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Pick a lawyer that suits your needs

Monday, July 25, 2022

I didn’t practice criminal law, but I do have some insight into basic legal principles, so this left me somewhat puzzled.

The excellent Marcy Wheeler notes here that the Trump appointed judge who presided over the Bannon trial opined that while he was bound by precedent to throw out Bannon’s advice of counsel defense, he wondered if it was still good law.

Back in the days when even judges appointed by Republicans were somewhat sane, the DC Circuit ruled that advice of counsel is not a good defense in a contempt of Congress case. Bannon’s judge has a point: the present Supreme Court may carve out an exception to that precedent for Republicans charged with contempt of Congress when Democrats are in the majority.

So, in the future, future Steve Bannons may merely have to follow the advice Smokey Robinson’s Mom gave to him: “You better shop around”. If the first lawyer you talk to tells you that you have to testify, find someone like Rudy Giuliani or John Eastman, who will tell you that you don’t have to testify. Case closed.

As an aside, and stop me if I’ve made this point before, but Marcy Wheeler’s blog, Emptywheel, is really the best reporting you’ll find anywhere on the various cases related to January 6th, Trump corruption generally, and other politically important prosecutions. If I was involved in representing either the government or the defendants in these various cases, I’d read her religiously. If I were a reporter for a major newspaper I’d do the same, so I could avoid the media screw ups that she constantly exposes.

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Those who don’t learn from history…

Monday, July 25, 2022

Here’s a post over at Balloon Juice that once again makes you wonder how our elected representatives manage to continue to live in a fantasy world.

The post is about the fact that we may need up to four new senators to rid ourselves of the filibuster, as there are a couple of others that are hiding behind Manchin and Sinema that will, quite likely, support abolishing the filibuster only in limited circumstances. One of the is Angus King, of Maine:

King argues that with the filibuster gone, Republicans could turn around and ban abortion when they regain power, saying “today’s annoying obstruction is tomorrow’s priceless shield.”

How oblivious do you have to be to actually believe that “tomorrow’s priceless shield” will survive should Republicans regain Congress and the presidency?

True, the Republicans would not get rid of the filibuster if they only had Congress, as anything they passed could be vetoed. But if they get the presidency they will not hesitate to get rid of the filibuster, either entirely, or piece by piece as they vote to carve out exceptions to its use. There is nothing more obvious, particularly given McConnell’s history.

And, just as an aside, while King’s Senate colleague, Susan Collins, might be concerned about getting rid of the filibuster, she will do as she is told should the occasion arise.

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There are 49 other Manchins we never hear about

Tuesday, July 19, 2022

This link should bring you to a number of Letters to the Editor at the New York Times, the first of which makes a point I’ve ranted at my wife about.

The press is once again making Biden’s inability to deal with the climate crisis all about the loathsome Joe Manchin. As the letter writer points out, that approach ignores the fact that there are 49 Republicans who have refused to deal with the climate issue. I’m sure Susan Collins is concerned, but, oddly enough, as so often happens, not concerned enough to actually do anything to address what is beyond a doubt the most critical issue we face.

The lack of Republican engagement on this issue, as on so many others, gets scarcely a mention in the press, because it is now considered simply normal Republican behavior to refuse to deal with the real issues facing the American people. They get a pass because they have established a history of indifference to the needs of the people, so the press concentrates on the one Democrat that follows their lead.

Given recent events, there is now a decent chance that the Democrats can hold onto the House, a chance that would be enhanced if they would learn how to properly convey their message. My own opinion is that there is a better than even chance that they will pick up some Senate seats. If that were to happen they can consign Manchin to purgatory, though he will no doubt anticipate his ostracism by switching parties, which he has already done in all but name. One must wonder if Sinema will follow his lead.

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A scam by any other name

Thursday, July 14, 2022

I’m fairly computer literate. When I got my first computer, a TI-99, I spent quite a few hours learning to program, and eventually, when I graduated to a PC, wrote programs I used at the office to actually do useful things, like auto dial my phone from an address book I wrote.

But I confess that I couldn’t begin to explain what a Blockchain is, though I understand it allegedly is intended to keep purchases of cryptocurrency both secure and private, though recent events have suggested that it’s not really capable of either.

I’m even more bewildered by NFTs, pieces of computer “art” that exist only as pixels, stored somewhere in the internet and allegedly “belonging” to only a single person. What has been particularly bewildering is the fact that people have been willing to spend many thousands of dollars for “art” that looks like badly drawn cartoons that you’d be lucky to get ten dollars for if it was painted on canvas and you actually physically owned it.

So I was a bit pleased to read this post at Vice this morning. Here’s the introduction:

Arguably no piece of software has been more central to the most recent crypto craze than MetaMask. With tens of millions of users, the digital wallet system has become the main access point to Ethereum, the blockchain that has given rise to stablecoins like Tether, play-to-earn games like Axie Infinity, metaverses like Decentraland, and NFT projects like the Bored Ape Yacht Club.

But after a precipitous crypto crash that has affected projects and people alike, the co-founders of MetaMask are now warning that the crypto ecosystem they helped create is currently an unsafe casino prone to Ponzi-like operations and exploitation.

It’s always nice when someone who should know reinforces your own beliefs, and I was particularly pleased with how one of the MetaMask founders described NFTs:

“…a form of a direct-to-consumer sale of an imaginary good”.

That’s precisely how I’ve conceptualized it to myself ever since I first read about them. People have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for things that for all intents and purposes have no independent existence. What I find most amazing about this is that it proves what a great country this is. Where else could anyone stupid enough to spend that kind of money on an imaginary piece of trash art have enough money to do so?

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A bit of speculation

Tuesday, July 12, 2022

I have to say that I like the January 6th committee’s pattern of having Liz Cheney drop a bombshell at the end of each hearing. Today we learned that the genius tried to tamper with a witness, who refused to take his call, notified his or her lawyer, who notified the committee, which notified the DOJ. All the blogs I go to say it’s clear proof of criminal witness tampering, but, not being a criminal lawyer, I have no opinion on that, as I don’t know if the laws apply to someone who is a witness to a congressional panel rather than a court.

Something I haven’t seen any comment on is the fact that Trump felt it necessary to make the call himself, rather than have someone else do his dirty work, which has always been his pattern in the past. Just ask Michael Cohen, among many others.

It suggests that Trump may be running out of patsies, who may have decided to abandon what they perceive is a sinking ship.

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Sorry Adam, history is written by the winners

Sunday, July 10, 2022

I give Adam Kinzinger credit for sticking up for the democratic process, but I think there’s a good possibility he’s wrong about this:

I think what’s most important is, again, what does history say in five or 10 years? Because I can guarantee — well, I can get about as close as I can to guaranteeing that, in about 10 years, there’s not going to have been a single Trump supporter that exists anywhere in the country. It’s like Nixon. There were a lot of people that supported Nixon until he was out of office, and then everybody was like, “No, nobody supported Nixon.

This presumes that things will, over the next ten years, return to “normal”, when there is no reason to believe they will, partly because people of somewhat good will, like Kinzinger, refused to believe that the Republican Party was a fascist institution when all the signs were there early on.

History is written by the winners, and there is no reason to believe that the right wing’s grip on the American judiciary, the unrepresentative American legislatures, and a great share of the American media will relax in the next ten years. There’s every reason to believe that the fascists will win, as any attempt to stop them will be frustrated by legislative bodies owned and operated by the right and/or a Supreme Court that has abandoned all restraints to help impose a theocratic fascist state on the American people.

The process of re-writing history has already begun, given the moves in states like Florida and Texas to ban the teaching of any truthful thing that might hurt the fee-fees of racists. The folks at Fox are, of course, reinforcing the push to ban factual history.

If they pull it off, and there’s every reason to suppose that they will, Trump will remain a cult figure and the mainstream media, in order to survive financially, will conform to the demands of the fascist thought police.

Nixon was never the center of a cult, and the Republican Party had just begun its transition from a respectable political party to an anti-democratic purveyor of hate wrapped in religion and other conspiratorial myths, all designed to keep the oligarchs safely in control, when he resigned. There were respectable Republicans back then, including a majority of congressional Republicans, such that Nixon realized he was bound to be convicted upon impeachment, and remember that requires a two thirds majority of the Senate. That type of Republican has disappeared, and there is no reason to believe they will reappear in the next ten years.

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Reflections on the Fourth

Monday, July 4, 2022

I’ve been writing on this blog now for 17 years or so. When it all started there were a lot of us lefty bloggers here in Connecticut, and most of them have gone on to other things, but I’ve stuck to it, though the posts come daily no more.

A lot has changed during all those years, though a lot has stayed the same. As I’ve reminded my readers every Good Friday, we should always look on the bright side, but that side has gotten a good deal dimmer over the years.

I think we’ve always known where the Republican Party wanted to bring us, but at least at first we didn’t believe it could get us there. There were a lot of reasons for that. For instance, even though I was using the internet to spread my own ideas (to the extent anyone read the blog) I didn’t understand at first how the internet had changed the way in which information was spread, and how easily it could be used to spread propaganda, disinformation, and conspiracy theories that wouldn’t otherwise make it into the mainstream.

That became evident over the years, as did the failure of that very mainstream media to recognize the reality in which we found ourselves. As the forces of fascism became more and more both organized and obvious, the media by and large insisted on both siding everything. Just yesterday, for instance, the lead article in the New York Times Magazine was about the “vanishing Democratic moderate”, when in reality the most leftist of elected Democrats is little more than slightly to the left of the typical 60s liberal. I’ve written many times about the media’s penchant for moving the definition of the ever elusive “center” further and further right. I saw a tweet yesterday from a progressive to the effect that being in favor of legalized abortion is a centrist position, given the fact that a huge majority of people in this country are in the legalization camp. The point is well taken, but you won’t see that basic fact recognized in the media.

The Democratic Party establishment hasn’t helped any, given its refusal to call a fascist a fascist, and its reflexive protection of those within its own ranks (e.g., Henry Cuellar) who enable the fascists.

Over the years the Supreme Court has gone in exactly the direction we knew it would if the Republicans got their way. I was never a judge, but I was a lawyer, and I know how to interpret legal language. I know with a certainty that the present court has disregarded basic grammar, logic and history to implement a simple agenda:creating a one party state in which elections are really beside the point. Is there anyone who believes that the court will not, when it rules next year, give Republican legislatures the absolute power to disregard the will of the majority of people in their states, not to mention the equal protection clause and the tattered remnants of the Voting Rights Act, to fix federal and state elections so that only Republicans and some token Democrats (to maintain the facade) get elected. At the same time we can only watch in despair as the court establishes a state religion by constantly ruling that those religionists it favors can impose their religious beliefs on the rest of us in the name of religious liberty.

I have two young grandchildren now, and I fear that they will grow up to live in a fascist state. Perhaps their experience will be all the worse since they are in Northern States. The education system in the South is being transformed into a propaganda factory. Witness, for example, Texas deciding that it wasn’t slavery, it was simply “involuntary relocation”.The kids in Texas will grow up simply thinking that fascism is the norm, while the kids up here may get a whiff of the truth before the transition to fascism is complete.

It’s the Fourth of July, and we’re supposed to be celebrating the birth of a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all humans are created equal. Lincoln asked whether any nation so conceived and so dedicated could long endure. We gave it a go, but it isn’t looking good.

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A bit of a surprise yesterday, and…

Wednesday, June 29, 2022

And some more or less random observations.

First, to the surprise.

I’ve been watching the January 6th hearings on my IPad, and I think they’ve been quite useful, but until yesterday nothing I heard surprised me. Most of it was already known, and what wasn’t already known fit so neatly into the Trumpian pattern that it seemed like old news anyway.

Now, I already knew that Trump had told the January 6 crowd that he’d be walking with them to the Capitol, but I always assumed he was just being Trump. You know, …. lying. But yesterday, Cassidy Hutchinson testified that Trump actually really wanted to go to the Capitol. Of course, he had no intention of walking. This is the guy, after all, who rode a golf cart during his meetings with European leaders. But he did want to go, which I found surprising because I always figured there was no way he would do anything that posed the slightest risk to himself, particularly when he could dupe others into doing his dirty work for him.

I have no reason to doubt Hutchinson on this point, so I can only conclude that Trump must have believed that the Secret Service was sort of his own Praetorian Guard, not only providing protection but ready to take on anyone he perceived as his enemy. Still, I have no doubt that had he gone, he would certainly have led from behind.

Now, to some random observations.

It has come to my attention that the right is running true to pattern, and attempting to distract from the meat of Hutchinson’s testimony, to which it can not take issue, by challenging her on an almost irrelevant point: whether Trump grabbed the arm of his secret service driver to force him to drive to the Capitol. As the author (Jason Miciak) of the linked article points out, the committee has already gotten testimony from the agent involved. If he had denied that such a thing happened, the committee would simply have cautioned her not to repeat what was, in any event, simply hearsay evidence coming from her. She never claimed to have first hand knowledge of the event, she only claimed that someone told her that it had happened. She also testified that the plan of Meadows, et. al to deal with the January 6th fallout, if I recall her terminology correctly, was to “distract and deflect” by blaming Antifa, etc. So this is part of that pattern, for which the media always falls. An unnamed source, usually, as here, with only asserted second hand knowledge, makes a claim and the media swallows it whole. They beat an irrelevant point to death while ignoring the larger story.

Finally, and this is a bit off the subject, but I said these were random observations, I was a bit taken aback by a paragraph from today’s New York Times article about Rudolf Giuliani’s risible claim that he was assaulted by a guy who patted him on the back and called him a scumbag, which admittedly is very unfair to scumbags. Anyway, here’s the paragraph in question:

The strange political afterlife of Rudy Giuliani is one of the most told stories in American politics: The man who was once “America’s mayor,” leading the nation’s biggest city through its worst terrorist attack, has since tried to overturn the results of a presidential election, gotten caught splayed on a bed and adjusting his pants in a satirical documentary, and on Sunday, gotten a supermarket worker jailed after claiming that he had been assaulted and almost knocked down.

Excuse me, but I’ve seen the clip from that satirical documentary. I believe the Times is being overly generous in stating that Rudy was merely “adjusting his pants”. I think you can get a better idea of what he was adjusting here.

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Is Fox ditching Trump?

Monday, June 27, 2022

One has to wonder.

I don’t even have a TV, and if I did, I’d still let the folks at Crooks & Liars watch Fox for me, but from what a gather from reading about the folks at Fox, and Brian Kilmeade in particular, one must wonder if a decision has been made that it is time to put the orange one behind them, and latch on to some other fascist:

Fox News host Brian Kilmeade took a shot at former President Donald Trump for his “unhinged” lies about the 2020 presidential election.

While speaking about the Jan. 6 hearings, Kilmeade recalled his interactions with Trump following the last presidential election.

“The president was unhinged during that period,” the Fox News host said. “I interviewed him at West Point and he was kind enough to give me a few minutes. I’ve never seen him so angry. That was in between the election and Jan. 6.”

“As soon as we were done, he just stormed off,” he continued. “And you know how long — I’ve known him for 15 years or 20 years prior to him going to the White House. I’ve never seen him so angry.”

Kilmeade added: “So he’s convinced he was robbed. There’s no doubt about it. But I have not seen any evidence and these are all incremental examples.”

The last paragraph is the money shot, it seems to me. It’s not as if the folks at Fox & Friends have been busy rebutting claims that the election was stolen, but if they start saying the true part out loud then it can only mean they would like to consign the genius to the dustbin of history.

I was always somewhat amazed that so much of the Republican establishment clung to Trump, and didn’t follow the pattern they set with GW, who disappeared down the memory hole on January 21, 2013. After all, they got what they wanted from him, as the Supreme Court proves on a daily basis.

Perhaps the internet makes that impossible, as there are so many different sources of “information” to which the whackjobs can turn if they aren’t fed red meat from the usual sources. Still, it makes sense from a tactical point of view for them to ditch Trump and find another fascist they can sell to the ever gullible American people.

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The court will find a way

Thursday, June 23, 2022

When I first read this column from the New York Times I thought: Hey, this is great:

What a week so far for conservatives. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court struck down a Maine law that prohibited religious private schools from receiving taxpayer dollars. And on Thursday, it invalidated a New York State gun safety law limiting the public carry of firearms. The outcome in these cases was not surprising. The court has ruled in favor of religious litigants in an overwhelming number of cases, and the gun case’s outcome was clear from the oral argument before the justices in November.

What is surprising is how little the 6-to-3 decision in the Maine case, Carson v. Makin, will matter practically. And the reason offers a glimpse of hope for those who worry about a future dominated by the court’s conservative supermajority — including the many Americans troubled by the court’s decision in the gun case, New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen.

Let’s start with the Carson case. Anticipating this week’s decision, Maine lawmakers enacted a crucial amendment to the state’s anti-discrimination law last year in order to counteract the expected ruling. The revised law forbids discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation, and it applies to every private school that chooses to accept public funds, without regard to religious affiliation.

The writer, a law professor named Aaron Tang, goes on to argue that the recent gun decision can also be worked around by crafty blue state legislatures.

Sounds good, but then I remembered this:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday sided with Catholic Social Services in a battle that pitted religious freedom against anti-discrimination laws in Philadelphia and across the country. The court declared that the private Catholic agency was entitled to renewal of its contract with the city for screening foster parents, even though the agency violated city law by refusing to consider married LGBTQ couples.

At issue was a decision by the city of Philadelphia to end its contract with Catholic Social Services for screening potential foster care parents. CSS challenged the termination in court, citing its religious belief that same-sex marriage is wrong, and maintaining that ending the contract violated its First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion.

I should note here that even the liberal judges joined in part of this decision, but that’s incidental. So, when the Maine law is challenged, as I’m sure it will be, it will be overturned.

The Supreme Court will find a way to get around any attempts to get around its goal of letting religious groups do whatever they want at taxpayer expense, provided, of course, that those religious groups are of a Christian persuasion. It will be interesting to see how they ultimately explain why their precedent doesn’t apply to Muslims, Rastafarians, or worshippers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but rest assured they’ll find a way.

As to Tang’s argument that the recent gun decision leaves open a few approaches such as legislatively enacting “an expansive list of so-called sensitive spaces” in which the court recognized firearms have been historically limited, rest assured that the court will restrict such sensitive spaces at its earliest convenience, with the only space that is clearly sensitive being the Supreme Court Building.

This is not the first court that has twisted the words of the constitution to suit its political agenda, but I think it’s safe to say that those words have never been so severely twisted.

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