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The cleaning crew is still scrubbing the blood off the floor from last week’s cage match about Ukraine and January 6, and already Ali and Frazier (that is, Lucretia and John) want to go for a sequel—maybe “Rumble in the Faculty Club Food Court” or something. (And yes, since we recorded in the morning instead of evening happy hour like we are supposed to, talk turned to McDonald’s and breakfast meats. Steve blames John for McDonald’s stock slumping this week while the broad market had a monster rally.)
While we await Don King’s promotion for Cage Match 2 next, we devote this episode to catching up on the other news of the moment, especially the rot in higher education as fully revealed by last week’s ignonimious appearance of the presidents of three Poison Ivy League universities (boy did we call it or what).
But then we also note the curious legal cases that popped up this week, especially Jack Smith’s Hail Mary pass to the Supreme Court to try Trump as soon as possible, but the equally inside-out coverage of what a novelist might call “The President’s Heart Is a Lonely Hunter Biden.” Somehow we ended up with a digression into religious liberty, and pondering whether the Hell’s Angels might be a bona fide religion that might be useful in some circumstances.
Next week, back to the Cage for Round Two!
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Another TWHH first? The Waitresses sending us out? Nice.
This is from a much longer post by Spencer Klavan on X. He goes into more detail as the aspects of the case, but this portion came to mind when you were discussing Satan in Iowa. He strikes me as being right on the mark.
“It’s absurd to imagine that the law has no feasible way of understanding the word “religion” in the Establishment Clause so that the Abrahamic faiths and the Christianity that saturated the country at its founding count, whereas invented flapdoodle contrived to mock our most cherished traditions does not count. Obviously the founders did not intend to, nor did they in fact, disarm us of the necessary tools for telling one from the other as legitimately worthy of state protection.” — Spencer Klavan, X, 12/15/23
Ironic that John had heard about the IEDs found at the border, but Steve and Lucretia had not!
I’m concerned about what is unequivocally a denial of Donald Trump’s due process rights. Appeal to the Circuit Court is a matter of right for a defendant. By taking the case, the Supreme Court is violating Donald Trump’s civil rights. How should he be compensated? How might he be compensated?
Furthermore, it seems to me that in order to convince the Supreme Court to deny so blatantly a litigant’s due process rights, the government – in this case Jack Smith – should have to show extremely exigent circumstances (garden-variety exigence obviously being insufficient), which clearly don’t exist here. For all of the hysteria on the left, this is not a matter of life and death.
Finally on this crazy-ass situation, Jack Smith’s citation to U.S. v. Nixon seems inapposite, given that Nixon was not at the time a declared candidate in a nationwide election to be held less than eleven months from the time of the “emergency” appeal.
Steve and Lucretia need to work on their act before they go on the road, but they’re surely on their way to becoming the next Burns and Allen.
The best joke about the firing of Liz Magill was told by Don Surber:
There are so many reasons for the Supreme Court to kick the Smith-Trump case back to the DC Court of Appeals. It would postpone it until after the election and perhaps make the case moot and thus keep them out of politics. It would allow circuit court judges to review the arguments and give SCOTUS the benefit of seeing a round of arguments at a higher level than a district judge.
Why not let Christians put up a nativity for Christmas, Jews a menorah for Hannukah, and atheists a lake of fire for April Fools’ Day?
I was wondering who would note the exit bumper music. But it is the Christmas season after all, so we’re just trying to help bolster the holiday spirit!
Yeah! And one of the songs I turn up the volume for!
All the SCOTUS rules this and that free speech blah blah.
Why not federalism again please? Can’t the States just have their own rules so they can incubate a healthy civil society before pastel liberalism sterilizes everything?
Isn’t that possible? Would the court have to do it? Or congress remove that from the court purview? How can we get back to a place were we can foster community again? Help please
John said that he had something new about the Dobbs decision but never got to it. I hope he explains in a future podcast.