Last Call For A Rudy, Awakening Con't

The hammer falls again on Rudy Giuliani, and by the time all the construction tools of justice get done with him, he's going to be spending his golden years spitting out chunks of drywall.

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that Rudy Giuliani is legally liable for defaming two Georgia election workers who became the subject of conspiracy theories related to the 2020 election that were amplified by Donald Trump in the final weeks of his presidency.

In an unsparing, 57-page ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell said Giuliani had flagrantly violated her orders to preserve and produce relevant evidence to the election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, resulting in a “default” judgment against him. She is also ordering him to pay Freeman and Moss “punitive” damages for failing to fulfill his obligations.

“Just as taking shortcuts to win an election carries risks — even potential criminal liability — bypassing the discovery process carries serious sanctions,” Howell ruled.

Giuliani spent weeks accusing Freeman and Moss of manipulating ballots during Georgia’s vote counting process after the 2020 election, despite repeated investigations that debunked and discredited the allegations.

The harassment that Freeman and Moss endured as a result of these conspiracy theories is at the heart of some of the criminal charges now facing several of Trump’s co-defendants in the Georgia racketeering case brought by Fulton County prosecutors. Giuliani is charged in that case, in part, for “false statements” to Georgia legislators related to his attacks on Freeman and Moss.

Howell has now ordered the case to proceed to a trial purely to determine the amount of damages Giuliani will now be forced to shoulder on charges of defamation, civil conspiracy and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

It’s unclear how much money the pair will seek in the trial, either in direct compensation for the damage to their reputations and other harms they faced or in terms of punitive damages–which can range to several multiples of the direct damages. The total might be influenced by what Giuliani does next.

Howell has given the former mayor until Sept. 20 to produce documents about his net worth, which she said he has dragged his feet on producing so far, as well as records from his companies related to the revenue produced by his “Common Sense” podcast.

 

Understand that Rudy fucked around so much, the judge ordered him directly into the Find Out phase, to determine solely how many millions he's going to fork over to the two Georgia election workers he made MAGA targets of.  He's guilty, It's just how much the damage will be.

And this will only be the beginning.

Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

The battle over Florida's position on slavery as Black history was far worse than previously thought, as the state objected to AP Black History being taught in the state because the course refused to consider the benefits of slavery for Black Americans, and it was too hard on the slave traders, nearly all of them white.

When Florida rejected a new Advanced Placement course on African American Studies, state officials said they objected to the study of several concepts — like reparations, the Black Lives Matter movement and “queer theory.”

But the state did not say that in many instances, its reviewers also made objections in the state’s attempt to sanitize aspects of slavery and the plight of African Americans throughout history, according to a Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times review of internal state comments.

For example, a lesson in the Advanced Placement course focused on how Europeans benefited from trading enslaved people and the materials enslaved laborers produced. The state objected to the content, saying the instructional approach “may lead to a viewpoint of an ‘oppressor vs. oppressed’ based solely on race or ethnicity.”

In another lesson about the beginnings of slavery, the course delved into how tens of thousands of enslaved Africans had been “removed from the continent to work on Portuguese-colonized Atlantic islands and in Europe” and how those “plantations became a model for slave-based economy in the Americans.”

In response, the state raised concerns that the unit “may not address the internal slave trade/system within Africa” and that it “may only present one side of this issue and may not offer any opposing viewpoints or other perspectives on the subject.”

“There is no other perspective on slavery other than it was brutal,” said Mary Pattillo, a sociology professor and the department chair of Black Studies at Northwestern University. Pattillo is one of several scholars the Herald/Times interviewed during its review of the state’s comments about the AP African American Studies curriculum.

“It was exploitative, it dehumanized Black people, it expropriated their labor and wealth for generations to come. There is no other side to that in African American studies. If there’s another side, it may be in some other field. I don’t know what field that is because I would argue there is no other side to that in higher education,” Pattillo said.

Alexander Weheliye, African American studies professor at Brown University, said the evaluators’ comments on the units about slavery were a “complete distortion” and “whitewashing” of what happened historically.

“It’s really trying to go back to an earlier historical moment, where slavery was mainly depicted by white historians through a white perspective. So to say that the enslaved and the sister African nations and kingdoms and white colonizers and enslavers were the same really misrecognizes the fundamentals of the situation,” Weheliye said.

The objections are an example of how Florida education officials are enforcing broad state laws and rules that restrict how schools can teach about racism and other aspects of history — and how the College Board’s pilot African American Studies course became a casualty of those policies.

 

To recap, everything I said earlier this year about Republicans withing to eliminate Black history and replace it with a white-friendly version where the "exploitation of human beings may have been bad but" nonsense is active, systemic racist violence against the children of an entire state and especially against the descendants of those Black slaves.

 

They want that history gone, if not criminalizing its teaching. 

Republicans hate us. They want to exterminate our history, so they can exterminate us.

Don't expect us to forgive you if you facilitate this brutality.

Black history, Black lives, they all matter.

Tangerine Versus Fourteen

I just don't see any of this getting past SCOTUS, but apparently there are legal challenges to Trump's 2024 election eligibility in the works in several states, starting with New Hampshire and Arizona.

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said Tuesday that his office is figuring out how to handle potential complaints over whether former President Donald Trump should be disqualified from appearing on the 2024 ballot.

The issue centers on the 14th Amendment, which prohibits people who have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from holding public office. Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson raised the theory at last week’s GOP presidential debate that Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6, 2021, might disqualify him on those grounds — a theory that has gained traction among some legal scholars, though others discount the possibility.

Now, the people running state elections are trying to figure out what to do if people bring legal challenges against Trump.

“We have to have a final certification of eligible candidates [for the primary ballot] by Dec. 14 for Arizona’s presidential preference election,” Fontes, a Democrat elected in 2022, told NBC News. “And because this will ultimately end up in court, we are taking this very seriously.”

New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan is dealing with the same question as he watches a potential challenge to Trump brewing in his state. There, a Republican former Trump ally is considering bringing a 14th Amendment challenge against him.

“We need to run an election,” Fontes said. “We need to know who is eligible, and this is of incredible national interest. We aren’t taking a position one way or the other.”

“If there are people who want to fight this out, they need to start swinging because I have an election to run,” Fontes added.

New Hampshire’s Scanlan made the same point on Monday — that he is “not seeking to remove any names from the presidential primary ballot” but is trying to figure out what to do about potential challenges that are brewing.

It'll end up in court and SCOTUS will kill these challenges very quickly, stating that there's no way to disqualify anyone from running under the 14th Amendment, because five or six bought and paid for justices will say so, and that is that. 

Even if Trump were somehow tried and convicted by the end of the year, the Roberts Court would mark him eligible to run, he's going to win the primary, and he'll get 75-80 million votes in November 2024. We're going to have to beat him at the ballot box. We've done it before.

 

I hate to agree with David Frum on anything, but he's right on this. Let the 14th Amendment challenges die. They are doomed wastes of time. 

Besides, the clear winner of last week's debate was Donald Trump, and it's not close. GOP primary voters will absolutely nominate him if given a chance, regardless of his criminal status.

The rest of us will have to vote or we will be destroyed.