Dark Brandon just granted clemency to 1,500 Americans

because it’s the right thing to do

big news this morning.

it’s easy to forget, given the wall-to-wall press coverage of the unrelenting chaos of Donny’s Confederacy of Sewer Clowns, that Joe Biden is still our president — but he is, and he’s been presidenting the shit out of America.

President Biden is commuting the sentences of nearly 1,500 people and pardoning 39 convicted of nonviolent crimes, the largest grant of clemency by an American president in a single day, the White House announced in a statement on Thursday.

fuck yeah.

let’s take a look at who’s among the fifteen hundred. most of the people granted clemency were prisoners who were released and placed in home confinement during the covid pandemic.

during the height of the pandemic, prisons were pestholes of plague. just try social distancing in a crowded cell. one in five prisoners contracted covid. so officials did the pragmatic thing — they sent as many nonviolent prisoners as they could home, where they served out their sentences under confinement.

so, why commute their already-completed sentences? because Republicans are heartless bastards, that’s why.

Some Republicans, who are set to take control of Congress next month, have tried to push legislation that would have forced those people to return to prison.

why send nonviolent offenders who have already served out their sentences back to prison? because fuck you, that’s why. because cruelty, as always, is the point.

imagine being so twisted that you’re angry because there are people in the world who, in your mind, haven’t suffered enough.

this is shit they’ve already tried to pull. remember Michael Cohen? he was one of the covid-era prisoners released into home confinement. this act of decency put a bug up Donny’s ass, and he invented a pretext in order to fuck with Cohen’s release.

you’ll never guess what happened next.

political retribution doesn’t get any more politically retributive than that.

speaking of political targets, the White House reminds us that —

[Biden] is also the first President ever to issue categorical pardons to former LGBTQI+ service members convicted for private conduct because of their sexual orientation.

LGBTQI+ service members are another vulnerable group whom Donny has targeted for persecution.

ah yes, Karl Marx, the famed woke advocate for sexual freedom.

and then there’s this.

by the way, Donny’s first-term ban on trans troops was something Biden shitcanned on his first day on office.

President Joe Biden has repealed Donald Trump’s ban on transgender Americans joining the military.

The ban was announced by Mr Trump during his first year in office.

“Transgender service members will no longer be subject to the possibility of discharge or separation on the basis of gender identity,” the White House said.

in addition to the 1,500 grants of clemency, Biden outright pardoned 39 nonviolent offenders.

Those pardoned on Thursday had been convicted of non-violent crimes such as drug offenses and turned their lives around, White House lawyers said. They included a woman who led emergency response teams during natural disasters; a church deacon who had worked as an addiction counselor and youth counselor; a doctoral student in molecular biosciences; and a decorated military veteran.

Joe Biden granted these pardons because it was the right thing to do.

we’re going to be sorely lacking in the right thing to do over the next four years, so it’s good that Dark Brandon is front-loading compassion now.

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Joe Manchin, the guy who lives on a seven-hundred-thousand-dollar yacht, and Kyrsten Sinema, the woman who lives inside her own head, continue to suck.

Manchin and Sinema, Ground Zero for Why Democrats Can’t Have Nice Things, had one last chance to do the right thing before leaving office — and both of them were all yeah, fuck no.

Senate Democrats failed Wednesday to confirm a Democratic member of the National Labor Relations Board after independent Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema opposed the nomination, thwarting their hopes of locking in a majority at the federal agency for the first two years of President-elect Donald Trump’s term.

the NLRB oversees labor disputes, supervises union elections and has the power to investigate unfair labor practices.

because of Manchin’s and Sinema’s fuckery, Democrats lost by one vote. now, the coming Republican Senate will get to install some compliant stooge to the NLRB — one who will be more in line with Donny’s (and co-president Space Nazi’s) anti-union stances.

Manchin and Sinema could have, for once, thrown the Democrats a bone and voted yes. why not? they’re both out the door at the end of the year, and have no need to preserve political capital. but no — allowing the Democrats to maintain a simple majority on the board of the NLRB was a bridge too far. these two fuckheads are a bottomless well of suck.

the only silver lining here is, should Democrats retake the Senate in 2026, these two obstructive shitweasels will be no longer in the mix.

good fucking riddance to both of them.

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FBI Director Chris Wray, who Donny had vowed to fire and replace with Krazee Eyes Kash Patel, obeyed in advance yesterday and announced he would resign on January 20, 2025.

here’s a clip from Wray’s press conference.

over at Wonkette, Evan Hurst asks a cogent question.

apparently, there’s a prevailing line of thought that Wray is playing n-dimenional chess here — and by resigning before he could be fired, he just checkmated Donny.

David French suggests in the New York Times that Wray’s resignation may have been an act of defiance against Trump, a fuck you that may not be immediately apparent to the naked eye. We don’t know if he’s right or not — read through his Bluesky post and the comments below it to suss it out for yourself — but the general gist is that if Wray had stayed on and waited for Trump to fire him, Trump could theoretically have gotten Kash into a position where he’d be eligible to be appointed as acting director while Wray was still emptying out his desk, skipping the Senate altogether. It has to do with the Vacancies Reform Act, which governs who is eligible to be appointed as an acting. Kash currently doesn’t qualify in any way.

I haven’t a clue. the nuts and bolts of policy is above my pay grade. as Evan points out, the comments below French’s bluesky post are both pro and con — and pretty quickly devolves into people screaming ‘you’re a wishful-thinking idiot’ and ‘no, you’re a fucking idiot’ at each other.

me, I just hope that Evan Hurst and David French are right.

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here’s your quote of the day:

“I think he gets up every day and tries to figure out, you know, ‘Let’s go to McDonald’s or let’s go to the garbage truck,’ whatever it takes but he wants to be on offense,” he continued. “I suspect he woke up, looked around and thought, ‘Yeah, I think my good friend Xi Jinping, we haven’t been together in a long time, why don’t I…?’”

that was Newt Gingrich, on Fox News yesterday. I keep staring at Newt’s words, and each subsequent re-reading just makes my head hurt more.

I think the simplest explanation is that there was a gas leak in the Fox studios.

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here’s your daily reminder that I can be found on Blue Sky at this link.

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this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:

practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.

to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.

we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.