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Tucker, the 21st century fifth columnist

Sunday, March 13, 2022

So, it appears that Putin considers Tucker Carlson to be one of his most valuable propagandists:

On March 3, as Russian military forces bombed Ukrainian cities as part of Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of his neighbor, the Kremlin sent out talking points to state-friendly media outlets with a request: Use more Tucker Carlson.

“It is essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who sharply criticizes the actions of the United States [and] NATO, their negative role in unleashing the conflict in Ukraine, [and] the defiantly provocative behavior from the leadership of the Western countries and NATO towards the Russian Federation and towards President Putin, personally,” advises the 12-page document written in Russian. It sums up Carlson’s position: “Russia is only protecting its interests and security.” The memo includes a quote from Carlson: “And how would the US behave if such a situation developed in neighboring Mexico or Canada?”

It is now time for me to point out that were the Russians touting a left leaning pundit we would never hear the end of this, either from the media or the Republicans. Next I have to point out that the Democrats themselves will do precisely nothing to make an issue out of this. Next I have to bemoan the fact that the Democrats seem incapable of propagating a talking point and are also incapable of coming anywhere close to speaking with one voice.

My problem is that I’ve said all this so many times I can’t think of a new way to say it, so if anyone happens to read this they will just have to consider it all said. Is it really too much to ask that the Democrats attack the Republicans for being the fascists that they are?

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Why am I not surprised?

Wednesday, March 9, 2022

It’s apparently a law of nature. The more a Republican accuses others of breaking the law, the more likely it is that they themselves are breaking that law:

Tina Peters, a county clerk running as a Republican for secretary of state of Colorado, was indicted Tuesday evening on 10 criminal counts related to allegations that she tampered with election equipment after the 2020 election.

The indictment, which the district attorney of Mesa County, Colo., announced on Wednesday, is connected to Ms. Peters’s work as a top county election administrator, a role in which she promoted former President Donald J. Trump’s false claims that the election had been stolen.

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On what planet do these pundits reside?

Tuesday, March 8, 2022

How deluded do you have to be to snare a guest spot on the New York Times op-ed page?

Today we are treated to an op-ed by Melissa Murray, who is a professor of law at New York University. It seems fairly clear that Professor Murray is unaware of the political developments taking place over the last 30 years or so. Here are the introductory paragraphs:

Much has been made in recent days of the racial and gender diversity that President Biden’s choice of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson would add to the Supreme Court. But there has been surprisingly little discussion of the fact that she would join Justice Amy Coney Barrett as the court’s second working mother.

Two years ago, when Justice Barrett was nominated, her status as a working mother was invoked by her Republican supporters as additional evidence of her fitness for the court. At her confirmation hearings, she was praised as “a walking example of how young children and demanding work can coexist.”

She goes on with a lot of drivel about how the Democrats should be using this as an argument to garner support for Jackson’s nomination.

Let’s put aside the fact that one’s status as a mother truly is irrelevant in considering one’s qualifications for a Supreme Court judgeship. In Barrett’s case, her “motherhood” was more a sign of religious fanaticism than anything else.

Professor Murray, like so many members of the punditocracy, actually seems to believe that some Republicans might be swayed to vote for Jackson if the same argument they deployed for Barrett were deployed for Jackson. To which one must truly ask, where has the professor been for the past 30 years or so? The Republicans have already shamelessly argued that there’s really no hurry to confirm Jackson, and whyever are the Democrats in such a hurry when surely we should be collegial about these sorts of things. Does she really think the response to a motherhood argument would be anything other than scorn? Hasn’t she noticed that hypocrisy is the standard operating procedure for the Republican Party, enabled by a media (the Times being a prime offender) that has decided that since this type of behavior is normal for Republicans it’s hardly worth commenting on, much less condemning, while any such thing coming from a Democrat will be roundly and repeatedly condemned.

This is one time when I am definitely with the Democrats. Expect no Republican support for Jackson. Push her through as quickly as you can. You might call out Republican hypocrisy but don’t really bother to try to convert any of them. The more you try, the less success you will have. All you really have to worry about is Manchin and Sinema.

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Just wondering

Saturday, March 5, 2022

By no means am I trying to defend Melania Trump, who is a truly loathsome individual, but I often wonder just how much personal involvement she has in the various recent scams to which her name has been attached. There was the NFT scam from a few weeks ago, and now there’s yet another Trump style charity scam, which seems awfully similar to the charity scams perpetrated by her husband and step-children, though this one is attributed solely to her.

She has come to her own defense through a series of written statements, which could have been authored by anyone and were most certainly not written by her. All of her scams seem to be almost indistinguishable from those perpetrated by the very stable genius.

It would be interesting to know whether she is even aware of these things before they blow up in scandal. Again, these are the type of things that someone in her position could have pulled off easily if they’d stayed out of politics and just kept to their place as rich grifters. Maybe if the criminality gets more pronounced we’ll find out her real role, because if she ends up on the wrong end of a criminal indictment she’ll surely turn on whoever is actually hatching these scams.

Now whoever could that be?

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A glimpse into our legal future

Monday, February 28, 2022

The Supreme Court is now considering how it will go about destroying the ability of the federal government to deal effectively with climate change. The situation is explained at length here I’ll just quote the gist, which is long enough:

West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency is one of the most frustrating cases that the Supreme Court has heard in many years. It involves an Obama-era environmental regulation that never took effect, that President Joe Biden’s administration has no intention of reinstating, and that imposed such minimal obligations on power plants that it’s not clear the regulation really required them to do anything in the first place.

But a majority of the Supreme Court appears likely to strike down this undead environmental regulation after Monday morning’s oral arguments in the West Virginia case, even though the conservative justices seem to have struggled to figure out how they could write an opinion that actually does so.

Depending on how they decide to resolve that question, a decision striking this zombie regulation could potentially gut the EPA’s ability to control emissions from power plants.

West Virginia concerns the Clean Power Plan (CPP), a 2015 policy that was widely touted as President Barack Obama’s most ambitious effort to fight climate change when it was announced. Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency projected that the CPP would lower carbon emissions from US power plants by about a third from where they stood in 2005.

But the CPP turned out to be cursed. In a party-line vote in 2016, the Supreme Court suspended the plan before it could actually do anything. Then Donald Trump became president, and Trump’s EPA formally repealed the CPP and replaced it with a much weaker rule.

…

Yet, while West Virginia is really a case about a defunct rule that wouldn’t have accomplished much even if did go into effect, most of the justices appeared unbothered by arguments that the Court shouldn’t even be hearing this case in the first place.

Instead, much of Monday’s hearing focused on whether the Court should apply its “major questions doctrine,” a judicially created doctrine that limits the power of federal agencies to hand down particularly consequential regulations.

As explained above, longstanding legal doctrines create a presumption in favor of a federal agency’s interpretation of a federal statute when that statute is ambiguous. The major questions doctrine, however, flips that presumption on its head — essentially pushing courts to reject an agency’s reading of a federal law if the agency attempts to do anything too consequential.

As the Court explained the major questions doctrine in Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA (2014) that “we expect Congress to speak clearly if it wishes to assign to an agency decisions of vast ‘economic and political significance.’” So, under this doctrine, when regulations have “vast economic and political significance,” the Court will block the regulation, unless the statute very clearly gives the agency authority to issue such a rule.

…

The problem with the major questions doctrine is that it is extraordinarily vague. Determining which regulations have “vast economic and political significance” necessarily requires the justices to exercise subjective judgment, and they can apply such judgment selectively to strike down regulations they don’t like and uphold regulations they do approve of.

Monday’s oral arguments seemed to confirm that it will be difficult to rein in the doctrine and place principled limits on it — if that’s even something this Court would like to do. Many of the justices spent the hearing fumbling about for a way to read the major questions doctrine so that it would apply to a defunct regulation that hardly does anything.

First off, I’m not sure when in one’s first year of law school you would know enough to see that this case is moot, but it would be fairly early on. In fact, it’s as moot as moot can be. The rule is not in effect and never went into effect. Moot cases are subject to dismissal. So the court is keeping it alive solely to use it as a vehicle to find a way to prospectively tie the hands of the federal government whenever it tries to deal effectively with climate change or any other issue in a way that upsets the feelings of the various industries that make money polluting the planet or are in some other way misusing their power. The major question doctrine is a new one on me. It appears to be custom made to allow the court to gut any regulation it doesn’t like while upholding any regulation it does. After all, it’s hard to see how the case realistically presents a major question when it is moot. So the ruling, if based on that doctrine, as seems likely, will likely presage a future in which the federal government will be unable to address matters of vital concern within the jurisdiction of federal agencies without the blessing of the Supreme Court, which will be bestowed less and less frequently. We are really in trouble as a nation.

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It’s okay to support a dictator if you’re a Republican

Monday, February 28, 2022

I have nothing original to say about the Ukraine situation, except to add my voice to those of others who have pointed out that Putin, besides being a very powerful man, is a very mentally ill man. Maybe that’s a prerequisite to obtaining power these days. See e.g, the very stable genius.

Anyway, one thing I’ve noticed is the fact that the press has failed to cover the Republican Putin enablers/worshippers as it would any Democrat who defended a dictator who just attacked a sovereign nation without any justifiable reason. But I won’t go on at length, as Eric Boehlert has done a much better job than could I, both here and here. I highly recommend reading him on a regular basis.

While Boehlert does mention the press’s neglect to quote Democrats in the various articles whitewashing Republican treason, he doesn’t mention the fact that Democrats themselves have been unnecessarily quiet about that treason. In the second article to which I’ve linked, Boehlert notes that while the press has run hundreds of articles about how this or that issue will hurt Democratic chances in the next election, no one has written about the extent to which out and out support for a twenty first century Hitler might hurt the Republicans. Unfortunately, unless Democrats actually make an issue of it, loudly and strongly, and start criticizing the press for coddling Republican Putin enablers, they may in fact derive no benefit from the issue.

It’s sort of mind boggling. I remember when I was a kid, the Democrats were still sort of successfully running against Herbert Hoover. If they didn’t control the narrative at least they were a factor. Nowadays they almost reflexively adopt a defensive crouch. Perish the thought that they should be perceived as impolite or lacking in bipartisanship. There are a few exceptions, but it’s really time for the big names to step up and start pounding on the Republicans and on the press.

Am I repeating myself?

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C’mon Dick!

Tuesday, February 22, 2022

I’m a fan of Dick Blumenthal, but really, can he be serious about thinking that the Democrats should try to make the vote on the new Supreme Court justice bipartisan:

Here’s how one Democrat inexplicably sees it: “For the institution, it’s important because the Supreme Court has become so polarized that a bipartisan vote might well help to begin to restore some of the credibility it has lost,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat. As if the radical, unprecedented actions of the six extremists on the court taking a sledgehammer to the entire Democratic agenda, not to mention core civil and political rights, won’t be so bad if a few Republicans vote for a liberal replacement among the minority.

The Supreme Court won’t regain its credibility by a bipartisan vote and in any event it’s absurd to think that the Republicans will do anything but oppose anyone Biden nominates. The court might, someday, regain its credibility when several current members die, resign, or get put in prison, but all of those events are unlikely in the short term. I will be dead before a time comes when the court regains credibility, if that ever happens, which I sincerely doubt.

It sometimes appears that United States Senators live in a fantasy world.

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The vultures are circling

Tuesday, February 22, 2022

These are discouraging times, but we must take our pleasures where we can. It is somewhat satisfying to watch things play out in the courts as the genius is faced with the reality that he is no longer entitled to the bogus presidential immunity that has somehow become black letter law in this country.

The latest and one of the most encouraging developments is a judge’s decision that Eric Swalwell et. al. have sufficient grounds to proceed in their lawsuit accusing the genius for fomenting the attempted coup. It should come as no surprise that the right to free speech, even for a president, does not include the right to incite an attempted coup. Of course, you never know what the Trumpian appellate judges may rule on the issue, but I do suspect they will let this ruling stand, as they have got what they want from the genius, and prefer to spend their time smoothing the way for Republicans to steal future elections. For instance, see here, where they have once again refused to protect the genius from Congressional investigators.

This puts Trump and his various co-conspirators (Rudy, et. al.)in the position of having to either sit for depositions or suffer a default, as Alex Jones did both here in Connecticut and in Texas, when he refused to produce relevant documents through discovery. If he does sit for a deposition he can take the Fifth, but if he goes that route he might as well take the default, because it raises an adverse inference against him. If he answers questions he’ll fuck up and basically admit everything because the days when he could think rationally, if there ever were such days, have long since passed. He’ll incriminate himself unknowingly even while trying to lie his way out of liability.

And here is where we come to the fly in the ointment, which I’ve written about before, but have yet to see discussed elsewhere. Whether the case goes to trial as to liability, or just to a hearing in damages after a default, a jury will have to decide the ultimate outcome. In any rational system, anyone who voted for Trump, or at least anyone who believes the Big Lie, should be excluded from the jury pool. These are people who are not interested in facts and will not feel bound to go where those facts may lead.

The question is: can the judge exclude them, either legally or as a practical matter. True MAGA types would no doubt lie in order to get on the jury, and unless they left tracks on social media that the plaintiffs lawyers could use to disqualify them, they could get on the jury even if the judge sought to exclude them. If we assume excluding them would somehow be successful, would that exclusion hold up on appeal? I think it’s entirely possible that on this issue the appellate courts would throw Trump a bone. It wouldn’t be hard to come up with a bullshit justification for doing so.

But we can always hope.

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Trump loses in court yet again

Thursday, February 17, 2022

So the genius and his offspring have been ordered to appear for depositions in New York. (Just one of many stories here). And, sort of by the way, where does he find these lawyers who don’t seem to be either stable or geniuses?

But I digress.

He’ll appeal, but it’s a state case, so the Supreme Court can’t step in and save him, even if it wanted to, but they’ve got what they want from him and they’ve cut him loose. The state courts will probably make short work of the appeal, and judging by the incompetence of his lawyers (see linked article), it’s unlikely they’ll make a coherent argument, if one actually exists.

But none of this means he’ll ever sit for the deposition. He’s in Florida, and the state of New York doesn’t have the ability to arrest him there and transport him to New York for the deposition. What happens if he doesn’t willingly come? That would be up to the state of Florida.

The constitution has a provision that requires a state to deliver up a person wanted in another state. It reads as follows:

A Person charged in any State with Treason, Felony, or other Crime, who shall flee from Justice, and be found in another State, shall on Demand of the executive Authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having Jurisdiction of the Crime.

While this would appear to mandate said delivery no further questions asked, in fact the states have reserved to themselves the right to determine whether the person demanded should be delivered up. I believe the Supreme Court may have limited that recently, but it remains the case that it will likely be up to Florida to determine if he has to go to New York.

Trump hasn’t been charged with a crime, so I don’t know if the constitutional provision even applies, nor do I know whether there’s some federal statute that may apply. In any event, it will likely ultimately be up to Rick DeSantis to decide whether to force him to New York, which might put DeSantis into a decidedly awkward position. He does want to get re-elected, and I don’t think he can win if he only gets MAGA votes. Then again, he can’t win without them.

Of course Trump can always plead the fifth, but it’s a civil case, and that can be used to raise an adverse inference, which could ultimately lead to the further destruction of the Trump business empire. My own prediction is that he’ll refuse to go to Florida, and DeSantis will protect him. It will be interesting to see what the fallout from all this will be. It should be hard for the press to treat it as simply another example of Trump being Trump, and it puts even more pressure on folks like McConnell to do the impossible by putting distance between themselves and Trump while keeping the MAGA idiots happy. Trump will respond to that as he always does. He doesn’t care about anyone but himself, and if he believes that the Republicans aren’t being sufficiently loyal, he’ll do what he can to destroy them.

Time to repeat myself: If only the Democrats had the ability to turn all this into talking points and use it against the Republicans, but with few exceptions, they don’t.

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The rich are different from you and me

Tuesday, February 15, 2022

If you are an inveterate reader of blogs, as am I, in addition to or in lieu of the mass media, you have no doubt read lots of speculation about the chances of Trump being indicted.

I didn’t practice criminal law, as I learned early on that in that area of practice, it’s ordinarily two against one, the prosecutor and the judge against the defendant. So, while I certainly agree that Trump has been a criminal all his life, I don’t have a fixed opinion about whether he’ll end up indicted, much less in jail.

When I read this post about David Cay Johnston’s prediction that Trump would be indicted on racketeering charges, I was all set to take issue with him on one point, until I came to the last sentence of this paragraph:

“Donald has learned very well from the notorious Roy Cohn how to evade and denounce law enforcement. He’s gotten away with stuff I’ve been writing about since the late ’80s. But what’s different here is, you now have seasoned teams of prosecutors and civil investigators from the attorney general who know what they’re looking for and they have lots of witnesses who come in and testified about what Donald is doing and his web of lies is catching up with him, finally, after all these years, after the New Jersey casino authorities failed to do their job and regulate him to the point that he actually cheated customers at one of his casinos. The only time that ever happened in Atlantic City. Finally, you’re having focused law enforcement on Donald Trump, which never would have happened if he hadn’t become president,” Johnston concluded.

Indeed. One thing I do know about criminal law is that one is free to break all manner of criminal laws if one is rich and one keeps to oneself while proceeding with your crime spree. It is definitely not a good idea to get involved in politics if you’re a career criminal, because that’s when people start looking at those crimes a bit. Along with his mental illness, or perhaps as part of it, Trump is hubristic. Most white collar crooks will keep a relatively low profile, but he has never done that, even while committing crimes pretty much in plain sight. If he had never run for president he would still be committing those crimes, and none of these grand juries would be in existence.

Speaking of Trump’s crimes, it’s very nice that his accounting firm has bailed on him, and disavowed the financial statements they prepared, but it’s a bit much for them to ask anyone to believe they weren’t aware of the fraud all along.

And speaking of criminals, maybe Melania actually loves the guy after all, since she appears to be plotting to follow him to prison.

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