've had training by the government on how to handle secure documents. If I had done what Joe did, my career would be over and I'd very likely do many years of prison time and war a few hundred thousand in fines. But not Joe. He had zero right to take any of those documents out of secure
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Hi AC dummy, I've already posted that either Trump and Biden should both be held accountable or neither.
I believe justice should be meted out fairly and equally. Do you, dummy? If so then you'd want Biden to be indicted for his already admitted document handling crimes the same as Trump.
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Not even close. Trump is an asshole. If that was a crime then most of our politicians would be in prison.
Real crimes have been committed by many presidents going all the way back. Zero prosecutions.
I don't mean shit like stealing dozens of boxes of classified documents and storing them in their garage next to their corvette. I mean bribery, rape/sexual assault, extra judicial killings of American citizens (aka murder if anyone else did it) and other high crimes and misdemeanors.
Yet, not a peep, ever. A
Re:As much as I *want* to disagree with this ruli (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, even Nazi speech should be allowed. The ugly evil side of humanity must be shown in bright public light. Forcing it into hiding doesn't kill it. It only makes certain people more interested in it.
Do you oppose when the ACLU defended the Nazi march in Skokie. Nazi are disgusting and stupid but have the right to be stupid in public.
The problem with deciding "Nazis are bad therefore should be silenced" is eventually the people getting silenced aren't Nazis. They are just people who disagree with their government. We're there right now.
You didn't add anything about Trump so going to ignore your reply there. My original point about a political justice system stands.
On my college campus as a freshman this woman was standing in the main plaza with a microphone leading a chant, "No free speech for fascists!" which is all fine n dandy until someone who doesn't like you determines -you- are the fascist. It took me all of 2 seconds as an 18 year old to figure out she was wrong and why. The majority doesn't need free speech protections, by definition.
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It's like the new generations have grown up with a civics course in high school. Oh, right, they ended that in the 90s after Democrats claimed it was racist.
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I think you need to stop visiting left wing web sites and instead visit a middle of the road news source that collects news and opinions for BOTH sides of the political aisle. Otherwise, on either side, you will go down a rabbit hole you will never be able to get out of.
RealClearPolitics.com is my favorite. It's been used by reporters for many years now. Every day it collects articles from the left and right, and even has an investigative "branch." I read it every day, both sides.
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The fact that you called me a name like "grade A MAGAT" material for suggesting you get your news from RCP, a middle of the road news aggregation site used widely by reporters for ages, suggests you are definitely "on one side."
Point of fact, I don't support Trump, hate his fucking guts. I just don't like the idea of destroying our democracy just to keep him out of office.
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So instead of forcefully silencing people we don't like we just beat them with bats and hospitalize them?
Sigh... ok that's all fine n dandy until they decide -you- need to get beaten with a bat.
See how that works?
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Who were we are at war in 1978 and who were they aligned with?
Your hate of people with a different view of where this country should go does not in ANY way justify curtailing their constitutional rights.
Some of them would call YOU a traitor. Who is correct?
Neither. You're not a traitor and Trump supporters aren't either.
Hate all you like but you do not get to use the unlimited power of the federal government as a club to shut down people because you disagree with them. You would be screaming to the heave
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"LiKe oH mY gOD! BOTH SIDES YO!"
Way to miss the point.
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So ALL FOUR of these prosecutions are literally worse than any crime any American presidential candidate has ever committed?
Cuz a president prosecuting his political oppoent has never been done against any U.S. presidential candidate. Not once ever.
And somehow, Donald Trump paying hush money out of campaign funds rather than his personal money (the first of the Democrat's criminal cases against him) absolutely requires Democrats to cross that Rubicon?!
Do you really think anyone is that stupid not to see
Re: As much as I *want* to disagree with this ruli (Score:2)
"a president prosecuting his political oppoent has never been done against any U.S. presidential candidate. Not once ever."
Biden is a president, not a judge. He's prosecuting nothing.
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Now answer the question.
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I welcome presidents being prosecuted for crimes. Bring on the charges, if you can make them stick. There are many, many charges coming for Trump, and these are just the tip of a very big iceberg — some are saying it might be the biggest of all time.
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You should read the thread and answer the question none of you cowards will answer.
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I thought that was the question.
Did you ask a more meaningful one in there somewhere? I didn't catch it.
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Look, when I woke up and learned Trump was gonna be president based on another electoral fluke, I couldn't believe it. I kind of paniced, and the blood drained from my face, like anyone with any sense at all. Not only was his TV personality a massive embarrassment to our country, he just wasn't fit for office. He only got elected because people were absolutely sick of SJWs acting increasingly insane for the last several years.
But the left, on that very day, after accusing the right of plotting "not to *a
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Then they impeached him twice on pure nonsense, Russian conspiracies then Ukrainian conspiracies.
There is more than ample evidence of Trump and co. collaborating with Russia. There was a shitload of it in the Mueller report.
You guys crossed a line that must NEVER be crossed
Trump's coup attempt? Wait, that was you guys
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There is more than ample evidence of Trump and co. collaborating with Russia. There was a shitload of it in the Mueller Report.
Show me the line in the Mueller report. One line.
Trump's coup attempt? Wait, that was you guys
Trump did no such thing. Just a bunch of morons rioting, and not even at his request.
Now, ANSWER MY QUESTION, you absolute coward.
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Show me the line in the Mueller report. One line.
https://www.justsecurity.org/6... [justsecurity.org]
I've posted this link probably dozens of times here already.
You haven't read it once.
But I keep it handy for this circumstance anyway, for the readers.
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I did not ask for someone else's opinion. Think for yourself. Quote me the line. ONE LINE.
AND NOW ANSWER MY QUESTION, COWARD.
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I did not ask for someone else's opinion. Think for yourself.
That's pretty rich coming from a guy with a shitty debunked rented opinion.
AND NOW ANSWER MY QUESTION, COWARD.
And now eat my nuts, loser.
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That's what I thought. No understanding of the Mueller Report of your own, can only post someone else's opinion when asked. And still won't answer my question.
You represent the fascist side of politics perfectly, drinkypoo. Stay proud in your ignorance!
Re: As much as I *want* to disagree with this rul (Score:2)
You are just one of many ass clowns who think my job is to regurgitate on command, but it's much more fun to clown on you than to educate you.
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Done with you, dude.
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That's the best news I've heard in ages. Call me a coward some more and then get butt hurt when I come back, it's fun for everyone.
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Hence the many "Flamebait" votes on entirely reasonable comments.
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Freedom to be destructive to your neighbors has never been a protected freedom. Freedom to be an asshole is protected, as long as you don't harm your neighbors.