Today In Biden Land

[Kirkland Laing]

‘This Case Was Never About Fraud’: Federal Judge Refers ‘Kraken’ Attorneys, Including Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, for ‘Possible Suspension or Disbarment’




A federal judge sent a strong message to each of the so-called “Kraken” lawyers behind litigation to upend the 2020 election, ordering that they be referred for a professional conduct investigation and “possible suspension or disbarment.” The attorneys include pro-Trump lawyers Lin Wood and Sidney Powell.

“A Historic and Profound Abuse of the Judicial Process”
Full of indignation and spanning 110 pages, U.S. District Judge Linda Parker‘s ruling reads like a treatise on the judiciary’s role in protecting the democratic process.
“This lawsuit represents a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process,” Judge Parker wrote in her opinion and order. “It is one thing to take on the charge of vindicating rights associated with an allegedly fraudulent election. It is another to take on the charge of deceiving a federal court and the American people into believing that rights were infringed, without regard to whether any laws or rights were in fact violated. This is what happened here.”

[...]


Parker’s pronouncement was similarly unequivocal that “this case was never about fraud,” a phrase she emphasized in italics.
“t was about undermining the People’s faith in our democracy and debasing the judicial process to do so,” she added, in her own emphasis.
“While there are many arenas—including print, television, and social media—where protestations, conjecture, and speculation may be advanced, such expressions are neither permitted nor welcomed in a court of law,” she added in her ruling.



https://lawandcrime.com/2020-electio...or-disbarment/

[palmerq]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-58349010

Nasty stuff at kabul airport, many dead, probably inevitable given the way things turned out... Maybe there was always going to be a mass crowd at the airport whenever the westerners decided to remove their armies, maybe it could have been done better, keeping more soldiers at bagram airfield during this evacuation time?

[mrbig1]

20 years in long enough, sick and tire of war.

[Kirkland Laing]

In other Biden news.

This is behind a paywall so if you don't use noscript you're not going to be able to read it. Here's a relevant chunk:


Biden campaigned on a proposal to increase taxes on the wealthy by roughly $3.5 trillion over a decade. Nobody in Washington currently believes he will sign a tax hike anywhere close to that magnitude. The current predictions floating around — Politico’s tax newsletter is one publication that has used this estimate — peg the total at around a trillion, give or take.
The most striking thing about the decision by moderate Democrats to scale back Biden’s plan by some three-quarters is that we have no idea what the rationale is.
According to The Hill, the lobbyists have argued that Biden’s plan “would slow the U.S. recovery from the coronavirus recession.” It’s not clear what basis they have for this conclusion. If mainstream economists believe Biden’s tax hikes would imperil the recovery, they aren’t saying so publicly. (As economists like Larry Summers did when they loudly warned that Biden’s rescue plan would overheat the economy.)
When the conservative American Enterprise Institute ran the numbers on Biden’s full tax-increase proposal, it found a negligible effect on economic growth: reducing GDP 0.16 percent over the next decade, increasing GDP by 0.19 percent in the following decade, and reducing it by 0.18 percent over the longer run. All those numbers are so tiny they are rounding errors, tantamount to zero.
One of the most “persuasive” arguments, at least judging from its results, is the lobbying campaign to preserve a notorious loophole called “stepped-up basis,” or, more colloquially, “the angel of death loophole.” Here’s how this loophole works: Normally, if you sell an asset, like a stock, you pay tax on the profit. If you bought $1,000 worth of GM stock, and sold it for $2,000, you’d pay taxes on the $1,000 capital gain. However, if you die and pass the asset on to your heirs, then all the gains that occurred before you die are wiped from the books (hence, “angel of death”). Your heirs will only pay tax on the gain that occurred after they inherited the asset.
This exemption allows half of all capital gains to avoid any taxation, ever. The loophole is considered so ridiculous that conservatives often propose eliminating it as an alternative to increasing the estate tax. (Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney have both advocated eliminating the angel of death loophole.) Biden is proposing to eliminate the loophole, with the exception of a generous $1 million exclusion. (Most capital gains belong to staggeringly wealthy fortunes worth well over $1 million.)
Former Democratic senator Heidi Heitkamp is leading a lobbying campaign on behalf of wealthy benefactors looking to save the angel of death loophole. Heitkamp tells The Hill, with a straight face, that the loophole is vital to protect “an emerging entrepreneurial class within the Hispanic community and within the African American community, [who] won’t be able to take advantage of these tax rules” if it is eliminated.
Biden’s proposal includes protections for family-run businesses. That does not satisfy Heitkamp, who argues (in The Hill’s wording) that “many Americans may think that wealthy and well-connected people will most likely benefit from any exemptions.” And so, in the name of Americans who are cynical about well-connected people benefiting from special exemptions, Heitkamp insists we keep in place a notorious loophole that almost exclusively benefits massively wealthy heirs.
Heitkampf is also so committed to combating cynicism that she has declined to disclose the identities of her group’s donors. We can probably assume that they’re mostly the hard-scrabble Black and Latino small business owners she talks about so movingly.
In place of any well-articulated public rationale, the moderate Democrats have instead put forward a transparently disingenuous pretext that their goal is to sign the infrastructure bill as fast as possible. The ten House Democrats, led by Josh Gottheimer, have insisted their goal in opposing the House budget is to get shovels into the ground as quickly as possible. “No Labels,” the anti-partisan group funded by wealthy financiers, is running pretending Gottheimer’s clique is supporting Biden’s agenda, emphasizing the infrastructure bill and making absolutely no mention of the tax dispute. Many reporters have repeated Gottheimer’s account of his motives at face value.
The Hill’s less-blinkered account, on the other hand, frankly notes, “Business interests have Democratic allies in Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) and the group of House moderates led by Rep. Josh Gottheimer (N.J.) — all have expressed concerns about the size of the spending plan and potential tax hikes.”
Since budget rules require any permanent costs be paid for, and Biden doesn’t want to increase taxes on households earning less than $400,000 a year, the size of his domestic policy legacy will be determined by how much new taxes on the rich he can get through Congress. His proposal is perfectly ample to finance a historic legacy. A handful of moderate Democrats are starving that legacy very, very quietly. If they had good reasons for their position, you would probably know what they were.



https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021...-moderate.html



In other lobbyist/bullshit propaganda news:

https://twitter.com/MattGertz/status...44019087204352

[Kirkland Laing]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-58349010

Nasty stuff at kabul airport, many dead, probably inevitable given the way things turned out... Maybe there was always going to be a mass crowd at the airport whenever the westerners decided to remove their armies, maybe it could have been done better, keeping more soldiers at bagram airfield during this evacuation time?

It turns out Bagram is a one and a half hour drive from Kabul on roads that offer endless opportunities to ambush or bomb vehicles. You would need many thousands of troops to prevent it being a shooting/bombing gallery for whoever wanted to have a go at Americans and many thousands more to protect those thousands, then many thousands more (at least seven thousand) just to protect the airbase. So overnight you have to go from two thousand troops to tens of thousands and they're straight in the middle of a shooting war, busloads of American civilians being bombed and so on.

The military advised getting people out from Kabul airport was the least worst option so that's what they did.

There's a whole bunch of other stuff that I'm forgetting but I can't remember where I read this now. Anyway it wasn't a good idea.

Never mind, the Taliban have things under control:

https://twitter.com/biannagolodryga/...12686475972614

Provided the fucker can count he'll tell the rest of their brains trust that they need to do what America wants or they're absolutely fucked. That'll get the remaining few hundred people out at some point.


I think Biden should appoint a Fed chair who promises to run US monetary policy according to literal interpretation of the Bible.