Mini-Wrants

Why the fuck is pissvortex still allowed to use his same blog name after his account got terminated?

I wasn’t allowed to do that!

I don’t care that Trump had to personally ok this song in order for it to be sung, the chuckling dinner guests got the message.

Sorry that Trump is too stupid to understand.

A federal judge has ruled that the legal battle over Mahmoud Khalil’s deportation should continue to play out in New Jersey, rejecting the Trump administration’s bid to transfer the Columbia University protester’s case to Louisiana.

In a written decision on Tuesday, the US district judge Michael Farbiarz in Newark said the jurisdiction over the case should remain in New Jersey since Khalil was being held there at the time his lawyers filed their habeas corpus petition. The judge described the government’s argument otherwise as “unpersuasive”.

The ruling does not guarantee that Khalil will be moved out of a detention facility in Louisiana, where he is being held as the government seeks his deportation for his role in campus protests against Israel. But it will allow his attorneys to make their arguments for his release before a judge in New Jersey.

If the case were to have gone forward in Louisiana, it may have ultimately ended up before one of the nation’s most conservative appeals courts, possibly allowing those judges to issue a precedent-setting ruling on both Khalil’s case and the Trump administration’s broader efforts to deport non-citizen student activists.

Small win, but a win nonetheless.

Marine Le Pen leads a party that was founded by Holocaust deniers and former Nazi-collaborators. It speaks of French people of immigrant background as second-class citizens and routinely calls for foreign-born criminals to be expelled from France. It has a long history of damning the presence of fraudsters and convicts in French political life. Le Pen has herself launched legal action to political ends. Her party’s claim, today, to be victim of a weaponized justice system is the height of hypocrisy and double-standards.

Even knowing all these things, it’s probable that the ban on Marine Le Pen running for office will backfire.

The Paris court ruling on Monday, with a sentence applied immediately, means that she cannot stand for election or hold office for five years. A reform introduced in 2016 made this an automatic sentencing requirement for political embezzlement convictions of this kind. Le Pen’s defenders — like her Rassemblement National party’s president, Jordan Bardella — claim that this is an assault by “elites” on democracy itself. A string of right-wing personalities have sought to portray this as a government attack on the main opposition party. This claim is overstated, not least considering that the legal process started fully a decade ago.

No one is above the law, and the court could not rule based on Le Pen’s personal popularity. But banning candidates from running for office due to financial crimes is highly dubious. The damaging effect on the democratic choice seems out of proportion to the crime in question, and (even coupled with a €2 million fine) is ineffective in punishing the party.

Respectfully, this is a fucking joke.

Maybe if politicians like Trump had actually faced some fucking consequences for his financial crimes surrounding his elections, we wouldn’t be in the fucking position we would be now.

Maybe if following dark money and campaign laws was prioritized here in the United States, we wouldn’t see men like Elon Musk throwing literally money at voters to show up for conservative candidates.