Mon: Stupid Democrats Continue to Fall for It

He's Not Clear and He Wasn't Cleared

In a late Friday filing, special counsel Jack Smith brutally shot down a claim made by Donald Trump and his lawyers that the Department of Justice is hiding evidence that the former president received a special security clearance that would have allowed him to keep secret documents belonging to the government.

As part of the ongoing attempts by the former president to delay the obstruction of justice trial the DOJ is struggling to begin due to foot-dragging by Judge Aileen Cannon, Trump and his legal team have asserted the government needs to find and turn over more evidence about his level of clearance as part of discovery.

According to former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, Smith made a point of shooting down the claim in no uncertain terms in his Friday filing.

As Joyce wrote on her Substack platform, "One particularly interesting part of the government’s response related to a suggestion in Trump’s motion that he had some form of security clearance issued by the Department of Energy that continued after he left the White House."

"Smith eviscerates that claim in response to Trump’s effort to force the government to search for more evidence that such a clearance existed," she explained before adding, "Trump argued that the government had an obligation to search 'Scattered Castles,' a database of security clearances maintained by the intelligence community, as well as a similar one maintained by the Department of Defense. But Smith pointed out that he had already produced a search in Scattered Castles, 'which yielded no past or present security clearances for Trump.' Same result in the Department of Defense system."

Vance notes that Trump and his team also demanded "discovery about a special 'Q clearance' he held through the Department of Energy," and that Smith responded by informing the the court "he had already produced a memo to Trump that showed his Q clearance, granted at the start of his presidency, was terminated shortly after it ended."

Because the World Needs More Collisions

Researchers at the world's biggest particle accelerator in Switzerland have submitted proposals for a new, much larger, supercollider.

Its aim is to discover new particles that would revolutionise physics and lead to a more complete understanding of how the Universe works.

If approved, it will be three times larger than the current giant machine.

But its £12bn price tag has raised some eyebrows, with one critic describing the expenditure as "reckless".

That money - which is only the initial construction cost - would come from member nations of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) including the UK, and some experts have questioned whether it makes economic sense.

The biggest achievement of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was the detection of a new particle called the Higgs Boson in 2012. But since then its ambition to track down two holy grails of physics - dark matter and dark energy - have proved elusive and some researchers believe there are cheaper options.

Huge atom-smasher bid to find missing 95% of Universe

Another Day, Another 30 Dead Gazans

Rescue teams search for survivors as local authorities say 30 people were killed in Israeli air attacks on “safe homes” and a mosque in central Gaza.

They Endanger the Lives of Kids Too Young to Get Vaccinated

As outbreaks of measles spread throughout the world, anti-vaccine activists aren’t just urging people not to get vaccinated — they’re taking a page from a well-worn playbook, falsely downplaying the dangers from the highly contagious respiratory disease.

“The truth is, measles is not a super severe serious illness when you’re a child,” Mary Holland, president of the country’s best-funded anti-vaccine organization, Children’s Health Defense, said last week on the group’s online morning show. Children’s Health Defense was founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who took a leave from the organization in April to run for president.

Holland, a lawyer, called government responses to recent outbreaks “fearmongering” and “crying wolf.”

“It’s a couple days of spots and then you move on,” she said.

But national health agencies warn the fear of measles is well-founded.

Measles — a disease so contagious it acts as a bellwether for threats from other infectious diseases — is marked by fever, flu-like symptoms and an itchy rash, and sometimes comes with dire complications including pneumonia, seizures and brain damage. For every 1,000 cases of measles, about 200 children may be hospitalized, 50 may get pneumonia, one child may develop brain swelling along with deafness or disability, and between one and three may die.

Despite the availability of an incredibly effective vaccine, the disease is spreading worldwide. The reasons behind the surge are complex. For countries in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, there are issues of access; childhood vaccine campaigns suffered when Covid weakened already-stretched public health systems. Europe, the U.K. and the U.S. experienced similar, if smaller-scale, disruptions to their childhood vaccine programs during Covid. Rising vaccine skepticism plays a smaller but significant part.
Last month, the World Health Organization announced an “alarming” 45-fold increase in measles in Europe from 2022 to 2023, while health officials in the U.K. declared a “national incident” stemming from an outbreak of hundreds of cases in the West Midlands, warning of a likely spread to other regions. U.K. officials attribute the rise to a drop in vaccine uptake.

Stupid Democrats Continue to Fall for It

President Joe Biden has appointed—and, as of of Jan. 31, the Senate has confirmed—174 federal judges to fill the country’s district courts and circuit courts of appeal, according to Ballotpedia. There are still about 60 current vacancies. That’s not a bad record; Donald Trump ended up with 234 appointments during the abominable four years he occupied the Oval Office.

Now the bad news: The vast majority of those confirmed judges hail from states with two Democratic senators, so their nominations didn’t fall victim to the Senate ”blue slip” tradition that dictates the process. A blue slip indicates consent to the nomination by the nominee’s home state’s senators. In recent practice, it’s led to Republican senators blocking many of Biden’s judicial appointments in red states, regardless of the nominee’s qualifications. Under current Senate custom—but not actual Senate rules—without that blue slip, the nominees cannot be considered or voted on by the Judiciary Committee, resulting in their nominations, and any subsequent vote by the full Senate, being stalled indefinitely.

Under the current Senate calendar, the number of Biden’s nominees likely to be approved under this regimen—barring retirements or other judicial openings—stands at approximately 189. After that, a few judges will likely still make their way to a vote, but only if Democrats and Republicans can agree on a path forward. That typically requires that Republicans provide the coveted blue slip, usually in exchange for a more conservative nominee. It is realistically quite limited, given Republicans’ track record during the last three years, and the intense emphasis they place on appointing only like-minded judges. So unless the blue slip tradition is abrogated, Biden may see very few judges confirmed by the Senate beyond those 189 or so “blue state” nominees.

And assuming he wins a second term, should Republicans gain control of the Senate in 2024 or thereafter, Biden’s ability to get his chosen judges confirmed will almost completely evaporate.

The Congressional Research Service is quite clear that the blue slip process is and has been a Senate tradition wholly outside the existing rules for judicial nominations:

Since the use of blue slips is not codified or included in the committee’s rules, the chairman of the committee has the discretion to determine the extent to which a home state Senator’s negative or withheld blue slip stops a President’s judicial nomination from receiving consideration by the committee and, consequently, whether it reaches the Senate floor.

In other words, the presiding chair of the Judiciary Committee can decide whether or not a blue slip is being withheld in bad faith and can act accordingly to advance a nomination for the committee’s consideration. The current chair is Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin, who continues to stand by the tradition.

It's Early, But the Trend is Good

What Biden's South Carolina primary win means for his 2024 chances

For starters, Democrats seem to be falling in line. A full 74% of potential primary voters now say they support Biden as their 2024 nominee against Williamson (4%) and Phillips (3%) — up from 68% who said in December that they would vote for Biden in their state’s primary or caucus.

Likewise, Democratic support for Biden (62%) versus a hypothetical “someone else” (28%) is 11 points higher than it was just last month — and less than half (42%) of potential Democratic primary voters say they want another Democrat to challenge the president, down from 50% in December and 54% in November. Democrats are also increasingly likely to describe Biden as “fit to serve another term as president”: 64% now vs. 54% in November.

At the same time, Democrats are seven points more likely to say they approve of how Biden is handling the presidency (81%) than they were last month (74%). As a result, Biden’s overall approval rating among all Americans (40%) has jumped by three points over the same period — and while still low, it’s higher than it has been since August of last year.

The issue on which Biden has gained the most ground since December? The economy, where he’s gone from 36% to 39% approval among all Americans — and from 69% to 79% among Democrats.

This modest shift likely reflects real-world economic trends, including falling inflation, low unemployment and higher-than-expected growth. A third of all U.S. adults (33%) now describe the current state of the American economy as excellent or good, up six points from 27% in December and 10 points from 23% in September.

Will the Women Save Us All?

Trump Is Botching His Already Dismal Shot With Women Voters

If Donald Trump doesn’t change his campaign’s trajectory, the voter gender gap will be a gender Grand Canyon by November, as hordes of women run screaming away from the presumptive nominee, earning Joe Biden a second term.

According to a new Quinnipiac poll, 58 percent of female registered voters now support Biden—an increase that propelled Biden to a 6-point lead against Trump in a hypothetical 2024 presidential matchup. As of December 2023, Biden’s support among women was just 53 percent and has grown by 5 points in just the last month.

It’s not absurd to think that three women have contributed to this abrupt shift: Nikki Haley, E. Jean Carroll, and Taylor Swift.

Those Opposing Green Energy Are Batty

The issue: Do wind turbines kill birds and bats?

The short answer: Yes, wind turbines can kill both bats and birds. But the more important question is how many they kill compared with other sources.

Buildings are estimated to kill up to 988 million birds a year and outdoor cats are an enormous danger to birds. By one estimate, free-ranging domestic cats kill between 1.3 and 4 billion birds each year.

A study to be published in 2024 found that wind farms had no statistically significant effect on bird counts. But another kind of energy did. Fracking reduced the total number of birds counted in near shale and oil production sites by 15%.

And all of that is separate from considering the impact of climate change.

Do wind turbines kill birds? Are solar panels toxic? The truth behind green-energy debates

I'll Bet Climate Change Kills More Birds than Turbines