Just to be clear: IF the verdict is Not Guilty, I will be disappointed, but I won't be in the streets protesting and calling it a sham. IF, on the other hand, he's found guilty, you can count on anger and protests from Trump and his allies.
I politely asked Stan on his blog if he were going to have any comments about the Trump conviction. I asked because he (and some of the others) are often pretty topical and this is, after all, the conviction of the century (or one of them)... a HUGE story!
Stan didn't post my comment but instead castigated me for asking the question, saying...
I cannot imagine why you would think it would be appropriate here at all.
This, on a post about the "sin" of Ananias and Saphira, who famously lied and cheated to enrich themselves and who were, according to the story in Acts, held accountable for their lying and cheating.
In other words, it is an EXTREMELY close and apt parallel to Trump's cheating and lying, for which he has now been convicted.
What are the odds that ANY main conservatives (or ANY of the conservative blogs I've communicated with over the years) have ANYTHING to say about law and order and holding the pervert king accountable for his crimes for which he has been convicted in a legitimate court of law by a jury of his peers?
The "conservative" claims to be about family values and respect for law and order is now officially dead. That dawg don't hunt.
No response from Stan, but no doubt, he doesn't get that this post of his is a very apt place to talk about holding cheaters accountable.
Ah! I sent him a note, too. Saying that if his only response is that he didn’t vote for Trump then his Christianity has zero respect for the prophets. Amos and Micah, Isaiah and Jeremiah railed against corrupt Kings who abused the poor the widow and orphan.
None of which does show the least concern.
So, his silence is part of the problem he doesn’t think he belongs to.
Neither Stand and Craig (both of whom are not thrilled with Trump, on a low grade level, and Craig, nonetheless, reports voting for him twice and will likely a third time, unless this changes his mind - don't hold your breath) seem to get that their silence in the face of the Perverted king and their defense of him by way of their mild disagreement with him are exactly part of the problem that lets the corrupt conman continue in power, openly breathing threats upon our free republic. EVEN in the face of this conviction by his peers in a free court of law doesn't humble the narcissist. He doubles down on his threat to Democracy and decent people doing their jobs... And Craig and Stan are just as culpable - if not more so - than the Marshals and Glenn's etc, etc.
To the degree that they express mild discomfort with Trump, it's to say that he seems mildly dishonest, but BIDEN IS DISHONEST TOO! - as if the comparison is comparable. That, and he's a serial cheater on women and his wife. That is, the ONLY thing they have any serious reservations about is his mere cheating on wives who bought into his wealth trap... as if that was anything like the worst of the man.
AND EVEN THEN, the Craigs of the world STILL vote for him!
Craig is working very hard to convince his own conscience that the GOP as molded by Trump isn’t a deal breaker for his coded style of brutality. The clarion and brazen destructiveness of Trumpers threatens to overwhelm his sense of self righteousness.
So his posts are increasingly frantic efforts to mythologize an equivalency.
The irrationality of claiming that Biden can manipulate New Yorkers - the home and culture of Trump’s success - and pull the strings of Justice is belied by how Hunter is going from hot water to hot pot legally. Much less that a GOP driven Congressional committee led by Jim Jordan simply cannot manufacture enough evidence for Impeachment questions against Biden.
Nor does he realize that he is only marginally more put out with Biden than progressive Democrats. I’m not enamored of Biden AT ALL. Never have been. I don’t like seeing or hearing him really.
But… come on! The only equivalency with Trump is Bernie Madoff.
Well, today, Stan reiterates his commitment to deny help to the poor and the imprisoned, the widow and orphan, the foreigner and refugee.
He tucks it all behind his reading of the gospels.
But doesn’t deal with Matthew 25: 32-46. Which plainly says that we can only enter heaven if we, in fact, help all these sorts of people.
And ends, “ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment but the righteous into eternal life.”
Never mind how many legal experts, including Dem voting Jonathan Turley and Alan Dershowitz, have listed the many easily reversible actions of the presiding judge. This was a shame trial reminiscent of Stalinist, Mao and Hussein show trials and to celebrate this verdict is an indictment of you now notorious moral bankruptcy.
Stalin and Mao sent poets and playwrights, novelists and composers to the gulag or prison. Which is exactly where you would send them, Marshal. Hussein slaughtered all those who would not full throatedly support him. Trump and you defame and would dispossess critics from their freedom
You are, of course, correct, Feodor. There is literally NO connection or resemblance to the Moscow Trials of fascists and Trump's trial where he was found guilty. We are a free nation that at least nominally abides by our laws. We do not have fascists in power (although we have one candidate running who certainly can be seen as leaning that way, with his constant admiration of strong man dictators and his constant attacks on our nation, on our judicial system, on our free press and on good and decent legal servants and politicians, imperfect though they may be). Our legal experts are generally trustworthy and there is no indication of a significant problem with our jurors.
These many crimes Trump has been charged with (and the ones he's now been convicted of) could only be "fake" or "rigged," if there were some sort of mass conspiracy of legal experts, the justice department, lawyers and judges, jurors and other experts and ordinary people, from left to middle to right. In short, the sheer volume of numbers and consistency of the charges against Trump and the legal players involved indicates that, of course, there is no mass left-middle-right wing conspiracy to unjustly pick on the poor pervert king.
Trump has tried to live above the law for all of his sad, unjust life and has mostly succeeded, thanks to the actual benefits of being wealthy, white and privileged/powerful in the ways that Trump has been. It's simply caught up to him. Trump almost certainly knows it, himself (although no doubt he's surprised, thinking his wealth and privilege would always keep him above the law). The only ones who believe his nonsense claims are the useful idiots willing to believe an obviously deviant conman.
As a side note, I went exploring today.
Stan Craig Marshal Neil Glenn Jesse
...and almost NONE of the other Trump loyalists (and I know Craig and Stan will complain about being noted that way, but they are what they are) who I've engaged with over the years have had ANYTHING to say about this story of the century yesterday or today.
With one exception: Wintery Knight. HE says that he's said all along that Trump almost certainly can't win and this conviction is the final nail in the vampire's coffin (my paraphrase). He's saying "you should have listened to me and thrown your support behind De Santis... our ONLY hope now to have a GOP president is to throw Trump under the bus and choose another candidate and quick." (again, my paraphrase).
No doubt, Marshal at least will take offense at this but this one time, at least, WK has the right of it. I hope.
To my point that I would, of course, have abided by an innocent charge (and most if not all of us on the left), and my wondering what response the extremists on the right would have, we're starting to see. A lot of silence from the conservatives I typically interact with, some silence or mild protest from a lot of conservatives in power, and a good deal of false claims of a "stolen innocent result" and attacks on the legal system from Trump and his acolytes.
Also, this:
Supporters of former President Donald Trump, enraged by his conviction on 34 felony counts by a New York jury, flooded pro-Trump websites with calls for riots, revolution and violent retribution.
Some called for attacks on jurors, the execution of the judge, Justice Juan Merchan, or outright civil war and armed insurrection.
“Someone in NY with nothing to lose needs to take care of Merchan,” wrote one commentator on Patriots.Win. “Hopefully he gets met with illegals with a machete,” the post said in reference to illegal immigrants.
On Gateway Pundit, one poster suggested shooting liberals after the verdict. “Time to start capping some leftys,” said the post. “This cannot be fixed by voting."
Threats of violence and intimidating rhetoric soared after Trump lost the 2020 election and falsely claimed the vote was stolen. As he campaigns for a second White House term, Trump has baselessly cast the judges and prosecutors in his trials as corrupt tools of the Biden administration, intent on sabotaging his White House bid. His loyalists have responded with a campaign of threats and intimidation targeting judges and court officials...
And on it goes. It's fairly predictable, when we look at the violent rhetoric of Trump and his MAGA allies, including the white supremacists and Christian nationalists' who've long been engaged in violence and longing for a civil war to "take back our country."
The calls for retribution began immediately after the verdict was announced. Experts who track online extremism told CNN the volume of violent rhetoric in the last 24 hours is as high as it was after the FBI’s search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property in August 2022.
“Hope these jurors face some street justice,” one anonymous user on a pro-Trump forum wrote. Another suggestively asked, “Wouldn’t [it] be interesting if just one person from Trump’s legal team anonymously leaked the names of the jurors?”
Well, you know me. I try to look at this from the lens of blackness. What do adult black and brown people see about this? Of course they are disgusted by the current generation of vile and bitter division among White people. But they aren't surprised. Their grandparents have horror stories. Same with America's Jews. Same with Chinese Americans, Indian Americans. Vietnamese, Cambodian Americans. Same with LGBTQ+ and the physically, emotionally challenged or neurodivergent folks.
All we are going through, as so-called White people, is the end of Empire. Everywhere every news source I use today has two things ever present: Trump, and the centenary of Kafka's death on Monday.
Kafka fictionalized the anxiety, the brutality, and the irrationality of the populace and the bureaucratic institutions of a dying Austro-Hungarian Empire. Everyone turned against each other either trying to abet a crescendo of authoritarianism or hiding from it. Oddly, that Empire ultimately collapsed in its mission to be an inclusive Imperial realm: Christians, Jews, and Muslims coexisting, though under a Christian monarchy. Nonetheless, as it came apart, anti-Semitism and ant-Muslim fervor crested.
Ours is an Empire built on dispossession and slave labor, an extractive coercion that built up and propped up corrupt foreign regimes that oppressed their own citizens in order to get rich.
So, while it is very important to represent the democratic, law abiding justice that yesterday brought us, Trump is just a symptom of the fact that our current situation is just 1 generation away from a blithely racist, White dominant default society at the end of 500 years of brutality and all the narratives that were generationally learned justifying White dominance.
It is the slight majority of White people who are going mad because the identity we were given is now found to be built on rotting piers set in place by violence.
And it is the vast majority of people who have been Othered, outcast, oppressed (and perversely ogled) by Whiteness on whom we minority of so-called White people must depend. (And in this election cycle, White women who want to preserve their right over their own bodies; and those who will now drop Trump because they draw a fake line in the sand over technicalities appearing at the top of their own moral elasticity.)
Craig and Marshal and the rest of the thugs are instinctively repulsed by this and call it illegitimate politics - labelling it as pandering - because it disassembles White Supremacy. They cannot conceive of majority non-White society, and therefore must deny their full citizenship and their collective electoral tipping point.
"Trump is just a symptom of the fact that our current situation is just 1 generation away from a blithely racist, White dominant default society at the end of 500 years of brutality and all the narratives that were generationally learned justifying White dominance."
I think that's vital to remember both the vulgar brutally of our history and just how very recent that change is.
"It soon became clear that one of America’s two major political parties was determined to undermine faith in the US judicial system with expressions of rage and demands for revenge, creating an alternative view of the US in which Joe Biden is a clear and present danger to US democracy."
What is clear is that large numbers of them have become very hostile to basic US systems. They've long been anti-journalism and now they're overtly hostile towards are election system, legal system, justice system, education systems, experts, scientists and, when they give a whiff of opposition, anti-military systems and anti-law enforcement systems.
They're making themselves the party opposed to the US... except for the US as it was 50+ years ago.
Craig, the “values” guy has a history of a Machiavellian argument: it’s going to hurt Democrats to treat Trump like he’s not above the law. He has the capacity, apparently, to bear a lot of moral compromising cognitive dissonance.
I think that the armchair insurrectionists are unsure whether a felony conviction will hurt or help Trump. Which is a position that precisely pinpoints right wing evangelical moral vacuity.
Dan, Craig has misrepresented the case and the prosecution’s argument. Likely because he reads manipulative lies like it’s news reporting. Campaign finance laws are not central to this case. The jury needed only to reasonably ascertain Intent to defraud NY citizens of information relevant to evaluating his candidacy. The prosecution did not claim campaign finance malfeasance.
Craig writes:
“Falsifying business records under NY law is a misdemeanor, unless done to hide a crime. [This is the only thing that’s entirely true. Bragg says that crime was a violation of the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), or of a NY statute making it illegal to influence an election by “unlawful” means. But if the latter, what is the “unlawful means?” An alleged violation of FECA. So it comes down to FECA. There are two potential violations here. One is acceptance of an unlawful contribution by the campaign. The other is incorrect reporting of a contribution by the campaign.
Either way, we have to have a campaign contribution.” ___
No, we don’t. Here are the clear facts:
In 2017, Cohen and Allen Weisselberg, an executive at the Trump Organization, reached an agreement about how Cohen would be repaid for the $130,000 that he sent to Daniels in exchange for her silence. Weisselberg detailed the calculations in handwritten notes that were shown to the jury at trial. Cohen would receive $130,000 for the Daniels payment, plus $50,000 intended for a technology company that did unrelated work for Trump. That amount was doubled to account for taxes that Cohen would have to pay on the income. Weisselberg then tacked on an extra $60,000 as a bonus for Cohen, who was upset that his regular year-end award had been cut. The total worked out to $420,000.
Cohen would be paid in a series of monthly payments of $35,000 over the course of 2017. The first check was for $70,000, covering two months. Cohen sent an invoice to the Trump Organization for each check, portraying the payment as his "retainer." Every time he was paid, a bookkeeper generated a record for the company's files, known as a voucher, with the description "legal expense." The first three payments were made from Trump's trust, while the remaining nine came from his personal account.
Each of the 34 charges against Trump corresponded to a check, invoice and voucher generated to reimburse Cohen. The prosecution laid out the charges in a chart that jurors saw several times during the trial. Prosecutors said Trump knew the payments were to reimburse Cohen for the Daniels payment, not for his legal expenses.
The jury voted to convict on all 34 counts.
Under New York law, falsification of business records is a crime when the records are altered with an intent to defraud. To be charged as a felony, prosecutors must also show that the offender intended to "commit another crime" or "aid or conceal" another crime when falsifying records. In Trump's case, prosecutors said that other crime was a violation of a New York election law that makes it illegal for "any two or more persons" to "conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means," as Justice Juan Merchan explained in his instructions to the jury. What exactly those "unlawful means" were in this case was up to the jury to decide. Prosecutors put forth three areas that they could consider: a violation of federal campaign finance laws, falsification of other business records or a violation of tax laws.
Jurors did not need to agree on what the underlying "unlawful means" were. But they did have to unanimously conclude that Trump caused the business records to be falsified, and that he "did so with intent to defraud that included an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof."
Trump heads a massive and national effort to subvert democracy. Marshal loves it. But Craig defends it by calling it understandable resentment.
They are all anti Chrust.
“The Wisconsin attorney general on Tuesday filed charges against three allies of Donald Trump accused of taking part in the effort to put forth a slate of fake electors and usurp the 2020 presidential election, according to online court records.
The men – Kenneth Chesebro, a right-wing attorney who helped devise the fake elector plot; Jim Troupis, a former Trump lawyer; and Michael Roman, a former Trump campaign official – are each facing a single forgery charge.”
“MLK was a convicted felon. Ghandi [can’t even spell his name dight] was a convicted felon. Nelson Mandela was a convicted felon. Maybe "convicted felon" isn't the impediment to high office some think it is.”
3 Trump allies indicted in Wisconsin for fake electors scheme.
Republican representatives in PA State House jeered and left at the appearance of 2 Capitol police officers defending the government on Jan 6.
Salaried employees who work long hours for low pay aren’t finding much sympathy among Republicans on Capitol Hill.
GOP lawmakers filed a resolution in Congress on Wednesday that would block the Labor Department from extending overtime protections to millions of salaried workers. ___
Meanwhile, guided by the Biden’ administration, unemployment has remained under 4% for the longest stretch in over 50 years.
The thugs are focused on your worry that a guilty verdict may have brought violence. They think you’re being preposterous and a liberal spreader of false information.
How easily do they forget? The last time the GOP lost a presidential election, a House committee, vice-chaired by a Republican, the daughter of a two term Republican Vice President, concluded with these facts:
1. Trump had knowledge that he lost the 2020 election but spread misinformation to the American public and made false statements claiming significant voter fraud led to his defeat;
2. Trump planned to remove and replace the Attorney General and Justice Department officials in an effort to force the DOJ to support false allegations of election fraud;
3. Trump pressured Vice President Pence to refuse certified electoral votes in the official count on January 6, in violation of the U.S. Constitution;
4. Trump pressured state lawmakers and election officials to alter election results in his favor;
5. Trump's legal team and associates directed Republicans in seven states to produce and send fake "alternate" electoral slates to Congress and the National Archives;
6. Trump summoned and assembled a destructive mob in Washington and sent them to march on the U.S. Capitol; and
7. Trump ignored multiple requests to speak out in real time against the mob violence, refused to instruct his supporters to disband, and failed to take any immediate actions to halt attacks on the Capitol.
31 comments:
Guilty. All 34 counts. A convicted felon.
The people have spoken. We'll see if those actually suffering from TDS accept the will of the people.
(Just kidding. They'll go nuts.)
Dan
[Dan Trabue is marked Safe from being convicted]
I politely asked Stan on his blog if he were going to have any comments about the Trump conviction. I asked because he (and some of the others) are often pretty topical and this is, after all, the conviction of the century (or one of them)... a HUGE story!
Stan didn't post my comment but instead castigated me for asking the question, saying...
I cannot imagine why you would think it would be appropriate here at all.
This, on a post about the "sin" of Ananias and Saphira, who famously lied and cheated to enrich themselves and who were, according to the story in Acts, held accountable for their lying and cheating.
In other words, it is an EXTREMELY close and apt parallel to Trump's cheating and lying, for which he has now been convicted.
What are the odds that ANY main conservatives (or ANY of the conservative blogs I've communicated with over the years) have ANYTHING to say about law and order and holding the pervert king accountable for his crimes for which he has been convicted in a legitimate court of law by a jury of his peers?
The "conservative" claims to be about family values and respect for law and order is now officially dead. That dawg don't hunt.
No response from Stan, but no doubt, he doesn't get that this post of his is a very apt place to talk about holding cheaters accountable.
Ah! I sent him a note, too. Saying that if his only response is that he didn’t vote for Trump then his Christianity has zero respect for the prophets. Amos and Micah, Isaiah and Jeremiah railed against corrupt Kings who abused the poor the widow and orphan.
None of which does show the least concern.
So, his silence is part of the problem he doesn’t think he belongs to.
Neither Stand and Craig (both of whom are not thrilled with Trump, on a low grade level, and Craig, nonetheless, reports voting for him twice and will likely a third time, unless this changes his mind - don't hold your breath) seem to get that their silence in the face of the Perverted king and their defense of him by way of their mild disagreement with him are exactly part of the problem that lets the corrupt conman continue in power, openly breathing threats upon our free republic. EVEN in the face of this conviction by his peers in a free court of law doesn't humble the narcissist. He doubles down on his threat to Democracy and decent people doing their jobs... And Craig and Stan are just as culpable - if not more so - than the Marshals and Glenn's etc, etc.
To the degree that they express mild discomfort with Trump, it's to say that he seems mildly dishonest, but BIDEN IS DISHONEST TOO! - as if the comparison is comparable. That, and he's a serial cheater on women and his wife. That is, the ONLY thing they have any serious reservations about is his mere cheating on wives who bought into his wealth trap... as if that was anything like the worst of the man.
AND EVEN THEN, the Craigs of the world STILL vote for him!
Craig is working very hard to convince his own conscience that the GOP as molded by Trump isn’t a deal breaker for his coded style of brutality. The clarion and brazen destructiveness of Trumpers threatens to overwhelm his sense of self righteousness.
So his posts are increasingly frantic efforts to mythologize an equivalency.
The irrationality of claiming that Biden can manipulate New Yorkers - the home and culture of Trump’s success - and pull the strings of Justice is belied by how Hunter is going from hot water to hot pot legally. Much less that a GOP driven Congressional committee led by Jim Jordan simply cannot manufacture enough evidence for Impeachment questions against Biden.
Nor does he realize that he is only marginally more put out with Biden than progressive Democrats. I’m not enamored of Biden AT ALL. Never have been. I don’t like seeing or hearing him really.
But… come on! The only equivalency with Trump is Bernie Madoff.
Well, today, Stan reiterates his commitment to deny help to the poor and the imprisoned, the widow and orphan, the foreigner and refugee.
He tucks it all behind his reading of the gospels.
But doesn’t deal with Matthew 25: 32-46. Which plainly says that we can only enter heaven if we, in fact, help all these sorts of people.
And ends, “ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment but the righteous into eternal life.”
Never mind how many legal experts, including Dem voting Jonathan Turley and Alan Dershowitz, have listed the many easily reversible actions of the presiding judge. This was a shame trial reminiscent of Stalinist, Mao and Hussein show trials and to celebrate this verdict is an indictment of you now notorious moral bankruptcy.
Stalin and Mao sent poets and playwrights, novelists and composers to the gulag or prison. Which is exactly where you would send them, Marshal. Hussein slaughtered all those who would not full throatedly support him. Trump and you defame and would dispossess critics from their freedom
Get real. Ahole.
You are, of course, correct, Feodor. There is literally NO connection or resemblance to the Moscow Trials of fascists and Trump's trial where he was found guilty. We are a free nation that at least nominally abides by our laws. We do not have fascists in power (although we have one candidate running who certainly can be seen as leaning that way, with his constant admiration of strong man dictators and his constant attacks on our nation, on our judicial system, on our free press and on good and decent legal servants and politicians, imperfect though they may be). Our legal experts are generally trustworthy and there is no indication of a significant problem with our jurors.
These many crimes Trump has been charged with (and the ones he's now been convicted of) could only be "fake" or "rigged," if there were some sort of mass conspiracy of legal experts, the justice department, lawyers and judges, jurors and other experts and ordinary people, from left to middle to right. In short, the sheer volume of numbers and consistency of the charges against Trump and the legal players involved indicates that, of course, there is no mass left-middle-right wing conspiracy to unjustly pick on the poor pervert king.
Trump has tried to live above the law for all of his sad, unjust life and has mostly succeeded, thanks to the actual benefits of being wealthy, white and privileged/powerful in the ways that Trump has been. It's simply caught up to him. Trump almost certainly knows it, himself (although no doubt he's surprised, thinking his wealth and privilege would always keep him above the law). The only ones who believe his nonsense claims are the useful idiots willing to believe an obviously deviant conman.
As a side note, I went exploring today.
Stan
Craig
Marshal
Neil
Glenn
Jesse
...and almost NONE of the other Trump loyalists (and I know Craig and Stan will complain about being noted that way, but they are what they are) who I've engaged with over the years have had ANYTHING to say about this story of the century yesterday or today.
With one exception: Wintery Knight. HE says that he's said all along that Trump almost certainly can't win and this conviction is the final nail in the vampire's coffin (my paraphrase). He's saying "you should have listened to me and thrown your support behind De Santis... our ONLY hope now to have a GOP president is to throw Trump under the bus and choose another candidate and quick." (again, my paraphrase).
No doubt, Marshal at least will take offense at this but this one time, at least, WK has the right of it. I hope.
To my point that I would, of course, have abided by an innocent charge (and most if not all of us on the left), and my wondering what response the extremists on the right would have, we're starting to see. A lot of silence from the conservatives I typically interact with, some silence or mild protest from a lot of conservatives in power, and a good deal of false claims of a "stolen innocent result" and attacks on the legal system from Trump and his acolytes.
Also, this:
Supporters of former President Donald Trump, enraged by his conviction on 34 felony counts by a New York jury, flooded pro-Trump websites with calls for riots, revolution and violent retribution.
Some called for attacks on jurors, the execution of the judge, Justice Juan Merchan, or outright civil war and armed insurrection.
“Someone in NY with nothing to lose needs to take care of Merchan,” wrote one commentator on Patriots.Win. “Hopefully he gets met with illegals with a machete,” the post said in reference to illegal immigrants.
On Gateway Pundit, one poster suggested shooting liberals after the verdict. “Time to start capping some leftys,” said the post. “This cannot be fixed by voting."
Threats of violence and intimidating rhetoric soared after Trump lost the 2020 election and falsely claimed the vote was stolen. As he campaigns for a second White House term, Trump has baselessly cast the judges and prosecutors in his trials as corrupt tools of the Biden administration, intent on sabotaging his White House bid. His loyalists have responded with a campaign of threats and intimidation targeting judges and court officials...
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-supporters-call-riots-violent-retribution-after-verdict-2024-05-31/
And on it goes. It's fairly predictable, when we look at the violent rhetoric of Trump and his MAGA allies, including the white supremacists and Christian nationalists' who've long been engaged in violence and longing for a civil war to "take back our country."
More:
The calls for retribution began immediately after the verdict was announced. Experts who track online extremism told CNN the volume of violent rhetoric in the last 24 hours is as high as it was after the FBI’s search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property in August 2022.
“Hope these jurors face some street justice,” one anonymous user on a pro-Trump forum wrote. Another suggestively asked, “Wouldn’t [it] be interesting if just one person from Trump’s legal team anonymously leaked the names of the jurors?”
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/31/tech/threats-doxxing-trump-jurors/index.html
https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/trump-verdict-violence-threats-merchan-rhetoric-rcna154863
Well, you know me. I try to look at this from the lens of blackness. What do adult black and brown people see about this? Of course they are disgusted by the current generation of vile and bitter division among White people. But they aren't surprised. Their grandparents have horror stories. Same with America's Jews. Same with Chinese Americans, Indian Americans. Vietnamese, Cambodian Americans. Same with LGBTQ+ and the physically, emotionally challenged or neurodivergent folks.
All we are going through, as so-called White people, is the end of Empire. Everywhere every news source I use today has two things ever present: Trump, and the centenary of Kafka's death on Monday.
Kafka fictionalized the anxiety, the brutality, and the irrationality of the populace and the bureaucratic institutions of a dying Austro-Hungarian Empire. Everyone turned against each other either trying to abet a crescendo of authoritarianism or hiding from it. Oddly, that Empire ultimately collapsed in its mission to be an inclusive Imperial realm: Christians, Jews, and Muslims coexisting, though under a Christian monarchy. Nonetheless, as it came apart, anti-Semitism and ant-Muslim fervor crested.
Ours is an Empire built on dispossession and slave labor, an extractive coercion that built up and propped up corrupt foreign regimes that oppressed their own citizens in order to get rich.
So, while it is very important to represent the democratic, law abiding justice that yesterday brought us, Trump is just a symptom of the fact that our current situation is just 1 generation away from a blithely racist, White dominant default society at the end of 500 years of brutality and all the narratives that were generationally learned justifying White dominance.
It is the slight majority of White people who are going mad because the identity we were given is now found to be built on rotting piers set in place by violence.
And it is the vast majority of people who have been Othered, outcast, oppressed (and perversely ogled) by Whiteness on whom we minority of so-called White people must depend. (And in this election cycle, White women who want to preserve their right over their own bodies; and those who will now drop Trump because they draw a fake line in the sand over technicalities appearing at the top of their own moral elasticity.)
Craig and Marshal and the rest of the thugs are instinctively repulsed by this and call it illegitimate politics - labelling it as pandering - because it disassembles White Supremacy. They cannot conceive of majority non-White society, and therefore must deny their full citizenship and their collective electoral tipping point.
I think it's our one hope of becoming better.
Has Trump's conviction broken conservative bloggers? They seem to have gone radio silent. I've expanded my search and just not seeing much at all.
Are they busy licking wounds? planning their civil war? Actually reconsidering their candidate?
(Nah, just joking on that last. )
Dan
Feodor...
"Trump is just a symptom of the fact that our current situation is just 1 generation away from a blithely racist, White dominant default society at the end of 500 years of brutality and all the narratives that were generationally learned justifying White dominance."
I think that's vital to remember both the vulgar brutally of our history and just how very recent that change is.
Dan
"It soon became clear that one of America’s two major political parties was determined to undermine faith in the US judicial system with expressions of rage and demands for revenge, creating an alternative view of the US in which Joe Biden is a clear and present danger to US democracy."
What is clear is that large numbers of them have become very hostile to basic US systems. They've long been anti-journalism and now they're overtly hostile towards are election system, legal system, justice system, education systems, experts, scientists and, when they give a whiff of opposition, anti-military systems and anti-law enforcement systems.
They're making themselves the party opposed to the US... except for the US as it was 50+ years ago.
Dan
Craig, the “values” guy has a history of a Machiavellian argument: it’s going to hurt Democrats to treat Trump like he’s not above the law. He has the capacity, apparently, to bear a lot of moral compromising cognitive dissonance.
I think that the armchair insurrectionists are unsure whether a felony conviction will hurt or help Trump. Which is a position that precisely pinpoints right wing evangelical moral vacuity.
Dan, Craig has misrepresented the case and the prosecution’s argument. Likely because he reads manipulative lies like it’s news reporting. Campaign finance laws are not central to this case. The jury needed only to reasonably ascertain Intent to defraud NY citizens of information relevant to evaluating his candidacy. The prosecution did not claim campaign finance malfeasance.
Craig writes:
“Falsifying business records under NY law is a misdemeanor, unless done to hide a crime. [This is the only thing that’s entirely true. Bragg says that crime was a violation of the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), or of a NY statute making it illegal to influence an election by “unlawful” means. But if the latter, what is the “unlawful means?” An alleged violation of FECA. So it comes down to FECA. There are two potential violations here. One is acceptance of an unlawful contribution by the campaign. The other is incorrect reporting of a contribution by the campaign.
Either way, we have to have a campaign contribution.”
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No, we don’t. Here are the clear facts:
In 2017, Cohen and Allen Weisselberg, an executive at the Trump Organization, reached an agreement about how Cohen would be repaid for the $130,000 that he sent to Daniels in exchange for her silence. Weisselberg detailed the calculations in handwritten notes that were shown to the jury at trial. Cohen would receive $130,000 for the Daniels payment, plus $50,000 intended for a technology company that did unrelated work for Trump. That amount was doubled to account for taxes that Cohen would have to pay on the income. Weisselberg then tacked on an extra $60,000 as a bonus for Cohen, who was upset that his regular year-end award had been cut. The total worked out to $420,000.
Cohen would be paid in a series of monthly payments of $35,000 over the course of 2017. The first check was for $70,000, covering two months. Cohen sent an invoice to the Trump Organization for each check, portraying the payment as his "retainer." Every time he was paid, a bookkeeper generated a record for the company's files, known as a voucher, with the description "legal expense." The first three payments were made from Trump's trust, while the remaining nine came from his personal account.
Each of the 34 charges against Trump corresponded to a check, invoice and voucher generated to reimburse Cohen. The prosecution laid out the charges in a chart that jurors saw several times during the trial. Prosecutors said Trump knew the payments were to reimburse Cohen for the Daniels payment, not for his legal expenses.
The jury voted to convict on all 34 counts.
Under New York law, falsification of business records is a crime when the records are altered with an intent to defraud. To be charged as a felony, prosecutors must also show that the offender intended to "commit another crime" or "aid or conceal" another crime when falsifying records. In Trump's case, prosecutors said that other crime was a violation of a New York election law that makes it illegal for "any two or more persons" to "conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means," as Justice Juan Merchan explained in his instructions to the jury. What exactly those "unlawful means" were in this case was up to the jury to decide. Prosecutors put forth three areas that they could consider: a violation of federal campaign finance laws, falsification of other business records or a violation of tax laws.
Jurors did not need to agree on what the underlying "unlawful means" were. But they did have to unanimously conclude that Trump caused the business records to be falsified, and that he "did so with intent to defraud that included an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof."
And Craig’s own cover up deception:
“As I rarely post anything on Friday afternoon, Saturday or Sunday…”
He’s posted on 16 of 21 Fridays.
The conviction came down Thurs afternoon.
Trump heads a massive and national effort to subvert democracy. Marshal loves it. But Craig defends it by calling it understandable resentment.
They are all anti Chrust.
“The Wisconsin attorney general on Tuesday filed charges against three allies of Donald Trump accused of taking part in the effort to put forth a slate of fake electors and usurp the 2020 presidential election, according to online court records.
The men – Kenneth Chesebro, a right-wing attorney who helped devise the fake elector plot; Jim Troupis, a former Trump lawyer; and Michael Roman, a former Trump campaign official – are each facing a single forgery charge.”
Craig is a black hole of a person.
His vile capacity for shit:
“MLK was a convicted felon. Ghandi [can’t even spell his name dight] was a convicted felon. Nelson Mandela was a convicted felon. Maybe "convicted felon" isn't the impediment to high office some think it is.”
Pretty loathsome.
Dan
A week of GOP for thugs:
3 Trump allies indicted in Wisconsin for fake electors scheme.
Republican representatives in PA State House jeered and left at the appearance of 2 Capitol police officers defending the government on Jan 6.
Salaried employees who work long hours for low pay aren’t finding much sympathy among Republicans on Capitol Hill.
GOP lawmakers filed a resolution in Congress on Wednesday that would block the Labor Department from extending overtime protections to millions of salaried workers.
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Meanwhile, guided by the Biden’ administration, unemployment has remained under 4% for the longest stretch in over 50 years.
Oh, and they’re locking up Trump’s chief strategist.
Way to go thugs!
Craig was quoting the Walk Street Journal at you?
“Steady hiring continues to fuel consumer spending, and, in turn, an economic expansion unlike any the us has seen.”
Wall Street Journal
I haven't seen that, I guess. Mostly, he seems to cite "twitter"/X... as if that's some authoritative source.
But yes, if Trump were running right now, they would without a single doubt be promoting how good the economy is.
The thugs are focused on your worry that a guilty verdict may have brought violence. They think you’re being preposterous and a liberal spreader of false information.
How easily do they forget? The last time the GOP lost a presidential election, a House committee, vice-chaired by a Republican, the daughter of a two term Republican Vice President, concluded with these facts:
1. Trump had knowledge that he lost the 2020 election but spread misinformation to the American public and made false statements claiming significant voter fraud led to his defeat;
2. Trump planned to remove and replace the Attorney General and Justice Department officials in an effort to force the DOJ to support false allegations of election fraud;
3. Trump pressured Vice President Pence to refuse certified electoral votes in the official count on January 6, in violation of the U.S. Constitution;
4. Trump pressured state lawmakers and election officials to alter election results in his favor;
5. Trump's legal team and associates directed Republicans in seven states to produce and send fake "alternate" electoral slates to Congress and the National Archives;
6. Trump summoned and assembled a destructive mob in Washington and sent them to march on the U.S. Capitol; and
7. Trump ignored multiple requests to speak out in real time against the mob violence, refused to instruct his supporters to disband, and failed to take any immediate actions to halt attacks on the Capitol.
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