In his opening statement in the criminal trial of Donald J. Trump in New York State Court, Mr. Trump’s attourney gently waved his fingers and told the jury “These are not the droids you are looking for . . . move along.” This is a rarely used New York legal technique called the Jedi Mind Trick which is only used when no legal or evidential defense seems possible.
The session concluded before any evidence of the JMT working on the jurors could be detected.
Special Prosecutor Robert Hur, who investigated Joe Biden’s secure documents foibles following his Vice-presidency, testified in Congress recently.
“My task was to determine whether the president retained or disclosed national defense information ‘willfully’. That means knowingly and with the intent to do something the law forbids.”
While stating that Biden had “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice-presidency when he was a private citizen,” Hur assessed that a jury would probably view him as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and thus would be unable to establish his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. (Source: The Guardian)
So, special prosecutors don’t just address the facts and the law and make a determination, they do so based upon whether or not they think they can “win” the case? WTF?
Basically, this idiot says two things: Biden broke the law and I don’t think we would win the case, so he is “off the hook.” And I thought the decision as to whether to prosecute was in the hands of Hur’s boss, the Attorney-General. Silly me.
Hur complicated his “case” by saying “I’m not here to speak about what may or may not happen in the future.” How that is consistent with “Hur assessed that a jury would probably view him as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and thus would be unable to establish his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt” is also beyond me.
This guy was clearly not up to the job, unless the job was different from the one he was charged to do.
What would have happened has the ruled the other way, that Colorado and by extension all of the other states had the right to impose Constitutional restrictions upon candidates?
If enough states took the opportunity it might mean Trump would lose.
The Congress could rush through steps necessary for states to execute that aspect of the Constitution as it applied to insurrectionists and rebels. This might impose some order.
Possibly only states that Trump would have lost in the election might ban him and the effect would be nil.
The consequences of allowing him to stay on all ballots has consequences. First of all it establishes a precedent of the Constitutional rules being waived for certain individuals. Not only does the law not apply to Donald J. Trump, but neither does the Constitution. This would embolden future tyrants greatly.
Arguments against allowing the bans were particularly specious. They required ignoring history, ignoring precedents, and ignoring logic. One person claimed that if Colorado were allowed to ban Trump, chaos would ensue. Since Mr. Trump is the embodiment of chaos, I am not surprised, but so what? Is the law the law or do we weasel around it when it is inconvenient or messy? It is almost as if Mr. Trump calling all of those people to Washington, D.C. riling them up, telling then to “Fight like Hell!” and sending them to the Capitol has no repercussions.
The same people who were screaming “We can’t let the states decide!” were the same ones who were screaming “We must let the states decide!” on other issues, like Medicaid coverage and the legality of abortion.
I have already pointed out the brief filed by a group of Civil War historians who basically showed that the Article in question was self-executing, even admitted to be so by people it was being executed against. But the SCOTUS that appeals to history so often ignored it this time. Similarly it ignored its own precedents, somethings near and dear to previous courts.
This court is not a “conservative” court as they leave precedents and history shredded behind them. They are clearly a radical court, a rogue court and we should just stop paying attention to them. Let’s see how good they are at enforcing their own rulings.
It seems we all have a deep-seated human need for . . . leadership (or what’s a messiah for?).
It seems each of us has examined ourselves and determined that me, myself, and I are a follower. And if I only had a leader, think of the great things that could be achieved.
But this urge/whatever can mislead us and mislead us badly. Ask yourself this question: what is the purpose of the U.S. Constitution? In my mind its clear purpose is to limit leaders. Just as the Magna Carta was designed to limit kings, our document is designed to limit leaders of all stripes up and down the government. Exceed your given powers and expect a lawsuit.
I remember way back when I was involved in the process of hiring a new president of the community college I was working for. My role was as President of the Faculty Senate, so I asked that Senate to compile a list of things that we wanted to achieve for this new president. Try as I might, I failed as a leader. The sentiment amongst my colleagues was to wait until she was hired and see where she wanted to lead us. I argued that this was anti-democratic (although I didn’t use that term), that a new constitution doesn’t come with a new leader. My colleagues were as well educated as I, or even better, but they wanted to be lead and they didn’t seem to care where they were being lead to.
Currently Donald Trump is the only politician portraying himself as a “leader,” the German word for such being “Führer.” Remember the past in which each of the two main parties had a “platform” which was a statement of where their leadership would lead to. How quaint. Today, nothing Mafia Don intends to do is put into any official party platform. He needs plausible deniability, you know . . . check that, he doesn’t. He would just declare anything he didn’t like about that platform to be fake news, no matter what was printed or recorded on video tape. Donald J. Trump will lead us to a new reality!
In a recent blog post umair haque defined leadership this way: “Leadership is fundamentally an act of moral agency. It means not just having a moral compass, but orienting the moral compass.” Would that that were true. “Wishful thinking that is” . . . shut up, Yoda.
The leadership we crave, apparently, is exercised by one in whom we can believe blindly, without having to think about what is happening. Our religions in this country have prepped us for this behavior. “You only need faith, and you will be saved.” We don’t ask “What kind of god would demand or even need the faith of beings like us?”
It is virtually impossible to winkle out the Justice’s motives, but since they have decided to be the most political court in U.S. history, and in politics appearances are more important than reality and politicians are judged on appearances, not facts.
And they have plausible deniability. After giving The Orange Terror the delay he so dearly wants, they can rule against his ridiculous absolute immunity claim and say that it was important for the SCOTUS to rule on such an important claim.
There is only one principle operative in the Republican Party, or rather the Party of Trump, the Republican Party no longer exists, and that is Loyalty to the Trump. That is one way loyalty, to Donald Trump, you should expect none coming back the other way.
So, all of the Justices who are beholden to The Donald can express their loyalty, with the delay, but also uphold some semblance of the Rule of Law.
There are no fine points to “settle” here. These justices are not the best legal minds in the country. Those minds have already spoken. Trump’s immunity claim should be thrown out of the courts it got in, refused to be considered by courts which can do that, and Trump’s lawyers admonished, if not sanctioned, for wasting the courts’ time and abusing their patience with clearly ridiculous claims.
But all that Mafia Don wants is a delay, not approval. His plan is to delay, delay, and delay, until he is elected and he can then have his minions pull those cases against him back.
And, of course, one thing he has in abundance is gall. He will claim that the delays he is responsible for will have pushed his trials too close to the election and will declare them as election interference, so they should be delayed until he is out of office.
Just when I thought the SCOTUS was the greatest threat to democracy we faced in our court system, the Supreme Court of the State of Alabama stepped up by deciding that frozen embryos are “extrauterine children.”
According to their Chief Justice, Tom Parker:
“The Alabama constitution’s ‘sanctity of unborn life’ provision, he wrote, ‘encompasses the following: (1) God made every person in His image; (2) each person therefore has a value that far exceeds the ability of human beings to calculate; and (3) human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself.’”
Apparently the Alabama Supreme Court has not heard of the separation of church and state. And I am surprised that they weren’t singing Monty Python’s song “Every Sperm is Sacred” while issuing their ruling.
This immediately put the brakes on all of the In Vitro Fertilization therapies currently under way. If you are unfamiliar with IVF it is a process where infertile couples can have fertilized embryos implanted in the woman’s uterus. The embryos are frozen awaiting this process and are willingly donated by fertile women.
So, here’s the bind the fertility clinics are in. They cannot go ahead with the IVF treatments because the “success rate is low, that is many embryos do not implant in the uterine wall and are flushed out during a waste cycle. This would be considered a wrongful death under the law and the desperate parents and doctors could all go to jail. So, all of these clinics are to put their frozen embryos on ice, as it were.
But, here is the problem. Those embryos under Alabama law cannot be implanted, so they have to stay frozen . . .in perpetuity. But what happens down there in hurricane country of the electric power is knocked out for a number of days. Without electricity, all of those embryos would thaw and “die.” Would that be considered a mass murder on the part of the clinic or an “act of God,” under their laws.
I know the solution. All of the Bible thumpers need to step up and adopt one of these “extrauterine children,” providing them with an uninterruptable supply of electricity and to take responsibility if they die. Then we will know they are truly “pro life.”
Remaining frozen forever, never to run and play in the park . . . so much for the sanctity of life.
These assholes, all over, not just in Alabama, are simply terrorists. They are suing women for having a miscarriage, calling it a wrongful death (as if the emotional impact of the miscarriage weren’t enough, drag that bitch and her doctor into court. They want to sue women for driving across state lines to get an abortion (and her driver, too). They want to sue women who get abortions and their doctors as murderers. Apparently they want to terrorize women into chattel slave status.
PS Note to Alabama SC Justices: all children are extrauterine (the definition of a child is someone who has been born), so you really are saying “frozen embryos are children.” And you need to get them banjos restrung.
PPS I will believe they are serious when they give tax deductions for unborn children.
PPPS You god musty be butt ugly if embryos are made in his image. Have you ever seen an embryo?
PPPPS You need some help with scripture if you believe that “human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself.” Your god killed over two million people according to the Bible, and that is not counting the time he killed 99.9999% of all men, women, and children . . . and unborn children in the Great Flood.
Uncommon Sense 
Life is Sacred and Other Bushwa of Anti-Abortionists
Tags: anti-abortionists, conservatives, corruption, hypocrisy, lying Christians, politics, Republicans, Tax the Churches, tax the rich
Once again, the Supreme Court is debating an abortion topic brought by a party who has no legal standing (which should have gotten the thing dismissed out of hand) and which case uses obsolete laws and strange logic. Since the SCOTUS is corrupt as Hell, I an not surprised they took the case, nor am I hopeful they will be at all in line with what Americans think about the topic.
Anti-abortionists arguments are generally religion-based, but nonetheless incoherent. The main claim is that life is sacred. Getting life to be defined as beginning at conception is part of their strategy, so the sacredness covers all of the bases they want covered. This ignores the fact that the Holy Bible does not state this and the people who wrote both the Old Testament and the New Testament, the Jews, have a definition of when life begins of the first breath of a born baby (reflecting their god’s use of the Breath of Life). No extrauterine fetus children at all exist in their worldview.
Someone went through the laborious process of counting up all of the people executed by the Bible’s god, either directly or by order to his hit squads in the Hebrews/Israelites. (A job the Israelis aren’t done with as they are racking up new totals of the dead as I write this.) But making reasonable assumptions regarding the populations of “cities” obliterated by Yahweh’s orders, a total of just over 2,000,000 deaths was arrived at. Considering estimates of the population of the earth at around 8000 BCE at 5 million, and that most of that number involved people far away in China and whatnot, Yahweh issued enough “hits” to wipe out the entire population of the Middle East.
And that total of 2 million plus does not include the Great Flood, in which Yahweh killed all but eight human beings, plus all of the plants and animals, so killing all in the Middle East is a drop in the bucket compared to that event.
Granted all of these killings are fictional, which raises another issue. How does one make an argument that “life is sacred” when the proponents of this god wrote fictional accounts of said god ordering the execution of close to 100% of the world’s human beings? Apparently they thought doing so reflected well on their god? WTF? “My god is a vengeful, murderous god; how about yours?”
The Supreme Court Justices make up stuff out of whole cloth when it suits their personal beliefs. Then they posture they are using historical and “original intent” reasons for their judgments. This is not new, people, they have been doing this since the inception of the court. Consider the Court’s decision in “Heller” which gave the right to bear arms to individuals. Allow me to quote from Thom Hartman’s “The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment” (pp. 101-103):
“Scalia also argued, in the absence of any evidence whatsoever from the time of the amendment’s ratification, that the Second Amendment was passed to allow individuals to own guns for self-defense (which was the essence of the Heller case, as Washington, DC, had forbidden people from owning guns even for that reason), rather than a purely military/militia context.
Stevens et al., in their dissent (which, but for one Republican-appointed justice, would have been the majority decision), argued back,
They added, quoting a previous Supreme Court decision on the topic,
Even a previous Supreme Court chief justice, Nixon appointee Warren Berger, called the idea that the Second Amendment conferred an “individual right” to gun ownership a lie. Explicitly, he said the idea being promoted back when he was on the Court was “a fraud on the American public.”
In other words, Supreme Court Justices make up arguments out of whole cloth, so the merits of the cases are irrelevant, only the votes count for anything, especially in the case of the current court which has given up on following even their own precedents.
Look for the extension of their dirty business in this latest case brought by anti-abortionists (of no standing, with no real arguments, etc.).
Postscript Ironically if one accepts the Young Earth Creationist’s date for the creation of the Earth, then Yahweh ordered the killing or killed many, many, many times the population of the entire planet. According to estimates the population of the Earth near 4000 BCE was about 30 million people. According to the Bible, it was zero. Therefore, according to the Bible, their weren’t enough people alive for Yahweh to kill. Life is sacred, my ass.