Don’t mind me, it’s just that I’ve been feeling like I’m wasting my time lately….

1. Please stop sending me links to whatever perpetually disgusting and hypocritical HBO comic Bill Maher has said because he appears to be courageously buck woke cant and the boring partisan spin of almost every other TV comedian. Now he’s criticizing progressives because he’s smart enough to figure out (though they haven’t) that they completely beclowned themselves by hitching their credibility to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. The King of Smug isn’t nearly as smart as he thinks he is, but he’s smart enough to see that the smarter rats will soon be fleeing the sinking ship. It doesn’t matter: Maher was one of the most vicious hate-mongers against President Trump and Republicans; he also advocated wrecking the economy to get rid of a President he didn’t like. Maher isn’t really a brave iconoclast, he just plays one on TV. I doubt that he has any principles that he wouldn’t discard without blinking, if it brought him some publicity and lengthened his already inexplicably long career as a public asshole.

2. Now, that doesn’t mean that Bill’s assessment isn’t correct for once, just that he aided and abetted those who stuck the country with Joe and Kamala and is therefore ethically estopped from flip-flopping now. Every single institution and individual who was part of this reckless, cynical and transparently irresponsible fiasco should be mocked, shamed, harangued and humiliated until death, especially the voters. Charles Cooke, a conservative NeverTrumper with the similarly Trump-bashing National Review, has written a very accurate essay on exactly what Democrats did, “that, in a desperate attempt to remove President Trump from office, the Democrats tailored themselves a straitjacket from which they will struggle mightily to escape.” They also stuck the United States and its citizens with a President and a Vice-President they knew were unfit for office so the party could gain power, placing the nation and its welfare at risk. Just like Bill Maher stating that wrecking the economy and putting Americans out of work was “worth it” if it resulted in Trump’s defeat, the Democrats (and the news media, but I repeat myself) decided it was worth it to place the nation’s fate for four years in the hands of what Cooke calls, in an understatement, “a pair of losers.” And they knew that was what they were doing. It is one of the worst betrayals of trust any American political party has ever engaged in.

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1. As with the Giuliani suspension, I have grave doubts whether this ruling is apolitical. Judge Parker, a Michigan federal district judge, issued a 110-page order sanctioning Trump lawyers Lin Wood, Sidney Powell, and others for their filing and advocacy of a federal lawsuit that was one of several law suits alleging fraud and illegality in the handling of the 2020 election. The full opinion here, but lawyer Bruce Faughan has done a neat cut and paste job to produce a Reader’s Digest condensed version:

[A]ttorneys have an obligation to the judiciary, their profession, and the public (i) to conduct some degree of due diligence before presenting allegations as truth; (ii) to advance only tenable claims; and (iii) to proceed with a lawsuit in good faith and based on a proper purpose. Attorneys also have an obligation to dismiss a lawsuit when it becomes clear that the requested relief is unavailable.

For purposes of Rule 11, an attorney who is knowingly listed as counsel on a pleading, written motion, or other paper “expressly authorize[d] the signing, filing, submitting or later advocating of the offending paper” and “shares responsibility with the signer, filer, submitter, or advocate.” In this age of electronic filing, it is frivolous to argue that an electronic signature on a pleading or motion is insufficient to subject the attorney to the court’s jurisdiction if the attorney violates the jurisdiction’s rules of professional conduct or a federal rule or statute establishing the standards of practice.

Even if there are sanctions available under statutes or specific federal rules of procedure, . . . the ‘inherent authority’ of the court is an independent basis for sanctioning bad faith conduct in litigation. To award attorneys’ fees under this “bad faith exception,” a district court must find that (i) “the claims advanced were meritless”; (ii) “counsel knew or should have known this”; and (iii) “the motive for filing the suit was for an improper purpose such as harassment.” When invoking its inherent authority to sanction, “[a] court must, of course, . . . comply with the mandates of due process, both in determining that the requisite bad faith exists and in assessing fees.”

[L]itigants and attorneys cannot come to federal court asserting that certain acts violate the law based only upon an opportunity for—or counsel and the litigant’s suspicions of—a violation. The rule[s] continues to require litigants to ‘stop-and-think’ before initially making legal or factual contentions.

[A]n “empty-head” but “pure-heart” does not justify lodging patently unsupported factual assertions. And the good or bad faith nature of actions or submissions is not what determines whether sanctions are warranted under Rule 11(b)(3). Inferences must be reasonable and come from facts proven, not speculation or conjecture. Pursuant to their duties as officers of the court, attorneys typically do not offer factual allegations that have no hope of passing as evidentiary support at any stage of the litigation. Substituting another lawyer’s judgment for one’s own does not constitute reasonable inquiry.”

As an initial matter, an affiant’s subjective belief that an event occurred does not constitute evidence that the event in fact occurred. Plaintiffs are not entitled to rely on the discovery process to mine for evidence that never existed in the first instance. Attorneys are not journalists. It is not acceptable to support a lawsuit with opinions, which counsel herself claims no reasonable person would accept as fact and which were “inexact,” “exaggerate[ed],” and “hyperbole.” Nor is it acceptable to use the federal judiciary as a political forum to satisfy one’s political agenda. Such behavior by an attorney in a court of law has consequences.

An attorney’s right to free speech while litigating an action “is extremely circumscribed.” Something does not become plausible simply because it is repeated many times by many people. An attorney who willingly continues to assert claims doomed to fail . . . must be deemed to be acting with an improper motive.

The nation’s courts . . . are reserved for hearing legitimate causes of action. Individuals may have a right (within certain bounds) to disseminate allegations of fraud unsupported by law or fact in the public sphere. But attorneys cannot exploit their privilege and access to the judicial process to do the same. And when an attorney has done so, sanctions are in order. Here’s why. America’s civil litigation system affords individuals the privilege to file a lawsuit to allege a violation of law. Individuals, however, must litigate within the established parameters for filing a claim. Such parameters are set forth in statutes, rules of civil procedure, local court rules, and professional rules of responsibility and ethics. Every attorney who files a claim on behalf of a client is charged with the obligation to know these statutes and rules, as well as the law allegedly violated.

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