Is there even any law that would apply? I know there is a gag order on Trump and his people. Apparently they're providing info on people they THINK MIGHT BE jurors.Will those people and jurors get police protection?
Friday, May 31, 2024
Good grief!
No wonder he lost.
Listen to thatListen to that. Did he actually think the prosecution was supposed to argue Trump's case for him?
He has to know better than this. They really do count on Trump supporters to be dumb as a box of rocks.
Also...
Thursday, May 30, 2024
A verdict so nice I have to publish it twice
Sentencing July 11. (And when you hear MAGA whiners complaining about that date - and they are - remember, this is the date Trump's lawyers asked for.)
Oh my!
Political prisoner.
UPDATE 06/08/2024:
Wednesday, May 29, 2024
He has been saluting everything lately
-
.
He's saluting because he thinks MAGA fools are suckers for shows of faux patriotism, and he's not wrong.
Tuesday, May 28, 2024
2024 election will not go easy
And if he should win, of course there won't be any problem in him claiming it was fair and square, no matter how much doubt he throws on it now.Trump is now again regularly raising doubts about the fairness of the 2024 election — about once a day, according to an analysis by The New York Times published Friday.
The Hill
To be determined by who wins, of course.And the tactic is being copied by Republican senators vying to be his running mate or trying to appeal to the GOP base for their own reelection races.
Sens. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who are said to be on Trump’s vice-presidential shortlist, have declined in nationally televised interviews to commit to accepting the election results.
[...]
Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), a possible VP pick in the GOP conference, said he would have declined to certify Biden’s victory in January 2021 if he was serving in the Senate at the time. He didn’t come to the upper chamber until January 2023.
Vance hedged slightly when asked recently whether he would commit to accepting the election results, qualifying his pledge to accept the results if the election is “free and fair.”
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway."If it’s a free and fair election, I think every Republican will enthusiastically accept the results,” he told CNN’s Dana Bash. “And again, I think those results will show that Donald Trump has been elected president.”
Monday, May 27, 2024
How do you Trump-proof an agency?
And the only faction there that MIGHT have any pushback would be the public.In an effort to Trump-proof, NIH has designated an official to identify political meddling in the agency’s work and is tasking a soon-to-be-established scientific integrity council with reviewing those cases. The White House knows Trump could still cast those plans aside but is calculating that doing so will set off alarms with the media, Congress and the public.
Politico
Have they learned nothing?The Biden administration likely hopes GOP lawmakers, even those who think the NIH needs an overhaul, will temper Trump’s moves.
That is absolutely true, but depending on "alarms" and, especially, GOP lawmakers is nothing short of pipe dreams.The plan to protect the agency’s independence is critical because the public needs to be able to rely on NIH to “generate rigorous, trusted evidence to inform public health.”
Hello?? Anybody awake in here?? Trump has specifically said he will be firing civil servants and replacing them with loyalists.In addition to assigning Jorgenson as the NIH’s watchdog, the White House has directed other health agencies that got caught up in the Covid wars, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, to strengthen their scientific integrity plans, both to ensure that research is rigorous, bias-free, transparent and reliable — and that nonpartisan civil servants are making the research decisions.
Nor will it be as long as Republicans hold power. Plus - Trump in a second term will not be concerned about laws and regulations.NIH’s scientific integrity plan [is] not written into law or regulation.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Israel has no intention of stopping
Two. At this rate, they will have wiped out all of Gaza by the time they get every "Hamas militant." And, that, of course, is the aim.The Gaza health ministry said that an airstrike in Rafah on Sunday killed 45 Palestinians and injured dozens more. It said that there are still victims under the rubble and that the majority of those killed were women and children.
The Israeli military said it was targeting a Hamas installation and killed two senior Hamas militants.
NPR
If that is not a war crime, nothing is.The strike caused a fire in an encampment just west of Rafah in a neighborhood called Tal al-Sultan, where dozens of Palestinians were sheltering. The area was designated a safe zone by the Israeli military, which dropped leaflets in the area last week saying humanitarian aid would be available there.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Jesus Christ - another one
Maybe convert to Christianity. They make the claim that they're in direct conversation with the almighty.“He does not reveal his cards, just keeps making me do things. And I cannot dial him directly to ask what’s next,” he said.
Guardian
Modi's followers are no different than any cult personality's (looking at you, Trump).
Yep. Or likely have any clue about history or science.Modi has built up a well-established cult of personality within his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with many supporters unable to name other cabinet members or their local BJP candidate.
Sorry. Trump has that spot already taken.The BJP has also actively promoted Hinduism, the majority faith, in every aspect of public life. At the inauguration of the temple in Ayodhya in January, it was Modi, rather than Hindu priests, who played the leading role in the rituals.
[...]
“The wily weaving of religion with politics for a country where faith is an inextricable part of everyday life is the BJP’s USP [unique selling point]. Mr Modi’s claim is the logical culmination of the BJP’s dominant theme,” the Indian newspaper The Telegraph wrote in an editorial.
Earlier this month, in a television interview in Varanasi, his constituency, Modi made another allusion to divinity. “When my mother was alive, I used to believe that I was born biologically. After she passed away, upon reflecting on all my experiences, I was convinced that God had sent me,” he said.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Sunday, May 26, 2024
South Carolina redistricting decision explained
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.Republicans accomplished the goal of protecting [Nancy] Mace by systematically removing Black voters from her district. The new map splits the city of Charleston, South Carolina, in two, and takes most of the Black voters who live there out of District 1 and puts them in District 6 (which is currently represented by Representative Jim Clyburn and is the only one of the state’s seven districts currently held by a Democrat).
I’m not the only person who thinks removing a bunch of Black voters from a district to make it safer for a white Republican Congresswoman is racist and therefore unconstitutional. A three-judge district court panel in South Carolina ruled that District 1 was a racial gerrymander and ordered South Carolina to redraw its maps.
[...]
It was [appealed and] literally one of the first cases the [Supreme] court heard in this term. But the court waited until yesterday, seven-and-a-half months after hearing oral arguments, to issue its ruling determining which maps South Carolina can use in the upcoming congressional election. That is significant because, while the Supreme Court was dragging its feet on this case, the South Carolina district court withdrew its order, saying that there was no longer enough time for the legislature to redraw the map even if the legislature lost its appeal. The Supreme Court locked in South Carolina’s racist gerrymander, simply by doing nothing.
Thursday’s opinion rubber-stamping South Carolina’s racism was therefore not really about South Carolina; it was about preventing future challenges to racist maps. Alito accomplished this by effectively making it impossible for Black people to prove that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause has been violated when our voting rights are taken away through racist gerrymandering. He did this by ruling that state legislatures must be presumed to be acting in good faith.
[...]
Alito didn’t actually contest the fact that the voters were removed because they were Black. Instead, he simply doesn’t care. Alito said that because race is highly correlated with voting behavior, trying to make a district more Republican means trying to make a district more white. Since making a district more Republican is constitutionally permissible, making a district as white as possible must also be permissible.
[...]
He says that you generally need “direct evidence” of racism, which basically translates to finding a Republican map-maker who says, “I’m finna do some racism, today!”
[...]
He said that the experts were wrong. He said that the district court made a “clear error” of fact. The NAACP did not have Mark Sanford on the phone to his Argentinian girlfriend saying we gotta get the Blacks out of District 1, so none of the evidence the NAACP did have mattered, according to Alito.
In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan (joined by justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson) hammered Alito over his disregard for the factual record. Kagan was incisive, so I’ll just quote her:The majority picks and chooses evidence to its liking; ignores or minimizes less convenient proof; disdains the [district court’s] judgments about witness credibility; and makes a series of mistakes about expert opinions. The majority declares that it knows better than the District Court what happened in a South Carolina map-drawing room to produce District 1…. In the majority’s version, all the deference that should go to the court’s factual findings for the plaintiffs instead goes to the losing defendant, because it is presumed to act in good faith…. So the wrong side gets the benefit of the doubt[.]Kagan also wrote that Alito used an “upside-down form of clear-error review.” I don’t know if that was an oblique reference to Alito’s flag controversies, but it makes life better to believe that it is.
[...]
Over on Bluesky, Adam Serwer summarized the court’s ruling accurately: “I hope people understand that what we are seeing is the systematic destruction of the civil war amendments by the Supreme Court, which are what made America [an] actual democracy and upon which all minority rights in the United States rely.” That is the irreducible point of the court’s ruling.
[...]
The votes of the white majority (and more specifically, the Republican majority within the white majority) are the only votes that are allowed to matter. Trump lost the election, but he won the white vote. Since [Alito, and Thomas as well] think only the white vote matters, it’s not antidemocratic, to them, to think that Trump should still be in charge.
[...]
[S]ince most Black people refuse to accept the wisdom of white conservatives, whites have to gerrymander Black political power away, and that has to be constitutional.
The Nation
Meanwhile, Russian war crimes continue unabated
An outrage that didn't have to happen.Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has released a desperate video plea calling on world leaders to attend a “peace summit” next month in Switzerland after a deadly Russian attack on a DIY hypermarket in Kharkiv on Saturday killed at least 16people and injured dozens more.
Zelenskiy appealed in particular to the US president, Joe Biden, and the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, to attend the summit, which is due to start on 15 June.
[...]
Biden has not yet confirmed his attendance and it is not known whether China will attend – “negotiations are ongoing” over Beijing’s participation.
[...]
Saturday’s strike came at the end of a week in which daily Russian missile and air strikes terrorised Ukraine’s second city, with hits on a printing house, numerous residential areas and a central park, among other targets. In most cases, there were no obvious military targets nearby.
[...]
Prosecutors said at least 16 people had died, of whom 10 had not yet been identified, and 43 injured. More than 10 are still missing after the strike. A separate missile strike early in the evening hit a residential building in the centre of the city, injuring 18 people, according to the regional governor.
[...]
The strike on Saturday targeted a popular suburban shopping complex. Andriy Kudinov, its director, told local media the store had been packed with shoppers buying items for their summer cottages.
[...]
The strike sparked a fire that sent large clouds of dark smoke billowing above the shopping centre. Rescue work is dangerous in these conditions, and repeat strikes targeting first responders have been a common feature of recent Russian attacks.
[...]
In recent weeks, Russia has been working to make life a misery for Kharkiv, a city 20 miles from the border with Ukraine, and which had a pre-war population of over a million. Although life in the city goes on, deadly strikes have become a daily feature of life.
Guardian
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Sad!
How will he spin this?
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
UPDATE 05/26/2024:
They knew - or should have known - it was coming...
Where even is he?
UPDATE 05/27/2024:
Of course. That way he can still say they wanted him and avoid being labeled a loser. Which he is.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)