Florida Right-Wingers Now Want To Censor Shakespeare!

The idiocy of right-wingers never seems to have a limit. Now a Florida school board wants to censor Shakespeare. Drew Lichtenberg (lecturer at Yale University and dramaturg at the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, D.C.) responds to this stupidity in The New York Times:

It seemed, for a moment, that Shakespeare was being canceled. Last week, school district officials in Hillsborough County, Fla., said that they were preparing high school lessons for the new academic year with some of William Shakespeare’s works taught only with excerpts, partly in keeping with Gov. Ron DeSantis’s legislation about what students can or can’t be exposed to.

I’m here to say: Good. Cancel Shakespeare. It’s about time.

Anyone who spends a lot of time reading Shakespeare (or working on his plays, as I have for most of my professional career) understands that he couldn’t have been less interested in puritanical notions of respectability. Given how he’s become an exalted landmark on the high road of culture, it’s easy to forget that there’s always been a secret smugglers’ path to a more salacious and subversive Shakespeare, one well known and beloved by artists and theater people. The Bard has long been a patron saint to rebel poets and social outcasts, queer nonconformists and punk provocateurs.

Yes, Shakespeare is ribald, salacious, even shocking. But to understand his genius — and his indelible legacy on literature — students need to be exposed to the whole of his work, even, perhaps especially, the naughty bits.

The closing lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20, addressed to the poem’s male subject, are among the dirtiest — and hottest — of the 16th century. “But since she pricked thee out for women’s pleasure, / Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure.” A favorite trick of Shakespeare’s was to play with word order, especially when he wanted to disclose something too daring to be said in a more straightforward way, such as the love that dared not speak its name. The untangled meaning here: Your love ultimately belongs to me, sir, even if women (sometimes) enjoy your prick. Or, from the neck up you are as beautiful as a woman, and from the waist down you are all man.

Sex is one thing. The plays are also astoundingly gory. The bloody climax of “King Lear” so horrified the playwright Nahum Tate that he felt compelled to rewrite its ending. Tate’s sanitized version of “King Lear,” premiering in 1681, held the stage until 1838. In the 18th century, Voltaire called “Hamlet” the apparent product of a “drunken savage” who wrote without “the slightest spark of good taste”— which didn’t stop Voltaire, who also recognized Shakespeare’s “genius,” from openly borrowing from the Bard for one of his own plays.

In 1872 in “The Birth of Tragedy,” Friedrich Nietzsche praised this savagery. To him, Shakespeare contained the ne plus ultra of grisly truths. Hamlet, he wrote, “sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of existence.” Nietzsche being Nietzsche, he considered this a good thing. Art, wrote Nietzsche, transforms “these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live.”

In light of Nietzsche’s counterintuitive epiphany, the notion of Shakespeare-the-hipster caught fire. Hamlet, uniquely among male roles in the classical canon, became an aspirational part for female theatrical stars looking to prove their bona fides and upend gender preconceptions: Sarah Bernhardt most famously, but also the great Danish actor Asta Nielsen. Shakespeare’s sonnets were a source of succor to decadent aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde, just as they had been to Charles Baudelaire. The writings and teachings of queer poets such as W.H. Auden and Allen Ginsberg suggests they saw themselves in Shakespeare’s works, as did anti-racist writers from James Baldwin to Lorraine Hansberry and Ann Petry.

Where the avant-garde led, pop culture followed. Shakespeare’s plays have always lent themselves to all manner of interpretations and they found new life in the postwar era, with landmark works like Basil Dearden’s “All Night Long,” a neo-noir film from 1962, which set “Othello” in a British jazz soiree. Franco Zeffirelli’s “Romeo and Juliet” in 1968 plugged into a different cultural zeitgeist, capturing onscreen the summer of love, while Roman Polanski’s film version of “Macbeth” in 1971 feels like an encomium for the dying utopian dreams of the ’60s.

In the transgressive ’90s, Shakespeare was everywhere: taboo, art house, alternative and cool. Gus Van Sant’s “My Own Private Idaho” reimagined Prince Hal and Hotspur as gay grunge gods and Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet” featured Leonardo DiCaprio at the peak of his androgyne allure. Even “Shakespeare in Love,” a relatively middlebrow Oscar winner, presented a vision of the brooding, bearded, sexy Shakespeare, as embodied by Joseph Fiennes.

In many other cultures, the bawdy lowbrow and the poetic highbrow are often personified by separate champions: In France, it’s Rabelais and Racine; in Spain, Cervantes and Calderón. In English literature Shakespeare has always combined both brows into something rich, special and strange. In “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” one of Shakespeare’s most magical and sensual plays, Bottom — a man with the head of a donkey — spends the night in bed next to the fairy queen. He wakes up having had something close to a religious experience. Every play in the canon features something similarly subversive and transcendent — and all of them are essential.

One can no more take out the dirty parts of Shakespeare than one can take out the poetry. It’s all intertwined, so that Shakespeare seems almost purposefully designed to confound those who want to segregate the smutty from the sublime. His work is proof that profundity can live next to, and even be found in, the pornographic, the viscerally violent and the existentially horrifying. So if you’re looking for sex, gore and the unspeakable absurdity of existence in Shakespeare, you will definitely find it. That’s the genius of Shakespeare. And it’s precisely what makes his work worth studying. 

Trump's Defense Seems To Be That He Is An Idiot

The following post is by Michael A. Cohen at MSNBC.com:

For those who have closely followed the political rise of Donald Trump, it’s rather obvious that the former president isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. This is a man, after all, who once mused about spraying disinfectant or ultraviolet light inside the body to kill the Covid-19 virus, looked directly at the sun during a solar eclipse without protecting his eyes and said Hurricane Florence was “one of the wettest we’ve ever seen, from the standpoint of water.”

But in the wake of his third criminal indictment in four months, it appears that even Trump’s criminal defense team is essentially arguing that their client is an idiot.

Consider the comments of Trump’s lawyer John Lauro, who said Sunday that his client’s defense “is quite simple. Donald Trump … believed in his heart of hearts that he had won that election.”

I don’t doubt that Trump believed he won the 2020 election or that he repeated the lie so many times that it became his reality, but that’s not a defense — it’s a cry for help.

And in Trump’s case, arguing that he believed he won suggests that he also lives in a fantasy world. Last week’s federal indictment says Trump’s closest aides told him repeatedly that he lost the 2020 election. Every conspiracy theory whispered in this ear by Sidney Powell and the My Pillow guy proved hollow, and every legal challenge failed in court. There’s never been a shred of evidence backing up Trump’s “beliefs.”

More than 2½ years later, only the most deluded Americans believe in their heart of hearts that Trump won re-election, but Lauro's argument is it that that group includes the man most likely to be the GOP’s presidential standard-bearer in 2024. 

The only way this defense could work is if, like Trump, the judge and members of the jury are also two sandwiches shy of a picnic.

In his bizarre statements over the weekend, Lauro didn’t limit himself to positing what Trump believes in his heart. He also claimed that when Trump asked Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 election at the Jan. 6, 2021, joint session of Congress, he “asked him in an aspirational way.” Lauro said the same about Trump’s infamous phone call to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, whom he asked to “find 11,780 votes” that would allow him to be declared the winner of the state.

“That was an aspirational ask,” Lauro said.

In Lauro’s telling, Trump simply asked, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent election outcome?” and nothing more. 

But as the indictment alleges, Trump did far more than just “aspirationally” ask Pence. He and his co-conspirators are accused of concocting and attempting to implement a scheme to draft fake electors and, in the process, disenfranchise actual voters. And as Pence has said, the former president didn’t merely ask him to stop the certification — he pushed him to “reject votes outright” and “overturn the election.” 

Lauro’s argument is akin to defending an accused bank robber with the claim that “he only aspirationally asked the teller to give him money.” As a defense, it’s ludicrous and insulting to the intelligence of anyone it seeks to persuade.

Then again, Lauro said his client committed a “technical violation of the Constitution” but “not a violation of criminal law,” which suggests that maybe the lawyer representing Trump is a few law books short of being Clarence Darrow.

But Trump’s making nonsensical arguments follows a familiar pattern in his attempts to get out of trouble. Who can forget his allegedly “perfect” phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which led to his first impeachment? After his indictment in the Mar-a-Lago documents case, Trump claimed he had a right to possess certain government documents after having left office (he didn’t), that he had sole discretion in deciding which of his papers to turn over to the government (nope) and that Hillary Clinton and Biden did even worse things with classified documents than he did (they didn’t). 

Perhaps Trump’s most moronic and outlandish argument was that he had the right to declassify documents with his mind — a claim utterly ludicrous and yet amazingly debunked by an audio recording in which he acknowledged that he held on to classified documents that, “as president, I could have declassified,” but “now I can’t.”

To be fair, Lauro is in an impossible position. The evidence against his client appears to be overwhelming. Trump continues to imperil himself further by constantly commenting on the cases and attacking the special counsel and the judge. There is no good legal or moral defense for Trump’s alleged actions, and his only hope for a not guilty verdict may rest on the jury’s giving him a pass because they think his elevator peters out well short of the top floor. 

While it’s highly unlikely, one can’t completely dismiss the possibility that jurors will give him such a pass. After all, in 2020, after four years of Trump’s demonstrating that he is as sharp as a bowling ball, 74 million Americans thought he should spend another four years in the nation’s most powerful elected office.

Trump's Attempted Coverup Is Probably His Stupidest Crime

The following is part of an op-ed by Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post:

If the allegations in the latest indictment of Donald Trump hold up, the former president is a common criminal — and an uncommonly stupid one.

Everyone knows, as the Watergate scandal drove home: The coverup is always worse than the crime. Everyone, that is, but Trump.

According to the superseding indictment handed up late Thursday, even after Trump knew the FBI was onto his improper retention of classified information, and even after he knew they were seeking security camera footage from the Mar-a-Lago storage areas where the material was kept — in other words, when any reasonably adept criminal would have known to stop digging holes — Trump made matters infinitely worse.

The alleged conduct — yes, even after all these years of watching Trump flagrantly flout norms — is nothing short of jaw-dropping: Trump allegedly conspired with others to destroy evidence.

As set out in the indictment’s relentlessly damning timeline, Trump enlisted his personal aide, Waltine Nauta, and a Mar-a-Lago worker, Carlos De Oliveira, in a conspiracy to delete the subpoenaed footage.

Consider: According to the indictment, on June 22, 2022, the Justice Department emailed to a Trump lawyer a draft grand jury subpoena for security camera footage. The next day, the former president called De Oliveira — who has reportedly worked for Trump for almost two decades — “and they spoke for approximately 24 minutes.” Hard to imagine what that might have been about.

After that, the pace picked up. Nauta claiming a “family emergency,” changed plans to accompany Trump to Illinois and made a secret trip to Florida, where he met up with De Oliveira. On June 27, 2022, De Oliveira met with another Trump employee, and, after saying the conversation should “remain between the two of them,” asked how many days the server retained video footage — and advised him that “the boss” wanted the server deleted. . . .

Even before this new evidence, the allegations of obstruction lodged against Trump were already damning. “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?” Trump allegedly asked his lawyer — after the documents were subpoenaed. He tried to get the lawyer to deep-six any problematic documents. As the lawyer recalled, “He made a funny motion as though — well okay why don’t you take them with you to your hotel room and if there’s anything really bad in there, like, you know, pluck it out.”

But this — the alleged conspiracy to destroy the security footage — is the epitome of obstruction, stunning in its brazenness. . . .

Those who insist on seeing Trump as the beleaguered victim of partisan prosecutors will not be moved by the fact of his 24-minute chat with a longtime retainer. The rest of us have long understood who he is. These new charges simply add to the pile.

But drip by drip, count by count, obstructive act by obstructive act, the seriousness of this situation comes into focus, the stakes of the next election become clearer. Trump in office was willing to do whatever it took to remain in power. Trump out of office was willing to do whatever it took to keep “my boxes.” One demonstration of narcissistic entitlement bolsters the other and deepens the urgency of holding this man to account, once and for all, and for all that he has done.

The Rich Are Not Smarter Than Us - Many Are Dumber

The following is some of an excellent op-ed by Paul Krugman in The New York Times:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a crank. His views are a mishmash of right-wing fantasies mixed with remnants of the progressive he once was: Bitcoin boosterism, anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, assertions that Prozac causes mass shootings, opposition to U.S. support for Ukraine, but also favorable mention for single-payer health care. But for his last name, nobody would be paying him any attention — and despite that last name, he has zero chance of winning the Democratic presidential nomination.

Yet now that Ron DeSantis’s campaign (slogan: “woke woke immigrants woke woke”) seems to be on the skids, Kennedy is suddenly getting support from some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley. Jack Dorsey, who founded Twitter, has endorsed him, while some other prominent tech figures have been holding fund-raisers on his behalf. Elon Musk, who is in the process of destroying what Dorsey built, hosted him for a Twitter spaces event.

So what does all this tell us about the role of technology billionaires in modern American political life? The other day I wrote about how a number of tech bros have become recession and inflation truthers, insisting that the improving economic news is fake. (I neglected to mention Dorsey’s 2021 declaration that hyperinflation was “happening.” How’s that going?) What the Silicon Valley Kennedy boomlet shows is that this is actually part of a broader phenomenon. . . .

One sad but true fact of life is that most of the time conventional wisdom and expert opinion are right; yet there can be big personal and social payoffs to finding the places where they’re wrong. The trick to achieving these payoffs is to balance on the knife edge between excessive skepticism of unorthodoxy and excessive credulity. . . .

On the other hand, reflexive contrarianism is, as the economist Adam Ozimek puts it, a “brain rotting drug.” Those who succumb to that drug “lose the ability to judge others they consider contrarian, become unable to tell good evidence from bad, a total unanchoring of belief that leads them to cling to low quality contrarian fads.”

Tech bros appear to be especially susceptible to brain-rotting contrarianism. As I wrote in my newsletter, their financial success all too often convinces them that they’re uniquely brilliant, able to instantly master any subject, without any need to consult people who’ve actually worked hard to understand the issues. And in many cases they became wealthy by defying conventional wisdom, which predisposes them to believe that such defiance is justified across the board.

Add to this the fact that great wealth makes it all too easy to surround yourself with people who tell you what you want to hear, validating your belief in your own brilliance — a sort of intellectual version of the emperor’s new clothes.

And to the extent that contrarian tech bros talk to anyone else, it’s to one another. The tech entrepreneur and writer Anil Dash tells us that “it’s impossible to overstate the degree to which many big tech C.E.O.s and venture capitalists are being radicalized by living within their own cultural and social bubble.” He calls this phenomenon of venture capitalism “VC QAnon,” a concept that I find helps explain many of the strange positions taken by tech billionaires lately.

Let me add a personal speculation. It may seem odd to see men of vast wealth and influence buying into conspiracy theories about elites running the world. Aren’t they the elites? But I suspect that famous, wealthy men may be especially frustrated by their inability to control events, or even stop people from ridiculing them on the internet. So rather than accepting that the world is a complicated place nobody can control, they’re susceptible to the idea that there are secret cabals out to get them.

There’s historical precedent here. Watching Elon Musk’s descent, I know that I’m not alone in thinking of Henry Ford, who remains in many ways the ultimate example of a famous, influential entrepreneur, and who also became a rabid, conspiracy-theorizing anti-Semite. He even paid for a reprinting of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery that was probably promoted by the Russian secret police. (Time is a flat circle.)

In any case, what we’re seeing now is something remarkable. Arguably, the craziest faction in U.S. politics right now isn’t red-hatted blue-collar guys in diners, it’s technology billionaires living in huge mansions and flying around on private jets. At one level it’s quite funny. Unfortunately, however, these people have enough money to do serious damage.

Stupid Woman Compares Trump To Mandela & Jesus

Marjorie Taylor Greene put her incredible stupidity on display recently. Here's what Steve Benen had to say about it at MSNBC.com:

After Donald Trump indicated that his indictment was imminent, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said the former president’s supporters “don’t need to protest.” The Georgia Republican added, “I’m not going to New York. ... I don’t need to protest.”

The right-wing congresswoman soon after changed her mind for reasons unknown, announcing via Twitter last week, “I’m going to New York on Tuesday. We MUST protest the unconstitutional WITCH HUNT!”

As it turns out, Greene probably should’ve stuck with her first instinct. The GOP lawmaker showed up at a pro-Trump event in Manhattan, complained for a short while mostly to a group of reporters, but her voice was soon drowned out in part by a Trump supporter who was handing out free whistles and who didn’t realize the congresswoman was there.

My MSNBC colleague Zeeshan Aleem wrote, “I’ve seen a lot of rallies in my life, but the pro-Trump rally featuring Marjorie Taylor Greene just now might have been the biggest flop I’ve ever seen. ... The entire thing was a non-event.”

But while the Republican’s comments at the pro-Trump “rally” — I’m using the word loosely — were largely ignored and difficult to hear, there was something Greene said before the former president’s arraignment that was even more notable. USA Today reported:

“Trump is joining some of the most incredible people in history being arrested today,” she said during an interview with Right Side Broadcasting in New York. “Nelson Mandela was arrested, served time in prison. Jesus — Jesus was arrested and murdered by the Roman government.” She said Trump joins the ranks of people who have been arrested and persecuted by “radical, corrupt governments.”

In case there are any doubts, Greene made the comments likening Trump to Nelson Mandela and Jesus on camera, and she did not appear to be kidding.

The comparison is stark raving mad, but let’s briefly pause to note the nature of the cases against the three men. Mandela was arrested for his fight against South Africa’s apartheid system. Jesus was persecuted for, among other things, starting a religious movement.

Trump, meanwhile, is currently facing a series of criminal investigations, but he was arraigned yesterday after allegedly falsifying business records related to the hush money payments he made to a porn star who claims they had an extramarital affair.

Imagine the perspective of an elected lawmaker who sees these three men and draws a parallel between them. Then imagine the perspective of a political party that puts such a congresswoman in a position of influence.

This MAGA Stupidity Could Flip A GOP-Held Seat

MAGA Republicans are not just dangerous -- they are also stupid, and hurting their own party because of it. Consider the following (as written by Dean Obeidallah at MSNBC.com):

Laura Loomer, the far-right extremist and proud bigot who failed to win the Republican nomination in a Florida congressional race Tuesday, is as vile as they come. But because Loomer is encouraging her supporters not to vote for the GOP nominee in the general election, she may just be the Democrats’ best weapon to win an otherwise safe GOP seat. Here’s hoping she inspires other MAGA losers to follow her lead.

For those lucky enough to not know who Loomer is, she’s a one-stop shop for bigotry. She has dubbed herself a “proud Islamophobe" and has backed it up with a slew of hate-filled comments about Muslims being “savages.” On a podcast hosted by a white nationalist, she declared, “I’m going to fight for white people” and added, “I’m a really big supporter of the Christian nationalist movement.” And this 29-year-old — who was gleefully endorsed by Donald Trump when she ran for Congress in 2020 — has been banned by a number of platforms from Twitter to GoFundMe, for her hate speech and conspiracy theories. She can’t even catch an Uber or a Lyft.

Despite being as despicable as she is, in 2020 Loomer won the GOP nomination for Congress in Florida’s 21st Congressional District. Thankfully, Democrat Lois Frankel crushed her by 20 points in that solidly blue district.

But Loomer had a new plan for 2022. She ran in Florida’s 11th Congressional District, which is solidly Republican, to challenge 73-year-old Rep. Daniel Webster, who’s been in office since 2011. And she almost won. Webster only bested her by about 5,000 votes, Loomer shocking many by attracting 44% of the vote.

But Loomer — taking a page from her beloved former president — has refused to accept her loss. On election night she declared in Trumpian fashion, "I'm not conceding, because I'm a winner!" And as you may have guessed, she claimed there was voter fraud. Soon some of her followers online were repeating her fact-free fraud claims.

Loomer escalated her rhetoric Wednesday. On GETTR, one of few social media platforms that hasn’t kicked her off, she posted in all caps, “I DO NOT CONCEDE.”

She then made a request to her nearly 38,000 voters that should make Democratic nominee Shante Munns happy. “I encourage all of my supporters and all of my voters to NOT support Daniel Webster and the establishment RNC and Big Tech voter fraud machine that is propping his feeble body up and depriving my constituents of the representation they deserve and need,” Loomer wrote. She then added for bad measure: “I am calling for Daniel Webster to RESIGN, because everyone knows he is beyond unfit to serve.”

This is not an empty threat. While the newly reshaped 11th Congressional District is rated by nonpartisan Cook Political report a “solid” Republican district, Cook predicts it favors Republicans by 8 points. That is on the low end of solid GOP districts. Simple math tells us that, for Webster to win in November, he will need Republican primary voters who cast a ballot for Loomer. . . .

There was a time when many of us hoped that Republican leaders would excise the MAGA extremists from their party. Clearly that is never going to happen. As we can see from Loomer’s fundraising haul that eclipsed a veteran GOP member of Congress, a significant amount of energy in the Republican base is with the MAGA extremists.

At this point, our best hope is that an increasing number of MAGA bigots and conspiracy theorists help Democrats win by turning on the GOP establishment. Maybe then the GOP will rise up from the ashes and become a mainstream political party again and not a white nationalist, anti-democratic movement. But even if that doesn’t happen, a divided GOP is far easier for Democrats to defeat than a united one.

Are Humans The Smartest Or Stupidest Species?

Whether you believe humans were created in their current form or are the result of millions of years of evolution, people seem to agree on one thing -- that humans are the smartest members of the animal kingdom.

After all, humans have built amazing things -- the Pyramids, modern skyscrapers, computers and the internet, machines that fly and some that even go to other planets. The list is endless of human accomplishments.

But a case can be made for the opposite view -- that humans are the stupidest members of the animal kingdom.

They have divided themselves into tribes and nations, creating arbitrary boundaries on the planet. And they use those boundaries to wage war with other tribes and nations. Millions have been killed in those wars, usually over greed or religion. And even within those tribes and boundaries, humans kill and maim each other. They do this even though common sense would dictate they should be helping each other.

Humans discriminate against one another because of silly reasons (like skin color, national origin, or religious preference) -- each convinced he/she is somehow better than others.

Humans, through misuse of natural elements, are in the process of making their planet uninhabitable -- deleting the forests that provide their oxygen, dirtying the water they need, and changing the climate to produce more storms, floods, droughts, and fires. And refusing to pressure their politicians into stopping or mitigating these disastrous things.

Humans allow poverty and neglect to exist -- even in countries with the wealth to eliminate both.

And humans refuse to believe their scientists and medical professional -- refusing to stop a killer pandemic by getting vaccinated or wearing masks. 

So, which is it? Are humans the smartest or stupidest species? I think a case can be made that they are both -- and unless they enhance the former and eliminate the latter, they may not survive very far into the future. The Earth doesn't care. She will survive with or without us. 

Humans must save themselves. Can they do it? They are capable of saving themselves, but do they have the will to do so? It will require putting a lot of our ignorant ideas behind us, and working together to the benefit of all. Frankly, I'm not sure we are that smart!

Gohmert Sues VP Pence In Attempt To Keep trump In Office

 On this blog, I have called Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) "the stupidest man in Congress" many times. It looks like Gohmert wants to prove that is true. He has now sued the vice-president of his own party in an effort to make him violate the rules and declare Donald Trump the winner of the 2020 election when Congress meets next week.

Here's part of how Kyle Cheney reports Gohmert's crazy lawsuit at Politico.com:

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) and President Donald Trump's defeated electors from Arizona may force Vice President Mike Pence to publicly pick a side in Trump’s bid to overturn his 2020 election loss.

Gohmert and a handful of the would-be electors sued Pence in federal court on Monday in a long-shot bid to throw out the rules that govern Congress' counting of electoral votes next week. It’s an effort they hope will permit Pence — who is tasked with leading the Jan. 6 session of the House and Senate — to simply ignore President-elect Joe Biden's electors and count Trump's losing slates instead.

The lawsuit asserts that the 1887 law known as the Electoral Count Act, the vague statute that has long governed the electoral vote counting process with minimal drama, unconstitutionally binds Pence from exercising total authority to choose which votes to count.

"Under the Twelfth Amendment, Defendant Pence alone has the exclusive authority and sole discretion to open and permit the counting of the electoral votes for a given state, and where there are competing slates of electors, or where there is objection to any single slate of electors, to determine which electors’ votes, or whether none, shall be counted," the suit contends.

The lawsuit comes before Judge Jeremy Kernodle, a Trump appointee to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. It's unclear if he'll grant the request for an expedited judgment.

Though the lawsuit itself is unlikely to gain legal traction, it does put Pence in the position of having to either contest the suit — putting him on the opposite side of Trump and his GOP defenders — or support it and lay bare the intention to subvert the will over the voters in the 2020 election.

10 Most Stupid Moments Of Trump's White House Tenure

 During his time in the White House, Donald Trump has done a lot of stupid things. Personally, I wouldn't know how to winnow that long list down to only ten. But Amanda Marcotte has taken on that monuments task at Salon.com. Here is the list she has come up with:

Here's a list of the 10 most jaw-droppingly stupid moments of Trump's White House tenure.

1) That time Trump suggested injecting household cleaners into people's lungs to cure them of the coronavirus.

2) That time he looked at a solar eclipse without eye protection — after everyone was repeatedly told not to look at the eclipse without eye protection.

3) That time he couldn't admit he was wrong when he tweeted that Hurricane Dorian was going to hit Alabama, and so he drew on a weather map with a Sharpie to make it seem like he was right. 

4) That time he threw paper towels at people in Puerto Rico who had just endured Hurricane Maria.

5) That time he asked members of the National Security Council if they could nuke hurricanes rather than letting them hit the U.S. 

6) That time Trump was told to talk about Frederick Douglass at a Black History Month event, clearly had no idea who that was, and while trying to bullshit his way through the talk, implied that Douglass was still alive. 

7) That time he suggested that his much-desired border wall could just maybe be buttressed with alligator moats. 

8) That time he asked Canada's prime minister, Justin Trudeau, "Didn't you guys burn down the White House?"

9) That time Trump "liked" a tweet praising Rihanna. 

10) When he called the Second Epistle to the Corinthians "Two Corinthians."

So there's your top 10, with the caveat that it was hard — perhaps impossible — to narrow down that number in a satisfying manner, since Trump has done unbelievably stupid crap virtually every single day for four years. But that's why the internet gods invented social media and comment sections, so you can add your own to the list! 

Mitch Shows (Like Trump) Is NOT A "Stable Genius"

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has come up with a lot of bad ideas, but his latest may be one of his worst. Instead of appropriating money to help states and cities fight the Coronavirus pandemic, Mitch says the states should just declare bankruptcy.

That was an insane and mean-spirited statement, and it shows that McConnell is not very bright. Many states (who can't run a deficit like the federal government) declaring bankruptcy would just make an already terrible economy many times worse.

Here's some of what Jennifer Rubin had to say in The Washington Post:

There is a tendency in the mainstream media to attribute nearly unlimited political prowess to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). Certainly, his hard-line gamesmanship has worked to fill the courts (and two slots on the Supreme Court) with conservative judges. Beyond that? He failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and he routinely gets boxed about the ears by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), as she did again in achieving — with a strong assist from Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer — many (but not all) of Democrats’ aims in the coronavirusrelief package passed last week. McConnell’s hard line collapsed, and then he really made a mess of things.

In rejecting the plea of governors and mayors for additional funding to make up for huge expenditures and revenue shortfalls stemming from the coronavirus, McConnell made himself a target. Suggesting states go bankrupt instead only added fuel to the fire of governors. In this case, the outrage over McConnell is bipartisan, which was entirely predictable given that senators are desperate to fund fire, police and other essential services back home. (Seriously, what could McConnell have been thinking?) . . .

Predictably, McConnell’s intention to stiff state and local workers (who are at risk of getting laid off) and essential services did not go down well with his own members. CNN reports: “A number of Senate Republicans are publicly and privately expressing an openness toward a new round of funding to cash-strapped state and local governments, even as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell floated the possibility of states declaring bankruptcy rather than receive more federal aid.” These include rock-ribbed Republicans such as Sens. Mike Braun (Ind.) and Bill Cassidy (La.), further proof that deficit hawks never object to spending on things they like. . . .

McConnell has tied himself to Trump’s mast, but on this one the president may not even agree with him. Trump apparently is open to helping the states. (Cuomo’s visit to the White House last week apparently paid off.) In any event, McConnell can read the polls — Trump is sinking, his Senate majority is at risk and he has a well-financed challenger in Amy McGrath.

Given all that it’s an odd strategy to declare you have no interest in bringing home relief to, as Pelosi describes them, “health care workers and public hospitals and the rest, police and fire, emergency services folks, first responders, our teachers, our teachers, our teachers, transit workers who enable people, the essential workers to get to work.” Perhaps McConnell has been in Washington too long and has gotten badly out of touch — even with Republicans.