September 24, 2024

West Virginia State Senator arrested for second time since August

MARSHALL COUNTY, W.Va. — West Virginia State Senator Michael Maroney was arrested Monday for the second time in just over month.

Maroney, R-Marshall, was arrested in McMechen after officers conducted a traffic stop for numerous traffic infractions. Maroney was arrested for suspicion of Driving Under the Influence and charged with Control of Vehicle Under the Influence, Expired Registration, and No Registration.

Maroney was taken to North Central Regional Jail.

Maroney was also arrested on August 13 and charged with disorderly conduct and indecent exposure after surveillance video showed him performing a sexual act in the gaming room of a Glen Dale gambling parlor on August 4. Maroney was removed from Senate Committee positions following the arrest.

https://wvmetronews.com/2024/09/23/west-virginia-state-senator-arrested-for-second-time-since-august/

He's a lame duck since he was defeated in the GOP primary.

August 25, 2024

Hezbollah launches missiles at Israel, prompting airstrikes on Lebanon

Source: Reuters

JERUSALEM/BEIRUT, Aug 25 (Reuters) - Hezbollah launched hundreds of rockets and drones at Israel early on Sunday, as Israel's military said it struck Lebanon with around 100 jets to thwart a bigger attack, in one of the biggest clashes in more than 10 months of border warfare.

Missiles were visible curling up through the dawn sky, dark vapour trails behind them, as an air raid siren sounded in Israel and a distant blast lit the horizon, while smoke rose over houses in Khiam in southern Lebanon.

The extent of damage was not immediately clear and Hezbollah indicated it was not planning further strikes yet, while Israel's Foreign Minister said the country did not seek a full-scale war.

Any major escalation in the fighting, which began in parallel with the war in Gaza, risks morphing into a regional conflagration drawing in Hezbollah's backer Iran and Israel's main ally the United States.

Read more: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-strikes-hezbollah-targets-lebanon-military-says-2024-08-25/

August 16, 2024

State senator arrested for indecent exposure, disorderly conduct.

GLEN DALE, W.Va (WDTV) - A West Virginia state senator was arrested for indecent exposure and disorderly conduct in Marshall County.

Michael Maroney, 56, is accused of performing sexual acts on himself in a gaming room at Gumby’s Cigarette & Beer World, according to the Glen Dale Police Department.

Maroney is a senator in the 2nd Senate district, which consists of Monongalia, Marion, Doddridge, Gilmer, Ritchie, Tyler, Calhoun and Wetzel counties.

Employees of the store told police Maroney came out of the back room to the ATM machine and was “breathing heavy and touching himself” at approximately 1 p.m., according to court documents. After watching the CCTV, they saw him performing sexual acts on himself.

https://www.wsaz.com/2024/08/14/state-senator-arrested-indecent-exposure-disorderly-conduct/

Another GOP sicko.

August 14, 2024

Harris is ahead in RealClearPolitics Poll Average by 1.1%

This is amazing! Harris leads Trump in the conservative RCP poll average, despite the eternal outlier, Rasmussen. This is part of a trend.

https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/general/2024/trump-vs-harris

March 18, 2024

Even the Supreme Court's Conservatives Are Fed Up With the Garbage Coming Out of the 5th Circuit

What happens when a lawless judge and a terrible appeals court embrace the dopiest First Amendment claim you’ve ever heard out of pure spite toward a Democratic president? That would be Murthy v. Missouri, a brain-meltingly dumb case that the Supreme Court was unfortunate enough to hear oral arguments in on Monday. Murthy poses a question so asinine that to ask it is to answer it: Can government officials encourage social media companies to moderate certain content that they deem harmful—most importantly, disinformation about COVID-19 in the middle of the pandemic?

Yes, of course they can: The First Amendment does not gag public officials from urging Facebook or the Washington Post or anyone else to publish or not publish certain information, especially when it contains dangerous lies about a once-in-a-century pandemic that could exacerbate the crisis. The First Amendment bars government censorship, not government persuasion, and the Biden administration planted itself on the latter side of that bright line. At least six justices grasped this basic constitutional principle on Monday. Several of them used arguments to highlight how this inane case illustrates so much of what’s wrong with the judiciary today, and hinted at the dangers it could pose to American democracy in the future. That we should pay attention to. The rest was an unfortunate sideshow.

Like so many Supreme Court cases these days, Murthy is built atop a heap of fake facts. The case began when Missouri and Louisiana sued agencies and officials across the Biden administration, falsely accusing them of coercing social media companies into censoring their residents’ free speech. (These states later added a handful of fringe anti-vaxxers to the suit.) They filed their complaint in the Monroe Division of the Western District of Louisiana, where—surprise!—they were guaranteed to draw a Trump appointee, Terry Doughty, the one judge hearing cases in that division. Judge Doughty has a record of issuing nationwide injunctions against the Biden administration on the basis of dubious legal and factual analysis. Most notably, he issued a nationwide bar against Biden’s vaccine mandate for health care workers in an opinion riddled with anti-vax nonsense (which the Supreme Court reversed).

Doughty, in other words, was certain to rule against Biden in the social media case. Even still, the opinion he handed down on July 4, 2023, was a humiliating mess of contradictions, fabrications, and (ironically) misinformation. Doughty adopted the plaintiffs’ theory that the administration “coerced” social media companies into removing “conservative” speech about COVID, including posts promoting hydroxychloroquine and rejecting the efficacy of vaccines. He accused government officials of launching a “coordinated campaign” to silence conservatives by forcing private companies to take down anti-vax content, as well as false claims about election fraud. And he issued one of the most sweeping injunctions in the history of the American legal system, prohibiting any employee—including Homeland Security, the State Department, the Department of Justice, and the FBI—from “engaging in any communication of any kind with social-media companies” encouraging content moderation.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/03/supreme-court-conservatives-5th-circuit-dumb-case.html

January 19, 2024

Stock market today: Dow, S&P 500 hit record highs as tech stocks soar

This is a real big deal, right? Where's all the huzzahs in the MSM?

December 22, 2023

Lawsuit to boot Trump off West Virginia ballots is dismissed because plaintiff lacks standing

A federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit that aimed to keep former President Donald Trump off ballots in West Virginia.

The court action never reached the point of examining a claim that Trump is ineligible under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which disqualifies federal officeholders who “have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

Instead, the case filed by Texas resident John Anthony Castro was dismissed because the judge found that he couldn’t demonstrate standing. Castro had described himself as a candidate for president and said Trump’s presence on the ballot would harm his chances.

U.S. District Judge Irene Berger found that the evidence submitted removes “any doubt that Mr. Castro’s purported ‘campaign’ exists as a vehicle for pursuing litigation, not votes.”

https://wvmetronews.com/2023/12/22/lawsuit-to-boot-trump-off-west-virginia-ballots-is-dismissed-because-plaintiff-lacks-standing/

August 2, 2023

Opinion Why Trump Was Indicted (Again)

You can thank the Jan. 6 committee.

Believe it or not, President Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland did not enter office planning to criminally prosecute Donald Trump. They practically had to be dragged into it.

You could be forgiven for questioning this claim considering that Trump was just indicted by the Justice Department for the second time in a matter of months — this time based on his efforts to overturn the 2020 election — and that does not even count the superseding indictment that was filed late last week for allegedly mishandling sensitive government documents and obstructing the federal investigation.

Republicans and Trump supporters on Capitol Hill and in the conservative media have certainly spent much of the last year laying the groundwork for the tendentious narrative of a “weaponized” DOJ — literally going back to the day that Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago was searched by the FBI, before any of them could possibly have known what was going on in that case.

But the notion that Biden or Garland was somehow determined to prosecute Trump relies on a serious distortion of the public record. Indeed, that record vexed some observers, including me, who repeatedly expressed frustration over how the two men seemed to be going out of their way for most of the first two years of the administration to avoid investigating and potentially prosecuting Trump.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/08/01/trump-indictment-jan-6-committee-00109235

March 12, 2023

Pence says 'history will hold Donald Trump accountable' for January 6th

Source: CNN

Former Vice President Mike Pence made his most blistering comments yet about former President Donald Trump’s role in the January 6th attack on the US Capitol during remarks Saturday evening at the annual Gridiron Club Dinner in Washington, DC.

Pence began his remarks at the dinner, which traditionally features politicians making jokes about notable Washington figures, with lighthearted comments about Trump, President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and several Republicans expected to run for president in 2024, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley.

He then took a serious tone, noting the attack on the Capitol was “one thing I haven’t joked about” and calling January 6th “a tragic day.”

Pence rebuked Trump for his role in the January 6, 2021 attack, saying he was “wrong” for claiming Pence had the authority to overturn the results of the 2020 election in his role presiding over Congress that day, saying “history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”

Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/11/politics/mike-pence-gridiron-dinner/index.html

January 5, 2023

A good wish list.

But I predict Democrats will approach a GOP moderate, to offer their support in the vote for Speaker. I don’t know who this person will be, but it won’t be McCarthy. After all, this same scenario just played out in the election of Speaker of the Ohio state legislature.

None of us knows what will happen next but this is my guess.