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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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Time for some fighting words

Monday, February 14, 2022

I’ve run across a lot of blog posts and other pieces pointing out that Democratic messaging sucks, this post being only one example. This is a drum I’ve been beating for some time.

I can’t quite understand why the Democrats are so reluctant to call the Republicans out for what they are. We have been hearing for years that Democrats are socialists (sadly, not) but what Democrat has called the Republicans out for what they actually are, that being fascists. It couldn’t be too hard for some clever Democratic strategists to come up with ads and social media posts comparing Republicans to the Nazis and Fascists they so admire.

Most of us were educated in our early years to look askance at book burning and book banning, and there is still a vast constituency that recognizes the danger of that sort of thing, something that is becoming endemic. The comparison’s with the Nazis and the fascists practically write themselves. And how hard could it be to compare the Republican’s drive to disenfranchise their political opponents with fascist techniques.

Along with ratcheting up the attack on the Republicans, the Democrats have to take on the media, and I don’t mean only Fox. The “mainstream” media has a nasty habit of normalizing Republican behaviors while doing their best to put a negative spin on anything the Democrats touch. They do this because they have been brutalized by the Republicans while the Democrats stood silent. Bullshit both siderism is not going anywhere until the Democrats start calling it out for what it is. Case in point, as Eric Boehlert documents here, we got months of But Her Emails stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails, which was in fact a non-story, while the media has spent the last week or so excusing Trump’s obvious criminality. The fact that the press feels free to act like this is directly attributable to the Democrat’s failure to engage in the tactics Republicans used to get a free pass for their criminality.

Oh well. I repeat myself.

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Yet another modest proposal

Thursday, February 10, 2022

We learn here that Marjorie Taylor Greene has warned that Nancy Pelosi has unleashed the Gazpacho on the American people. Really. You can watch the video at the link.

What a fund raising opportunity! Nancy should team with some well known chef of the Mexican persuasion and sell her Gazpacho to the millions of folks who would be happy to make a donation to the Dems in exchange for what would surely be a great soup.

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The Supreme Court isn’t partisan…

Monday, February 7, 2022

It’s just a massive coincidence that it’s rulings all favor Republicans, as they implement their racist agenda to once again deprive African Americans, other minorities, and Democrats generally, of the right to cast a meaningful vote, assuming they are allowed to vote at all.

Today the court stayed a lower court ruling that found -surprise-surprise- that recently drawn voting maps in Alabama “violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting the power of Black voters to elect their chosen candidates”. We need not pause to wonder if the lower court was factually correct, such a result being the whole point of these exercises, be they redistricting or changes to voting procedures, such as the elimination of voting sites in minority areas and the imposition of ID requirements designed to keep “those people” from voting.

As in the abortion case, the party hacks on the court have eschewed any partisan motivation on their part. In fact, they went out of their way to say that -who knows, we may uphold the ruling when we finally get around to hearing the case, but of course we have a busy schedule so don’t expect a decision in time for the next election so the state is good to go for now with the racist map. Basically the same sort of stuff they spewed in the abortion case from Texas. As in that case, they’ll wait until a convenient time to uphold the law, a time when they hope they can do so with little public notice.

The decision was 5-4 with Roberts voting with the dissenters. He is the guy, we should all recall, who wrote the decision gutting the Voting Rights Act, because, as he explained, the Act had worked so well that we no longer had to worry about racists depriving people of the right to vote so we might as well declare the pre-clearance provisions in the act unconstitutional. After which, right away, to the surprise of no one, the Southern states immediately began writing legislation designed to disenfranchise minority voters.

My general impression is that Roberts realizes “his” court has lost all credibility and, for that reason, in an attempt to restore the credibility his court never had, he joins the dissenters when it makes no difference. He’d like for us all to believe that the court is not made up of a bunch of partisan hacks, and presumably some in the media, who refuse to believe the obvious, will go along, even though they make no secret of their partisan bent as they attend right wing political events and give partisan speeches and, in at least one case, rule on cases in which their spouse is politically involved. It will be interesting to see if they go so far as to declare Maryland’s map, which favors Democrats, unconstitutional for some reason that doesn’t apply to Republicans.

If the Democrats ever get a working majority in Congress, look for this court to declare everything they do unconstitutional. We sometimes forget that a similar court actually struck down laws trying to abolish child labor. This court will be just as terrible.

The only thing about which I’m somewhat optimistic is the court’s response to Trump’s inevitable attempt to get away with his crimes. They got what they wanted from him and they don’t need him anymore, and if they rule against him they’ll use it as proof that-“So there! See! We’re not partisan!”

But I blather on. We are doomed.

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Some like them stupid

Wednesday, February 2, 2022

This article got me thinking about a theory that’s been percolating in the back of my head for a while. Here’s the meat of it:

Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican, has twice in the past three days promoted a fictional online rumor that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau fled to the United States because of a protest in Ottawa by a group of truck drivers and others opposed to vaccine mandates, Covid-19 restrictions and Trudeau himself.

Roy even called for Trudeau, who was not in the US, to be deported.

So, here’s the theory, which I fully concede I have not fully developed, but there seems to be plenty of evidence for it: The folks who ultimately decide who will become Republican candidates for Congress or Senate prefer drop dead stupid candidates who will simply do what they’re told. The stupidity is a feature and not a bug.

Now, some might argue that Roy was perfectly aware that there wasn’t an ounce of truth in what he was saying, and that he was playing some sort of three dimensional chess strategy to appeal to the MAGAites. I don’t deny that there’s some Republicans out there that are a bit smarter than Roy, and know that they’re lying, but I’m not buying it in Roy’s case. He saw it on the internet, he wanted to believe it, so he did, and he was stupid enough to pass it on even though Trudeau bashing wasn’t likely to be a net plus benefit to him when weighed against the blatant stupidity. But in all likelihood he doesn’t have to worry about any blowback, because he’s from Texas, probably in a safely gerrymandered district where the home folks are perfectly happy to send an idiot to Congress so they can own the libs.

Roy is hardly alone in his stupidity. Louie Gohmert comes to mind as an individual with an IQ that’s likely even lower than Roy’s.

It must be deeply frustrating to be a reasonably intelligent Democratic Congressperson and have to deal with such rank stupidity on a daily basis.

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The decline of public education

Monday, January 31, 2022

Diane Ravitch’s blog is on my RSS reader, so I am kept aware of the continuing decline of American public education, both by the encroachments of charter (read for profit) schools and various educational “improvements” and strategies that are so obviously horrendous if not cruel that one wonders how anyone could advocate for them. In her latest post she quotes a former elementary school principal who quit in disgust in part because the school system in which he worked was inflicting standardized test on kindergarten students:

One of the experiences that made me aware that my time with public education was coming to an end was when our district began testing kindergartners. I would walk into kindergarten classrooms and watch students struggle and often cry over the inability to navigate iPads. I would leave those classrooms shaken to the core. The students who could work with the devices were not making decisions about correct answers but through simply getting the program to move from question to question. Almost none of these students could understand what the test was asking them to do. This angered me significantly because what we were focusing on ignored the activities that were needed to build an actual foundational developmental standard. No focus on gross and fine motor skill development or social and emotional growth. No test below third grade will give us meaningful understanding of what children actually know and that really is beside the point. The poor quality of most of the tests I have seen keep us from understanding what those form third grade through twelve understand! What we are doing to children, or being asked to do, is criminal and a denial of how the brain can get to a point of meaningful inquiry.

It’s worth noting that a relatively more affluent kindergartner is likely to have a greater ability to navigate an Ipad that one from a less affluent family. Our tests tend to skew favorably toward the fortunate. Funny about that.

Then there’s the movement in red-states to teach fictional history. It’s always been a thing down there, but the movement to legislate it and to punish anyone who attempts to teach the truth is an innovation.

The decline of public education is yet another long term process under way in this country to which we pay little or no attention. It takes various forms. Here in Groton, the number of elementary schools has declined precipitously. Little kids are now being sent to mega schools. I went to a high school where my freshman class exceeded 1500 students, and that was a bit overwhelming, though I was 14 when I started there. Imagine going to a school of comparable size when you’re in kindergarten. All to save a few bucks. I’m thankful that my own kids got through the school system before the town took a wrecking ball to so many schools, but I worry about my grandkids, who may have to attend a mega school, not to mention having meaningless tests inflicted on them for no reason. Luckily they live in blue states, so maybe they’ll learn real history, though you never know what may happen if the Republicans take power in 2024.

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Breyer leaving

Wednesday, January 26, 2022

So Stephen Breyer is leaving. Perhaps he finally realized that his belief in an “above all that” Supreme Court was a fantasy.

I understand Biden intends to pick a black woman as the next justice, which is fine, but there’s another qualification that’s equally urgent. She should be young, say in her early forties. We need to know she’ll be around for a good long time.

I’m looking forward to see how the press handles it when Mitch starts mewling that the Democrats are pushing the nomination far too quickly, and that they should surely wait until after the mid-terms to bring the nominee up for a vote. Other than Fox, will anyone take him seriously? Alas, probably so.

So far as I know Manchin and Sinema have not caused problems with judicial nominees, but don’t be surprised if they start bloviating that they can’t vote for a Supreme Court nominee unless that person has support across the aisle.

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An anniversary of sorts

Saturday, January 22, 2022

Now, this is not to say that Republicans were not lying like rugs long before this day five years ago. It’s just that as of that time, lies became far more respectable both among those on the right who spread them, and those in the media who gave them a respectful hearing. For it is now the case that it is Republican orthodoxy that if they wish to believe a lie an alternative fact they have every right to do so, and the rest of us must respect their right to do so.

If they want to believe the Big Lie, we must treat them with understanding. If they want to treat COVID with horse dewormer not only must we treat that decision with respect, but we must order doctors to prescribe on demand. We have entire television networks dedicated to the sanctity of alternative facts, for which said networks have so far escaped legal liability for after all, what reasonable person would believe them just because they expect you to believe them.

This is not to say that all alternative facts are created equal. Rest assured that if we on the left decided to try our hand at the practice, the press would spend zero time trying to understand us. But as it is, this is the new reality. The right gets to choose it’s own facts and any relationship they may have to reality is purely coincidental. It’s a longstanding practice, but today is the fifth anniversary of their own express acknowledgement that it’s what they do.

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