Joe Rogan was mocked for talking about having been prescribed Ivermectin and taking it as prescribed.

There was also a movement to have his show taken off of Spotify entirely.

He's not an academic, though.

Anybody could have written this essay this morning.

It takes *INSIGHT* to have written it a week ago. Well done.

Unfortunately, it's not just me choosing to have the debate. Apparently the White House press room is now involved.

I don't know. It is scheduled to be released on May 20th, according to Amazon. You can pre-order it here.

Okay. Not believing that that would be legit gets us to the core issue.

I don't think it'd be legit either.

I also don't think that Trump has any special knowledge about how the pardons came about.

Stupid enough for NPR to deal with them.

There's also the NYT and BBC but, honestly, you're not going to click on those any more than you clicked on the NPR one.

The issue isn't "is the autopen sufficient for a pardon?" because OF COURSE IT IS.

The issue of "did Biden direct these pardons personally?" is troublesome because the possibility exists that he didn't is a larger possibility than "and monkeys might fly out of my butt" due to Biden's severe cognitive decline.

"There is no reason to believe that Biden didn't know about these pardons" is a better argument when there is no reason to believe that Biden didn't know about those pardons.

C-SPAN reports that Trump has announced that the JFK files get released TOMORROW.

He announces lots of stuff, though.

I'll believe it when I see it.

Would Jake Tapper's new book count as evidence?

Yes, but I was pointing out that he doesn’t even need to do that. Because pardons don’t even _need_ be signed. Bills need to be signed into laws, pardons do not. Just ‘granting’ them is enough. They are usually printed and signed, just like executive orders are printed and signed, but they have the exact same validity if they’re just…said.

I agree with every word you've said here.

The pardons *ARE* all listen on the official Justice.gov website. All the t's crossed and i's dotted.

If someone snuck into the autopen room and put a pardon in the machine and pushed the button WITHOUT THE DIRECTION OF THE PRESIDENT TO DO SO, do you believe that this is a legit pardon?

Because that's the debate being forced on us now.

"That's an absurd question!" might be a good counter-argument but Trump is making the allegation that Biden's staffers were running things and not Biden himself.

And I'm not sure that moral indignation will work as a tactic against people who do not recognize your moral authority.

We're entering some severe "diminishing returns" territory on the Hitler thing.

Isn't there a Harry Potter reference we could use instead?

"The implication that the Imperius Curse was used to procure these pardons is preposterous!"

I don't know that these pardons were done without Biden's knowledge or consent.

I don't know whether they were done with his consent or not.

I am agnostic on whether they were.

If Biden comes out and says "Oh, I'm the guy who directed my subordinate to press the button on these pardons", that would clear everything up.

However, I do think that the question of whether Biden personally directed his subordinate to affix a signature is an interesting enough question that it is in everybody's best interest to have the question cleared up.

I don't think that mocking the question is going to be a good play going forward.

I think that it signals the weakness of the position instead of its strength.

"Of course Biden directed the subordinate to issue these pardons and it's offensive to imply that he didn't! Trump is offensive!" is, at least, an argument that addresses the core issue.

"It doesn't matter if Biden knew about the pardons that the autopen signed!" is not an argument that I'd want to defend.

Though I'd probably think that dismissing the issue entirely is the best play...

The Office of Legal Council issued an opinion all the way back in 2005 on the topic of signing bills into law:

The President need not personally perform the physical act of affixing his signature to a bill he approves and decides to sign in order for the bill to become law. Rather, the President may sign a bill within the meaning of Article I, Section 7 by directing a subordinate to affix the President’s signature to such a bill, for example by autopen.

I think that we can similarly conclude that if Biden directed a subordinate to affix the President's signature to a pardon, then that pardon is officially official and it'd be silliness to say that it wasn't a real pardon.

"But what if Biden didn't direct the subordinate to affix the signature? Like, what if the subordinate was acting on his or her own?"

"What part of 'the president may direct the subordinate to affix a signature' did you not understand?"
"I'm asking about a subordinate affixing a signature without having been directed."
"WE HAVE ALREADY ESTABLISHED THAT THE PRESIDENT MAY DIRECT THE SUBORDINATE TO AFFIX A SIGNATURE!!!"

And so on.

It’s worth pointing out that there is literally no requirement that pardons _even be signed_, only that the President has granted them

I agree! The question is whether someone who is not the president can give a pardon on the president's behalf because it's what the president would want.

Which... well, it's not a slam dunk, is it?

I believe that the J6 pardons were all a single document. I believe that he signed it on camera (there are pictures of him holding up the document having been signed).

But to address the fundamental point, I believe that the argument about the president issuing pardons is that the president has to issue them.

Not his staff. Not his best buddy. Not some guy who sneaks into the room with the autopen device and pushes a button.

If the argument that a guy who sneaks into the room with the autopen device and pushes the button has a legit pardon, I think that there are legitimate complaints about that argument and it's not to the argument's benefit for them to become (even more) public.

There was a story a few years back about a protest where a bunch of protestors blocked a subway train. They prevented the subway car from taking off.

The story went on to talk about how some of the riders went vigilante and forcibly removed the protestors so the subway could get back to business.

This was described as the vigilantes removing the free speech rights of the people who were trying protest.

The question of whether there were any other rights of note in the entire situation went unremarked.

A fine trick.

Yeah, how the process is actually managed is going to be really important here... because what the process actually is versus what people assume it is (to the extent that they've considered it at all) is likely to have very little overlap on the Venn diagram.

The process getting sunlight is probably to the benefit of everybody except the people involved with the process itself.

What if the special investigator comes back and says "I'm not sure we can try Biden... he'll come across as an elderly man with memory problems"?

Because if that happens, it'll be to the benefit of Trump's argument.

Why are you denying that Trump said these things?

"Um, I'm not?"
"Well, I'm now going to argue against you as if you were."

Here's a link to what Trump said.

If your argument is that we still don't know whether Trump *ACTUALLY* said that or if he just had one of his staffers write it on his behalf, yes.

That is the fundamental argument here. Yes. Exactly.

So you agree that Elon can put a pardon in the autopen machine without Trump knowing about it and it's perfectly legit?

Because that's the argument. Elon can put a pardon in the autopen machine without Trump knowing about it.

If Biden didn't know about it and didn't sign it... is it still a presidential pardon?

While reasonable people all know that the answer is "yes, because we believe that if Elon put a pardon for himself in the machine and pressed the button that it'd be a real pardon", there are unreasonable people out there who think that an Elon Pardon that Trump didn't know about and didn't sign wouldn't be a real pardon.

And we have a new constitutional crisis and it's not even 8AM.

Donald Trump has announced that the pardons Biden handed out in his final days as president were not signed by Biden but were, instead, signed by autopen and Biden knew nothing at all about the pardons.

Given that Biden didn't know about the pardons and that they weren't "signed" by him, Trump has declared the pardons null and void.

How difficult is it for a contract to be annulled because the person who signed it was an elder who was non compos mentis? If that's something that never happens, it should be easy to dismiss the claims that it applies to pardons.

Our favorite restaurant in the universe (since closed) was a little place on the Vegas strip that specialized in "tapas".

If you're not familiar with that word, as we weren't in 2005, just imagine hearing "we're going to go eat at the tapas place."

"I beg your pardon."

Anyway, the theory to "tapas" is that the appetizers are better anyway so just get those. Get 5 or 6 appetizers between 2 or 3 people and everybody gets their first and second pick and you can play the "oh, try this!" game with the stuffed mushrooms or the black and bleu steakbits and if you find something that makes the entire table moan, order a second plate of them.

The little place we went to has been closed for years and years, I guess, replaced with one that looks exactly the same and so googling for tapas places (or even tapas places that shuttered) isn't that helpful.

But making a meal out of the appetizers can be a thing. Grab your main squeeze and a third wheel and make a night of it.

I mentioned these in the waning days of the last thread but I'm going to mention them again because they strike me as indicators for the summer and autumn:

From The Daily Mail: Labour minister 'rubbished' spy chief's secret dossier on Wuhan lab leak theory during pandemic despite Boris demanding probe... to 'avoid offending China'

A Labour minister was last night at the centre of an explosive row over claims he rubbished high-level intelligence pointing to Covid's origins in a Chinese laboratory.

The Mail on Sunday can reveal that a former spy chief submitted a secret dossier to No 10 early in the pandemic reporting that the virus had originated with a leak from a Wuhan facility.

But Lord Vallance, the science minister who was the Government's chief scientific adviser at the time, is accused of ignoring the report, possibly for fear of offending the Chinese or jeopardising research funding.

A classified dossier compiled by Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, was passed to then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the start of the outbreak in March 2020 which stated: 'It is now beyond reasonable doubt that Covid-19 was engineered in the Wuhan Institute of Virology'.

And, on Sunday, the NYT published Zeynep Tufekci: We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

Why haven’t we learned our lesson? Maybe because it’s hard to admit this research is risky now, and to take the requisite steps to keep us safe, without also admitting it was always risky. And that perhaps we were misled on purpose.

Lotta passive voice in that title, there.

To this day, there is no strong scientific evidence ruling out a lab leak or proving that the virus arose from human-animal contact in that seafood market. The few papers cited for market origin were written by a small, overlapping group of authors, including those who didn’t tell the public how serious their doubts had been.