2022: The Year In Losing Senate Loons
Democrats defied the odds!
Democrats held the Senate this year! Hooray! We can continue confirming judges!
For a long while, that didn't seem possible. President Joe Biden's approval ratings were in the toilet. Inflation was up. The supply chain was farkakte, and last December, Sen. Joe Manchin pulled the plug on Build Back Better.
However, Democrats managed to defend every US Senate seat that was up for re-election and even flipped Pennsylvania, expanding their majority to a modest but mighty 51 seats. This weakens the hold Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have over Biden's domestic agenda, and Sinema immediately acted out by declaring herself a free agent.
PREVIOUSLY:
Sorry, Mitch, It’s Not GOP ‘Candidate Quality.’ You Guys Just Suck.
Rev Sen Raphael Warnock Sends Herschel Walker Back To Texas
PA Senate Debate: Dr. Oz Supports State Legislatures' Right To Choose Terrible Abortion Bans
Creepy Ghoul Blake Masters Not Winning Over Voters In Arizona Senate Race
Republicans can't rely on grotesque gerrymanders for Senate race elections, just plain-old voter suppression. It's almost a fair fight. Any fool with an "R" after their name was going to prevail in deep-red Missouri, Ohio, or Florida, and they did! But control of the Senate came down to true swing states.
MAGA loons might win flaming red House districts, but they just couldn't pull off a statewide victory. This is why Senate — say it with us, y'all — Minority Leader Mitch McConnell tempered enthusiasm about a supposed "Red Wave" as far back as August.
"I think there's probably a greater likelihood the House flips than the Senate," McConnell said. "Senate races are just different, they're statewide, candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome."
This was right after the Republican Senate primaries, and McConnell more or less pointed at the nominees and said, "You believe these losers?"
Donald Trump campaigned hard for "man of the people" Dr. Mehmet Oz, whom Senator-elect John Fetterman pantsed on the regular. It was a joy to watch.
\u201cIn PA we call this a... veggie tray\u201d— John Fetterman (@John Fetterman) 1660579052
Now I personally consider "veggie tray" a dull name for food. Would you call a charcuterie board "meat plate"? "Crudités" sounds like your mouth is vacationing in Paris, but Oz couldn't even assemble a crudités platter like a normal effete.
The genius Republicans in Arizona decided to challenge incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly with creepy Victorian ghost doll Blake Masters. You'd probably pass on Masters for the lead in an American Psycho remake. It's just too much. Masters was a better fit for the weird alien that starship Capt. Mark Kelly would've met during first contact.
Here's Masters discussing abortion while holding a TIE fighter (the evil Empire's vehicle). He sucked so much at this.
PREVIOUSLY:
GOP NH Gov. Chris Sununu Not Interested In Going To Senate To Do Nothing For Two Years
Mitch McConnell Serpent-Talking Maryland GOP Gov Larry Hogan Into Running For Senate
How Does New Hampshire GOP Senate Idiot Don Bolduc Know You're Not Using A Litterbox RIGHT NOW?
Don't worry. We're not forgetting Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker, the perpetual scandal motion machine. "George Santos" would soon dethrone him as the Republican Party's most enthusiastic and persistent liar, but man did Walker drop some whoppers: Was he actually an FBI agent? (No.) Was he a college graduate? (Nope.) Was he valedictorian at his high school? (LOL ... no.)
Let's not forget all his spare children and abortion funding. Nonetheless, it took a solid effort from Sen. Raphael Warnock to keep this gibbering idiot out of the Senate.
New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu would've had a good shot at unseating Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan, but instead she curb-stomped election denier Don Bolduc, whom Trump blamed for losing because Bolduc belatedly embraced democracy (slightly) during the general election. Trump seemed to think his losing candidates would've sucked less and won more if they were as unhinged as he is.
Of course, McConnell all but begged Sununu and Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan to run for Senate and they refused. McConnell even sent his wife to "Draft Hogan," and it was still a firm no. (If I send my wife to ask a favor, you're gonna do that shit.) That has less to do with Trump and everything to do with the obstructionist, do-nothing hell hole McConnell created all by his loathsome self.
Enjoy 2023 from the minority, Mitch.
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2022 In People Who DIDN'T DO IT.
261 wrongfully convicted people were exonerated in 2022.
Earlier this month, The Gate of the Exonerated was unveiled in Central Park, honoring the Central Park Five who were wrongfully convicted of raping a jogger in the park when they were just teenagers in the 1990s. The Gate is dedicated not just to Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Korey Wise, and Antron McCray but also to the 320 New York prisoners who have been exonerated to date.
We've attributed variations of the phrase "It's better that 100 guilty men go free than one innocent should suffer" to practically everyone from King Alfred to William Blackstone to Ben Franklin to John Adams to Marilyn Monroe (probably), we say we only convict those who are guilty "beyond all reasonable doubt," and yet we still have a bit of a problem in this country with sending innocent people to prison, not to mention executing them. In reality, people often seem to be far more frightened by the idea of a guilty person going free than of an innocent person suffering.
As a result of the many issues within our criminal justice system, we send a lot of innocent people to prison — even to death row. There are, however, a lot of good people and organizations out there who are trying to help free them.
According to the National Registry of Exonerations, there have been 261 exonerations in 2022.
In 182 of those cases, it was determined that no crime had actually occurred.
In 156 of them, the defendants had "plead guilty."
In 172 of the cases, exculpatory evidence was withheld by either police or prosecutors.
In 197 of these cases, the defendants were Black.
In 16 of these cases, the prosecutor straight up lied.
35 of them involved false or misleading forensic evidence.
31 of the exonerated defendants had been convicted as juveniles.
In six cases the prosecutors knowingly permitted perjury.
Seven people were exonerated in one day in Chicago, all victims of framing by the notoriously corrupt Detective Reynaldo Guevara; another was exonerated later that month and another in November. One of them was Marilyn Mulero, who at just 21 was sentenced to death for the revenge murders of two men she had literally never met before the night she was convicted of killing them with two other women. As in many of his other cases, the former detective coerced several witnesses to identify Mulero as one of the assailants despite the fact that she had nothing to do with it. At the time she was arrested, she had two young sons who had to grow up without her.
Samuel Randolph IV was sentenced to death in Pennsylvania for a series of three murders he did not commit and for which police told witnesses they would be prosecuted if they didn't say Randolph did it. He spent two decades in prison, becoming confined to a wheelchair in 2009 after having been severely beaten by several prison guards while handcuffed.
Two of the people pardoned, Nancy Smith and Joseph Allen, were victims of the daycare sex abuse hysteria of the '80s and '90s. In 1993 in Lorain, Ohio, a woman named Margaret Grondin reported to police that her daughter had been sexually abused by Smith, a bus driver for the Head Start program, and a man, possibly named Joseph. After the accusations made it to the news, 15 other families came forward saying their children had also been molested by Smith, though awkwardly many of them did not take her bus or left Head Start before Smith became a bus driver.
As is usual in these cases, the stories were outlandish and involved several elements that could not possibly be true and made no sense. The parents went through several possible Josephs before landing on Allen, a man with a prior conviction for child molestation but no connection to Smith or to Head Start. Because the children's stories varied wildly in terms of the race of the assailants, Grondin allegedly put on actual blackface to "prepare" her daughter for trial.
Smith, a white woman, was released in 2013, while Allen, a Black man, was resentenced to serve 10-25 more years. They were both exonerated in February of this year after a judge reviewed several affidavits submitted on their behalf from psychologists, the first officer who interviewed the children, and Grondin's ex-husband and son who said they witnessed Grondin coaching her daughter and the other children to say what she wanted.
Abraham Bolden, the first Black Secret Service agent assigned to a presidential detail, was officially pardoned by President Joe Biden in April. Bolden has maintained for decades that in retaliation for exposing racist behavior within the Secret Service, as well as reporting that several of the agents assigned to President John F. Kennedy's detail were wasted the night before his assassination, he was framed for a crime he did not commit. Bolden was accused (and later convicted) of conspiring with Chicago counterfeiters, but the facts of the case and later testimony from witnesses support his version of events. He only served 36 months in prison but had to wait until the age of 87 to finally get his presidential pardon.
At Willie Stokes's 1984 trial for the murder of 32-year-old Leslie Campbell in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the primary witness in the case, who had previously testified at a preliminary hearing that he was present when Stokes bragged about the murder, admitted he lied and said he had been told by police that he would get leniency on his own murder charges if he would say what they wanted him to say. And yet, Stokes was still found guilty. Over the course of several decades, the case fell apart as "witnesses" increasingly admitted they'd been pressured by police to implicate Stokes.
In 2021, the Philadelphia Inquirerpublished an investigation into the cops who initially arrested Stokes, and how they would take potential informants to a special building and ply them with drugs and sex in order to get them to implicate others in crimes. In January of 2022, after Stokes served nearly four decades in prison, a judge finally looked at his case and exonerated him. His is one of nearly two dozen wrongful convictions overturned by progressive prosecutor movement leader District Attorney Larry Krasner's Conviction Integrity Unit in his first term in office.
These are only a few of the 261 miscarriages of justice corrected this year, but as much joy as we have that these people are finally seeing justice, we still have to live with the horror of what was done to them in the first place. It's great to let innocent people out but we have to change our system so that we're not just replacing them with other wrongly convicted people. We can do better and we must.
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Alex Jones Had A Sh*tty 2022. And 2023's Not Looking Good Either.
You love to see it.
Last January, Alex Jones rang in the New Year by trying to overthrow the government. This year he spent January telling the House January 6 Select Committee about it. Or, more accurately, not telling them about it. In fact, when he wasn't taking the Fifth or accusing Rep. Adam Schiff of forging documents, he was forgetting how to spell his own name:
STAFF COUNSEL: Mr. Jones, could you please state your full legal name for the record?
JONES: Alexander Emerick Jones.
STAFF COUNSEL: And I believe your first and last name are spelled in the traditional way. Could you please spell your middle name for the record?
JONES: You guys know what my name is. It's on the record.
STAFF COUNSEL: I'm just asking for the court reporter.
JONES: E-m — I'm so stressed out, I can't even spell it for you, so —
JONES'S LAWYER: E-m-e-r-i-C. [SIC]
JONES: That's right, E-m-i-r-c. [SIC]
Little did he know, that would be the high point, and the rest of 2022 would be all downhill.
Jones started the year on the back foot, after having gotten himself default judgments — AKA "death penalty sanctions" — in 2021 for his years-long failure to comply with discovery in the Sandy Hook defamation cases. This meant that he'd pissed off judges in both Texas and Connecticut so thoroughly before his trial that they independently ruled that he'd lost the chance to argue that he did not defame the families of children and staff murdered in the 2012 school shooting by calling them crisis actors. The only issue was how big a check he was going to have to cut.
And he continued to piss off the courts, most spectacularly in March, when he sent his lawyer into a Connecticut courtroom to defend his claim that he was too sick to be deposed, only to have the plaintiffs' counsel turn on his computer and show the judge that Jones was at that very moment broadcasting live from his studio.
"Your Honor, this whole thing to me, and I’m choosing my words carefully here, is extraordinarily disturbing," plaintiffs' attorney Chris Mattei said. "Mr. Jones appears to be on the air right now broadcasting his live show, the Alex Jones Show, as he does every day. I checked 15 minutes ago. He appeared to be on the air."
Later Jones claimed to be under the care of a doctor, by which he meant he was doing his show with a COVID quack named Dr. Marble. He did eventually agree to be deposed, but only after the court walloped him with monetary sanctions as an inducement.
On April 6, the Texas Sandy Hook plaintiffs filed a state court complaint alleging that Jones was siphoning assets out of Free Speech Systems (FSS), Infowars's parent company, in an attempt to make it litigation proof. According to the suit, Jones “doomsday prepped” by taking $18 million in personal draws, and signing promissory notes totaling $54 million to “shell companies owned by insiders like his parents, his children, and himself.” More on that in a second!
On April 17, on the eve of the first trial in Texas, Jones marched into the US Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of Texas and placed three worthless shell companies in Chapter 11. Because the companies were named defendants in the defamation suits, this had the effect of immediately staying the state trials. Jones then offered to fund a $10 million litigation settlement trust to settle all the claims against him — a pittance that wouldn't come close to covering the legal fees the dozens of plaintiffs had already accrued in the four years since the cases had been filed.
The US Trustee and the Sandy Hook plaintiffs accused Jones of abusing the bankruptcy court, while Jones's lawyer Kyung Lee huffed indignantly at the ingratitude of these parents, who were finally getting to see some cash after 10 years of being harassed by Jones's demented followers and somehow failed to kiss the hem of Jones's garments. The gambit failed spectacularly, with the plaintiffs dismissing the shell companies so the trial could start, and Jones slinking out of Judge Christopher Lopez's courtroom. But not for long ...
The jury phase of the Texas trial began on July 25. On live television, Jones was confronted by Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, parents of 6-year-old Jesse Lewis who was murdered in his classroom. Jones conceded in court that the parents weren't actors, but was otherwise unable to moderate his behavior. On his show he called the judge a "dwarf goblin," described the jurors as “blue collar folks” who “do not know what planet they are on,” and said that Heslin was “slow” and “on the spectrum.” Attorney Mark Bankston played that tape for jurors, and also had the Perry Mason moment to end all Perry Mason moments, confronting Jones on the witness stand with the fact that his own lawyers had given them the entire contents of his phone going back two years, chock full of evidence both embarrassing and impeaching.
\u201cAttorney Mark Bankston told #AlexJones that his attorney messed up and sent him Jones' entire cell phone history. "Did you know that your lawyers messed up and sent me your entire cell phone texting history 12 days ago?" Bankston asked. "You know what perjury is right?"\u201d— Law&Crime Network (@Law&Crime Network) 1659546909
Eventually the jury rendered a $45 million judgment against Jones and FSS. But before that happened, Jones declared bankruptcy for FSS, allowing it to sneak into court under a provision for small businesses with less than $7 million in debts. At which point, Judge Lopez promptly booted Kyung Lee off the case for having failed to disclose that he represented FSS and the shell companies simultaneously across the two bankruptcies. Womp womp.
Jones was desperate to avoid putting FSS under the supervision of bankruptcy court, and for good reason. The Sandy Hook plaintiffs have every incentive to dig up every penny he's got socked away, so if Jones has been hiding assets, they'll find 'em. And while lying in trial court rarely results in a perjury charge, lying about your assets in bankruptcy is a really fuckin' dumb thing to do. So FSS had to admit in its initial filing that the $54 million was owed to a Nevada shell company named PQPR Holdings, LLC, Infowars's supplement supplier, which is itself owned by two shell companies belonging to Jones and his parents. According to FSS, PQPR remembered in 2021 that it had never sent an invoice to FSS for all the trucker speed and beet tincture it had shipped for Jones to flog on air while he was saying that the plaintiffs were part of a hoax to gin up support for gun control. So FSS, which is also wholly owned by Jones, signed promissory notes securitizing the debt and making PQPR first in line of creditors to get paid. Convenient!
The Sandy Hook plaintiffs and the US Trustees are challenging the validity of those notes, and the matter is under advisement by Judge Lopez
Meanwhile, Jones was back in court in Connecticut, where he continued to wow 'em, albeit in less spectacular fashion than in Texas. Judge Barbara Bellis runs a tight ship! The jury eventually awarded $965 million to the 16 Sandy Hook families in the suit, to which Judge Bellis later added $473 million in punitive damages.
Here's Jones, reacting to the jury verdict with his usual grace and aplomb, laughing and assuring his audience that they can continue to buy his boner pills with no fear that the money will go to the families of murdered children.
\u201cWatching the Sandy Hook verdict live from his studio, Alex Jones makes an urgent plea to his audience for cash, and tells them that none of the money they send him will go the the families because he has filed for bankruptcy.\u201d— Ron Filipkowski \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\udde6 (@Ron Filipkowski \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\udde6) 1665604772
On December 2, Jones finally tapped out and declared personal bankruptcy. He really had no choice, since he and FSS are jointly liable for the $1.5 billion in damages, and with FSS in bankruptcy, he was on the hook for it all. Jones claimed to have assets worth just $12 million, although something called “The Missouri779384 Trust” already advanced more than $700,000 for his lawyers. No idea what that is, but you can bet your bottom dollar the Sandy Hook plaintiffs are going to figure it out!
This month, Jones claimed to have "lost a great deal of money trusting people who did not have the ability or the character to handle the finances," and threatened the Sandy Hook plaintiffs if they don't agree to reduce their damages in mediation. He also filed a motion in the FSS case demanding to be paid $1.3 million dollars per year, as opposed to the measly $10,000 per week he's getting now — because some creditors can't possibly be expected to take a haircut.
Judge Lopez is about to have a bad 2023, and so is Alex Jones. Sorry about the first, not sorry at all about the second.
[Jones Jan. 6 Transcript / Lafferty v. Jones Docket / In re Alexander Jones, Docket via Court Listener / In re Free Speech Systems, Docket via Court Listener]
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2022: Oh Yeah, We Canceled ERREBODY
Yes, this post contains your annual allotment of Elon Musk.
2022 was another brutal year of liberal woke mob cancel culture. No one can remake Blazing Saddles in today’s hypersensitive reality, even though that film is readily available and there’s no real market for Western parodies. Once-powerful male comics are denied the opportunity to work in their chosen profession, with a few exceptions such as wealthy, entitled transphobe Dave Chappelle, chronic public masturbator Louis CK, and rapist scumbag Bill Cosby, who’s considering touring again in 2023.
Wait, before he was convicted in 2018 of at least some of the rapes, Cosby’s lawyers argued he was too old, too frail, and too blind to even stand trial let alone serve time in prison. Now that he’s free, he’s suddenly fit for a comeback. What a miraculous recovery!
Actually, reviewing our notes here, it seems as if liberals really dropped the cancel culture ball in 2022. We couldn’t even cancel two-time killer Kyle Rittenhouse, who spent most of 2022 refusing to shut up. Republicans had to pick up the slack and how!
PREVIOUSLY:
What If The Real Cancel Culture Was 'People Freaking Out About Cancel Culture' All Along?
Kyle Rittenhouse Wishes People Were Held Accountable For Their Actions. That's It, That's The Joke.
Why Boring Conservatives Are Such a Drag About Drag
Wingnuts Still Addicted To Trans Panic
Elon Musk. Because When You're A Billionaire, They Let You Do it.
A decade after Mitt Romney declared that corporations were people, Republicans discovered that some of those people were liberal or at least not overtly fascist. It’s like when your kids start talking back to you. Republicans had nurtured corporations for decades, watching with joy as they grew and walked all over small businesses. The Supreme Court even gifted them with Citizens United.
However, seemingly ungrateful corporations vocally opposed MAGA’s active coup attempts, voter suppression efforts, and overtly anti-gay legislation. Early this year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law House Bill 1557, the "Parental Rights in Education" bill, which prohibits "classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity” in kindergarten through third grade, but also forbids any discussion of either topic "in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards." The deliberately vague language is why critics dubbed the law "Don't Say Gay." Why risk it?
Disney expressed its contrary opinion on the law, using its First Amendment rights, and DeSantis clapped back with the censorious power of the state. He shamelessly retaliated against “woke” Disney, which he dismissed as a Burbank-based company. Disney employs roughly 500,000 workers in Florida and has an estimated $75.2 billion annual economic impact for Central Florida alone. Disney also contributes about $5.8 billion in state revenue, which we assume is significantly more than Florida resident Donald Trump.
DeSantis also unleashed the Stop WOKE Act, a blatant speech code that was intended to drive out the dreaded "wokeness" from higher education and even businesses that have diversity training. A federal judge cancelled most of the law because he'd read the Constitution.
Oh, and DeSantis threatened drag queens because they exist and he's a gross bully. He wasn't alone: Republicans nationwide sought to cancel both drag queens and trans people from public life. Even the post-Christmas lull couldn’t stop Florida’s Department of (Not Minding Its Own) Business and Professional Regulation (DBPR), which on Wednesday announced it was investigating a holiday-themed drag show. When Republicans talk about “parental rights,” they don’t mean that parents have the right to take their kids to a harmless form of entertainment
Meanwhile, across the country, more Republican-controlled legislatures banned "The1619 Project" because it dared discuss slavery and its ongoing impact on the Black community. Oklahoma outright forbade educators from teaching so-called “divisive content,” which is actually more “Orwellian” than using a transperson’s preferred pronouns like a non-jackass mammal.
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, without irony, ordered an audit of the Tulsa School District for any potential critical race theory thought crimes. Tulsa was literally the location of the single greatest race massacre in our nation's history, which otherwise well-educated Americans didn’t learn existed until they saw HBO’s Watchmen.
A high school English teacher in Norman, Oklahoma, was placed on leave — she later resigned — because of how she peacefully protested the state’s law. Her evil doppelgänger Vicki Baggett, a high school teacher in (of course) Escambia, Florida, filed challenges demanding the banning of nearly 150 books from school libraries in the county.
Cancel culture warrior Elon Musk bought Twitter in a truly hostile takeover just a couple months ago, or 80 years in Musk time. He quickly found having not so pleasing a thing as wanting. He spent $44 billion of rich people bucks (a barely real currency) to unleash Nazis, rightwing trolls, and disinformation spreaders on the platform that regulars soon found too toxic to tolerate. They canceled their accounts, which is another example of liberal cancel culture because I used the word “cancel” twice in this sentence.
Major advertisers, such as General Mills, Audi, and Pfizer, weren’t thrilled with CEO Musk’s new management style, which involved making decisions as if he was pulling random Post-it Notes from a hat or someplace slightly below his waist.
Republicans, including Musk’s new Bestie DeSantis, cried cancel culture and said these woke corporations were denying Musk his constitutional right to buy a company, publicly torch its product and image, and experience no negative repercussions whatsoever.
You might think that companies refusing to support a spoiled billionaire’s bad business decisions is the free market in action, but today’s Republicans, such as brain genius Marjorie Taylor Greene, call it “corporate communism.” And don’t you dare suggest this actual sitting Congress member doesn’t know what words mean. You won’t cancel her!
That concludes this latest year in liberal cancel culture! Will the woke mob ever stop?
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