Retribution Execution, Con't

House GOP Number 3 Clown Elise Stefanik has filed an ethics complaint against  NY Trump civil trial Judge Arthur Engoron for the crime of overseeing that civil fraud case against Donald Trump.

Rep. Elise Stefanik, the House GOP conference chair, has filed a judicial ethics complaint against the judge presiding over the New York civil fraud case against Donald Trump, accusing Judge Arthur Engoron of “weaponized lawfare” against the former president, and calling on the judge to recuse himself.

Engoron has exhibited “clear judicial bias” against Trump, including by telling Trump’s attorney that the former president is “just a bad guy” whom New York Attorney General Letitia James “should go after,” Stefanik, R-N.Y., said in a letter to the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct. She said the judge has failed to honor Trump’s due process rights, concerns that she said are exacerbated by the former president’s position as the front-runner for the presidential nomination.

Engoron is presiding over a bench trial in the $250 million lawsuit, meaning the judge will also determine guilt and any penalties in the case. The suit, filed by James last year, accuses Trump of inflating asset values for financial gain. Trump testified angrily on Monday in the high-stakes case and has complained and clashed with the judge for weeks.

Engoron issued a partial gag order on Trump last month after he made disparaging remarks about a law clerk on social media and to reporters. He was fined twice for violating the gag order. The judge expanded the gag order last week to include the former president’s lawyers.

“I filed an official judicial complaint against Judge Arthur Engoron for his inappropriate bias and judicial intemperance in New York’s disgraceful lawsuit against President Donald J. Trump and the Trump Organization,” Stefanik said in a statement to NBC News. “Americans are sick and tired of the blatant corruption by radical Leftist judges in NY. All New Yorkers must speak out against the dangerous weaponized lawfare against President Trump.”

Stefanik said in the letter to accompany the complaint that Engoron had illegally gagged Trump’s protected political speech, violated political giving rules with financial contributions to Democrats as recently as 2018, and ignored a decision on the appropriate statute of limitations in the case. At the start of the trial, Engoron “infamously smiled and posed for the cameras,” she noted.

“If Judge Engoron can railroad a billionaire New York businessman, a former President of the United States, and the leading presidential candidate, just imagine what he could do to all New Yorkers,” Stefanik writes. “Judge Engoron’s lawlessness sends an ominous and illegal warning to New York business owners: If New York judges don’t like your politics, they will destroy your business, the livelihood of your employees, and you personally. This Commission cannot let this continue.”

“All Americans, including political opponents, must receive due process and equal protection under our U.S. and New York Constitutions,” Stefanik wrote. “Judge Engoron’s disdain for President Trump and his politics are evident, and the Commission must take corrective action to restore a just process and protect our constitutional rights. Judge Engoron must recuse from this case.”

You can tell how badly things are going for Trump in this case if he called up Stefanik and had her file this formal complaint to try to force Judge Engoron to recuse himself.  It also becomes a major marker in any expected appeal to a higher court.

Again, Trump's play is get back in office and have all of his legal problems go away. No, he can't pardon a state civil judgment, but he can have SCOTUS toss the case. He has to win in November or he's going to jail, broke and penniless. He just has to outlast the legal process.

We'll see, but this is clearly a long shot. It does however have the advantage of giving Trump fundraising fodder for millions more, which is the real point.

 

 

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Donald Trump's testimony in front of NY civil judge Arthur Engoron today went about as badly as most Trump-watchers (including myself) expected it to go.

As Donald Trump prepared to take the stand in the civil fraud trial that could destroy his business empire, the ex-president and his attorneys settled on a strategy built on spite and unbridled antagonism. According to two sources familiar with the matter and another person briefed on Team Trump’s legal strategies, Trump and his lawyers want to intentionally provoke the judge into a nuclear-level overreaction.

They certainly seem to be carrying out the plan on Monday. Trump dodged questions and ranted about this “haters” while on the witness stand, leading Judge Arthur Engoron to scold him repeatedly and push the former president’s attorneys to rein in their client. “I beseech you to control him if you can,” Engoron implored. “If you can’t, I will. I will excuse him and draw every negative inference that I can.”

An explosive response from Engoron could include ordering Trump to be remanded to a jail cell for the night. The judge in the case had already imposed a gag order on Trump, warning him to refrain from attacks on the judge’s staff. Late last week, the order was expanded to also include Trump’s attorneys. Trump has still shown a brazen willingness to violate it repeatedly. And as bizarre as it may sound, there are attorneys and political advisers to Trump who have told the former president that a so-called “remand order” to put him in custody for repeatedly breaching the judge’s rulings might be a good thing — both legally and politically.

The ex-president’s legal advisers had long ago told Trump that his chances of winning at trial are close to zero — hence, their scorched-earth, “Fyre Festival”-style courtroom performances. According to the three sources, several Trump attorneys and other key allies have advised him that the more the New York judge supposedly “overreacts” — including perhaps remanding Trump — the better their case for an appeal will be.

“I call it the Chicago 7 disruption strategy,” Alan Dershowitz, the celebrity lawyer who defended then-President Trump during his first impeachment, tells Rolling Stone.

“When a defendant honestly believes he can’t possibly get a fair trial from the judge, one of the tactics is to antagonize the judge to a point of causing reversible errors,” Dershowitz says. “That is what happened in the Chicago 7 case, and I was one of the lawyers on the appeal in that case. Abbie Hoffman provoked Judge Hoffman to such a degree that the judge made mistake after mistake. And courts of appeal often reverse convictions or verdicts when the judge has made serious errors.”

In recent weeks, the former president and some of his lawyers in the New York civil fraud trial have discussed the likelihood of Engoron very aggressively responding to Trump team’s strategy of relentless hostility and defiance. The tactics have included attacks on Engoron’s court clerk, filibustering the prosecution’s witnesses with repetitive questions, and raising legal arguments the judge had already specifically prohibited.

This has included Trump asking his legal advisers if the judge would, or could, actually go so far as to send him to jail for a short time, the sources tell Rolling Stone. Trump has been told such an order is probably unlikely — though Engoron has publicly put the option on the table. This is one reason why Trump and his counselors have kept up with their brazen strategy of infuriating a judge who has openly threatened the former president with possible jail time.

The legal team has further assured Trump that even if he were remanded, they would likely be able to deploy a variety of legal tactics to keep him from spending any time behind bars. According to two other sources with knowledge of the situation, some Trump advisers have already reached out to certain outside attorneys to see if those lawyers would be interested in joining that potential fight to keep Trump out of jail. (Some of those lawyers have preemptively turned Team Trump down.)

In addition, there have been recent conversations among some of Trump’s 2024 campaign brass of how much of an immediate fundraising boost they would enjoy, if a New York judge were to try to put Trump in a cell for even a minute. “All the cash in the world,” one Trump political adviser says.

Our legal system is not built to handle Trump. As I told you months ago, the Trump plan is to goad Engoron and the other judges in his various cases into an either ruinous sanction that will be used for grounds to appeal, or to make the case impossible to prosecute, or both.

Right now Trump is running his playbook perfectly. Judge Engoron clearly knows this. So how much will he continue to let Trump get away with? 

The answer appears to be as much as Trump can and everyone in America knows it.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

The judge in Donald Trump's NY civil fraud case has ordered Ivanka Trump to testify.

The judge overseeing the $250 million civil trial against Donald Trump and his company ordered the former president's daughter Ivanka Trump to testify in the case.

Judge Arthur Engoron said Friday she could not be called as a witness before Nov. 1, giving her time to appeal the ruling if she chooses.

Trump's attorneys had challenged New York Attorney General Letitia James' subpoena to Ivanka Trump, noting an appeals court had ruled earlier this year that she should be dropped as a defendant in the case over statute of limitations issues.

They contended the AG's office was trying "to continue to harass and burden President Trump’s daughter long after" the appeals court "mandated she be dismissed from the case."

They also argued that the AG waited too long to subpoena her, and argued the office doesn't have jurisdiction over her because she no longer lives in the state.

The AG's office countered that Ivanka Trump, a former White House official, still has information important to their case.

"While no longer a Defendant in this action, she indisputably has personal knowledge of facts relevant to the claims against the remaining individual and entity Defendants. But even beyond that, Ms. Trump remains financially and professionally intertwined with the Trump Organization and other Defendants and can be called as a person still under their control," the AG contended in a court filing.

The office said it wanted to ask her questions about Trump's former Washington, D.C. hotel, and noted she profited from the sale.

"Ms. Trump remains under the control of the Trump Organization, including through her ongoing and substantial business ties to the organization," the AG argued, adding that she "does not seem to be averse to her involvement in the family business when it comes to owning and collecting proceeds from the OPO (hotel) sale, the Trump Organization purchasing insurance for her and her companies, managing her household staff and credit card bills, renting her apartment or even paying her legal fees in this action. It is only when she is tasked with answering for that involvement that she disclaims any connection."

Ivanka Trump's siblings Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump and their father are all expected to testify in the case and have been listed as witnesses by both the AG and the defense.

 

Again, it's not like Donald Trump was able to consistently commit corporate fraud without the knowledge of the other officers of the Trump Corporation, i.e. Ivanka and her two chucklehead brothers.  We'll see what comes of this, but I expect the ruling against Trump is going to be enough to really hurt.

We'll see

 

 

 

Mr. Jones Goes To Poverty

A federal judge has ruled that white supremacist whackjob Alex Jones cannot use bankruptcy to get out of his billion-dollar plus judgment for defaming Sandy Hook families.

 

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones cannot use his personal bankruptcy to escape paying at least $1.1 billion in defamation damages stemming from his repeated lies about the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre, a U.S. bankruptcy judge ruled Thursday.

Bankruptcy can be used to wipe out debts and legal judgments, but not if they result from "willful or malicious injury" caused by the debtor, according to a decision by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez in Houston, Texas.

Courts in Connecticut and Texas have already ruled that Jones intentionally defamed relatives of school children killed in the mass shooting, and they have ordered Jones to pay $1.5 billion in damages.

Lopez ruled that more than $1.1 billion of those verdicts, awarded for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress, cannot be wiped away in bankruptcy. But he ruled that other parts of the verdicts, including $324 million in attorneys' fees that were awarded as punitive damages in the Connecticut case, could possibly be discharged.

It was not clear whether those punitive damages were attributable to "willful" and "malicious" lies, or whether they could instead be attributed to merely "reckless" conduct, Lopez wrote. Lopez said he will hold a trial to sort out the precise amount of the damages that could be discharged.

Attorneys for Jones and the Sandy Hook families did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

 

Jones is going to owe these families the better part of hundreds of millions, and he's going to have to pay up. The system works, at least in this one case. 

We'll see what the judge comes up with as a figure, but I'm hoping it's enough to break Jones completely, both his back account and the shriveled raisin he calls a soul.

These Disunited States, Con't

Divisions between supporters of President Biden and Donald Trump are getting deeper, and it's starting to look pretty grim out there in the irreconcilable differences department in the latest survey from UVA and Sabato's Crystal Ball.

 

In a head-to-head race between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, 52% said they plan to vote for Biden and 48% for Trump, mirroring 2020 outcomes. Respondents reported similarly negative views of both candidates, with 40% approving and 50% disapproving of Biden’s job performance, and 39% approving and 53% disapproving of Trump. Voters split 40%-35% in favor of at least probably supporting Democratic candidates over Republican candidates in the 2024 congressional elections, with 25% opting for a middle ground, prioritizing qualifications over party affiliation.

Those who intended to support one candidate expressed a great deal of suspicion toward supporters of the other side, expressed in roughly even proportions among both Trump and Biden voters:

— A staggering majority of both Biden (70%) and Trump (68%) voters believed electing officials from the opposite party would result in lasting harm to the United States.

— Roughly half (52% Biden voters, 47% Trump voters) viewed those who supported the other party as threats to the American way of life.

— About 40% of both groups (41% Biden voters, 38% Trump voters) at least somewhat believed that the other side had become so extreme that it is acceptable to use violence to prevent them from achieving their goals.
Playing with fire

When rated on a scale from 0 (completely disagree) to 100 (completely agree), 69% of respondents at least somewhat agreed (defined as a response of 61 or higher on the 100-point scale) with the statement, “Democracy is preferable to any non-democratic form of government.” However, nearly half of the overall sample frequently expressed opinions that veered towards authoritarianism.

A significant share of respondents also expressed doubts about both the future of democracy and even the United States as it is currently composed. Roughly two in five (41%) of respondents leaning towards Donald Trump in 2024 at least somewhat agreed with the idea of red states seceding from the Union to form their own separate country, while 30% of Biden supporters expressed a similar sentiment, but for blue states. Disturbingly, nearly one-third (31%) of Trump supporters and about a quarter (24%) of Biden supporters at least somewhat agree that democracy is no longer a viable system and that the country should explore alternative forms of government to ensure stability and progress.

Respondents were also presented with a range of statements suggesting using state power to achieve certain outcomes, gauging the respondents’ willingness to employ authoritarian methods for partisan aims.

Those who intend to vote for Biden in 2024 were likelier than Trump voters to express support for the following (percentages shown are those who expressed at least some agreement with the statement):

Freedom of speech and rights: 31% of Biden supporters, in contrast to 25% of Trump supporters, at least somewhat agreed with limiting certain rights, including freedom of speech, to safeguard the feelings and safety of marginalized groups.

Regulation of discriminatory views: A significant 47% of Biden voters, as opposed to 35% of Trump voters, believed the government should regulate or restrict the expression of views deemed discriminatory or offensive.

Firearms control: There’s a pronounced divide regarding gun control, with 74% of Biden supporters favoring restrictions on the quantity and types of firearms, irrespective of constitutional interpretations. In contrast, only 35% of Trump supporters felt the same.

Wealth redistribution: Addressing income inequality by redistributing all wealth over a certain limit to address income inequality garnered support from 56% of Biden voters, compared to 39% from Trump voters.

Corporate diversity: A substantial 69% of Biden voters believed in mandating policies requiring corporations to ensure diversity at all levels of leadership. This sentiment was shared by 43% of Trump voters.

When examining the sentiments of those leaning towards Trump in the upcoming 2024 elections, the following preferences emerged:

National symbols and leaders: 50% of Trump voters, compared to 32% of Biden voters, at least somewhat agreed that laws should be enacted to require citizens to show respect for national symbols and leaders.

Suspending elections: In times of crisis, 30% of Trump supporters felt that elections should be suspended, with a slightly smaller proportion (25%) of Biden supporters echoing this sentiment.

Patriotism and loyalty: 37% of Trump voters, versus 24% of Biden voters, believed in enacting laws to restrict the expression of views deemed unpatriotic or disloyal.

Presidential powers: Concerning national security decisions, 37% of Trump voters were in favor of giving the president the authority to bypass Congress, while 31% of Biden voters shared this perspective.

Protest regulations: 45% of Trump supporters, against 30% of Biden supporters, felt that laws should be enacted that limit demonstrations and protests that the government deems potentially disruptive to public order.

An almost identical number of Biden (37%) and Trump (36%) voters at least somewhat agreed on the need for certain religious groups to be subjected to government monitoring and limitations to ensure national security.

“We stand on the precipice of a developing emergency,” said Larry J. Sabato, director of the Center for Politics. “Dislike of the other side combined with a pervasive disregard for the fundamental freedoms contained in the U.S. Constitution poses a grave threat. If these sentiments go unchecked and grow, our nation could face disastrous division.”

 

Here's the thing, though: Democrats/Biden supporters want things like gun control, income equality and laws protecting minority views. Republicans/Trump supporters want a militaristic patriotic dictatorship where elections are suspended in "times of crisis".

These two things are not the same level of authoritarian fascism, folks.

Last Call For Israeli Getting Serious Out There, Con't

As I mentioned last week, nothing good will come from Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu's war cabinet government, and apparently that fact is going to be proven in near-record time with a planned emergency suspension of civil liberties for journalists across the country.

Israel's communications minister is proposing emergency regulations that would allow police to arrest citizens and journalists who publish content deemed to "harm national morale".

Under Shlomo Karhi's proposal, those restrictions could be placed upon publications that have been used as a "base for enemy propaganda".

Journalists and other citizens could have their homes searched, property seized and could be placed under arrest for speech the government deems undesirable.

The proposal comes on the ninth day of fighting between Israel and Palestinian groups, which has killed at least 2,450 Palestinians in Gaza, including 724 children and 458 women. In the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, 56 people have been killed by Israeli fire. Meanwhile, at least 1,300 people have been killed in Israel.

Earlier on Sunday, Karhi said he was seeking a possible closure of Al Jazeera's local bureau, accusing the Qatari news station of pro-Hamas incitement and of exposing Israeli soldiers to potential attack from Gaza.

The proposal to shut down Al Jazeera had been vetted by Israeli security officials and was being vetted by legal experts, Karhi said at the time, adding that he would bring it to the cabinet later in the day.

Al Jazeera and the government in Doha had no immediate comment.

"This is a station that incites, this is a station that films troops in assembly areas [outside Gaza]... that incites against the citizens of Israel - a propaganda mouthpiece," Karhi told Israel's Army Radio.

In the age of TikTok war correspondents, Instagram military analysis and Twitter/X/Whatever propaganda and disninformation, locking up journalists is bad enough, but locking up citizens for spread of information deemed "harmful" by Israel shouldn't surprise anyone. 

The folks who brought you "Hamas beheads babies!!!!" which of course turned out to be completely fabricated is a reminder that nobody does disinformation quite like the IDF. And when Al Jazeera called bullshit on that story this weekend, well, no wonder Israel wants to get rid of them.

Orange Meltldown, Con't

The Trump Organization fraud trial in Manhattan continued as formed CFO Allen Weisselberg took the stand for a second day, but that testimony was cut short as NY AG Tish James's office confirmed they were looking into a Forbes Magazine report from Thursday claiming that Weisselberg committed perjury Tuesday when testifying about the value of Trump's properties in the state.

The Trump Organization’s former chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg’s testimony reached an abrupt and unexpected end on Thursday afternoon, just hours after Forbes magazine accused the convicted tax cheat of perjuring himself during an earlier stint as a witness.

Weisselberg insisted on Tuesday from the witness stand that he “never focused” on calculating the square footage of the former president’s Trump Tower triplex, a three-floor penthouse in his namesake skyscraper.

Two days later, on Thursday, Forbes reported that emails not currently in the attorney general’s possession show otherwise.

A source close to New York Attorney General Letitia James confirmed that her office is looking into the latest Forbes report.

Hours after the publication of that story, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron convened a sidebar with attorneys for the state and defense, but the subject of their private huddle remains unknown. Weisselberg was excused for the day shortly after that conversation, as attorneys for both sides reserved the right to call him back.

I'm not lawyer, but this seems really bad for both Weisselberg and for Trump's defense in the case.

Forbes senior editor Dan Alexander wrote that his old emails and reporter notes contradict those denials, pointing out in his story that "Weisselberg absolutely thought about Trump’s apartment—and played a key role in trying to convince Forbes over the course of several years that it was worth more than it really was."

"Given the fact that these discussions continued for years, and that Weisselberg took a very detailed approach in reviewing Trump’s assets with Forbes, it defies all logic to think he truly believes what he is now saying in court," Alexander added.

Earlier this week, Trump attacked Alexander by name on Truth Social, labeling him a “psycho” and his news organization a “rag" after it dropped the former president from its world billionaires list for the second time in three years. 

Those Trump social media comments were also posted hours after James entered a series of Forbes’ fact-checking emails with Weisselberg and other executives into evidence. Alexander, whose byline appeared on the story knocking Trump off Forbes’ billionaires list, was one of the staffers who sent those emails.

Considering Trump's overinflation of the value of his properties is at the heart of this fraud case, I'm betting Trump wish Weisselberg had kept his mouth shut, or at least taken the 5th because he definitely screwed up here.

We'll see what the results are, but at this point if there was any shred of hope that Trump would prevail, that hope died screaming as it was shot into the sun. 

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Again, Trump is deliberately attacking judges, prosecutors, and court officers during his trials in order to drive hatred towards them, but also to play a game of high-stakes chicken where Trump believes he can force judges to take action against him and "prove" the trials -- and the charges against him -- are nothing more than punishment for a corrupt and evil government. He's trying to martyr himself and create a groundswell of support to win in 2024. Tuesday's actions at his civil trial were no exception to this plan.

 

The New York judge presiding over Donald Trump's civil fraud trial on Tuesday issued a gag order after the former president attacked his clerk by name and shared her image on social media.

“Personal attacks on members on my court staff are unacceptable, inappropriate, and I won't tolerate it [in my courtroom],” said New York State Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron.

He added later to "consider this a gag order for all parties from posting about any members of my staff."

The judge rebuked the "untrue and personally identifying posts" about a staff member.

“Schumer’s girlfriend, Alison R. Greenfield, is running this case against me. How disgraceful! This case should be dismissed immediately!!” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform, along with a picture of the clerk and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

The post appeared to show a photograph of Greenfield standing next to Schumer, without any more context. Fact-checkers note that false rumors about Schumer and infidelity appear to trace their origins to a now-shuttered satirical website.

Engoron didn't mention the former president by name, but the remarks clearly referred to him. The judge said he ordered the post deleted, and it was. Trump deleted his Truth Social post.

 

And as usual, if somebody gets hurt here, it won't of course be Trump. Again, the plan is to force a judge to sanction Trump in order to massively increase the outrage and the violence.

Our system is not set up to handle a criminal like Trump.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

New York Judge Arthur Engoron has found Donald Trump liable for years of inflated property values resulting in fraudulent Trump Organization loans in NY AG Tish James's $250 million civil fraud case against Trump.

 

A judge ruled Tuesday that Donald Trump committed fraud for years while building the real estate empire that catapulted him to fame and the White House.

Judge Arthur Engoron, ruling in a civil lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James, found that the former president and his company deceived banks, insurers and others by massively overvaluing his assets and exaggerating his net worth on paperwork used in making deals and securing financing.

Engoron ordered that some of Trump’s business licenses be rescinded as punishment, making it difficult or impossible for them to do business in New York, and said he would continue to have an independent monitor oversee the Trump Organization’s operations.

Trump’s lawyer and spokesperson Alina Habba said they intend to appeal the decision, calling it “an affront to our legal system” and “fundamentally flawed at every level.”

Trump has long insisted he did nothing wrong. His son, Eric, railed against the decision Tuesday in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, calling it “an attempt to destroy my father and kick him out of New York.”

“Today, I lost all faith in the New York legal system,” said Eric Trump, an executive in his father’s company and a defendant in the lawsuit. “Never before have I seen such hatred toward one person by a judge — a coordinated effort with the Attorney General to destroy a man’s life, company and accomplishments.”

The decision, days before the start of a non-jury trial in James’ lawsuit, is the strongest repudiation yet of Trump’s carefully coiffed image as a wealthy and shrewd real estate mogul turned political powerhouse.

Beyond mere bragging about his riches, Trump, his company and key executives repeatedly lied about them on his annual financial statements, reaping rewards such as favorable loan terms and lower insurance costs, Engoron found.

Those tactics crossed a line and violated the law, the judge said, rejecting Trump’s contention that a disclaimer on the financial statements absolved him of any wrongdoing.

“In defendants’ world: rent regulated apartments are worth the same as unregulated apartments; restricted land is worth the same as unrestricted land; restrictions can evaporate into thin air; a disclaimer by one party casting responsibility on another party exonerates the other party’s lies,” Engoron wrote in his 35-page ruling. “That is a fantasy world, not the real world.”

 

Trump is pretty well fucked, innit he? 

Well, he would be if I didn't expect the entire case to be overturned on statutes of limitations issues on appeal, and Trump won't have to pay a dime, but otherwise, he's fucked. If Judge Engoron's ruling holds, the Trump Organization is effectively done in the state of New York.

With Judge Engoron's decision made, we'll see what the NY appellate court now says about the statue of limitations on the fraud charges, possibly as soon as Thursday.

Stay tuned.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

Just as with Rudy Giuliani's civil trial last month, the judge in E. Jean Carroll's civil defamation case against Donald Trump has also reached a liability ruling finding the defendant liable for damages.

 

A federal judge on Wednesday ruled that Donald Trump is civilly liable for defamatory statements he made about writer E. Jean Carroll in 2019 when she went public with claims he had raped her decades earlier.

Judge Lewis Kaplan, as part of that ruling, said the upcoming trial for Carroll’s lawsuit against Trump will only deal with the question of how much the former president should pay her in monetary damages for defaming her.

Normally, a jury would determine at trial whether a defendant is liable for civil damages claimed by a plaintiff.

But Kaplan found that Carroll was entitled to a partial summary judgment on the question of Trump’s liability in the case.

He cited the fact that jurors at a trial in a separate but related lawsuit in May found that Trump sexually abused Carroll in a New York department store in the mid-1990s, and defamed her in statements he made when he denied her allegation last fall.

Carroll’s lawyers argued, and Kaplan agreed, that the jury’s verdict in that case effectively settled the legal question of whether Trump had defamed her in similar comments he made about Carroll in 2019.

“The truth or falsity of Mr. Trump’s 2019 statements therefore depends — like the truth or falsity of his 2022 statement — on whether Ms. Carroll lied about Mr. Trump sexually assaulting her,” Kaplan wrote in his 25-page decision in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

“The jury’s finding that she did not therefore is binding in this case and precludes Mr. Trump from contesting the falsity of his 2019 statements,” Kaplan wrote.

The ruling is the latest in a series of big losses for Trump in lawsuits filed by Carroll.

At the trial that ended in May, Trump was ordered to pay Carroll $5 million in damages for the comments he made after he was president. Trump is appealing the verdict and damages in that case.

The suit that was the subject of Kaplan’s ruling Wednesday relates to statements about Carroll that Trump made when he was president as he denied her claim of rape.

Trial in that case is set to begin Jan. 15, just as the Republican presidential nomination contest is set to heat up with primaries and caucuses. Trump is the front-runner in the contest for the 2024 GOP nomination.

 

2024 is going to be packed with Trump trials, and he's going to lose most of them. Keep that in mind when Democrats insist Joe Biden can't beat him again.

Retribution Execution, Con't

Trump and his MAGA cronies are working on formalizing plans to investigate, charge, and arrest hundreds, maybe thousands of Democratic politicians, Justice Department lawyers, FBI investigators, staffers, and analysts involved in the federal probes of Donald Trump criminal activities starting with Jack Smith, Merrick Garland, and Joe Biden.

 

DONALD TRUMP IS a long, long way from winning the GOP primary, let alone retaking the White House. But he always has revenge on his mind, and his allies are preparing to use a future administration to not only undo all of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s work — but to take vengeance on Smith, and on virtually everyone else, who dared investigate Trump during his time out of power.

Rosters full of MAGAfied lawyers are being assembled. Plans are being laid for an entire new office of the Justice Department dedicated to “election integrity.” An assembly line is being prepared of revenge-focused “special counsels” and “special prosecutors.” Gameplans for making Smith’s life hell, starting in Jan. 2025, have already been discussed with Trump himself. And a fresh wave of pardons is under consideration for Trump associates, election deniers, and — the former president boasts — for Jan. 6 rioters.

The preparations have been underway since at least last year, with Trump being briefed on the designs by an array of attorneys, political and policy advisers, former administration officials, and other allies. The aim is to build a government-in-waiting with the hard-right infrastructure needed to turn the Justice Department into an instrument of Trump’s agenda, according to five sources familiar with these matters and another two people briefed on them.

Trump’s spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

One idea that has caught thrice-indicted former president’s attention in recent months is the creation of the so-called “Office of Election Integrity,” which would be a new unit inside the Justice Department. It would be tasked not only with relitigating Trump’s lies about his 2020 election loss, but also with aggressively pursuing baseless allegations of election “fraud” (including in Democratic strongholds) in ways that Trumpist partisans believe the department has only flirted with in the past.

This idea was recently pitched to Trump by a longtime Republican activist and an attorney who’s known the ex-president for years, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter. (Republican officials have also begun voicing their own support for state-level offices of election integrity. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made the proposal a reality in his state. Officials in Tennessee, Missouri, and Wisconsin have proposed the offices, and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, proposed a similarly named office.)

And when it comes to Special Counsel Smith’s office — which just handed Trump his third indictment, this one related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election — the former president and his fellow travelers already know what they want: They want the FBI and DOJ to name names.

This year, close advisers to Trump have begun the process of assembling lists of the names of federal personnel who have investigated the former president and his circle for years, and are attempting to unmask the identities of all the DOJ attorneys and others connected to Smith’s office. The obvious purpose of this, according to one source close to Trump, is to “show them the door on Day 1 [if Trump’s reelected]” — and so “we know who should receive a subpoena” in the future.

Such subpoenas would of course be instrumental in Trumpland’s vows to its voters that, should he return to power, Trump and his new attorney general will launch a raft of their own retaliatory “special counsel” and “special prosecutor” probes to investigate-the-investigator, and to go after their key enemies. As it were, Jeffrey Clark, a former DOJ official and a central figure in Trump’s efforts to subvert the legitimate 2020 presidential election results, has been on Trump’s informal shortlist for plum assignments, including even attorney general, in a potential second administration.

Sources familiar with the situation tell Rolling Stone that Trump and his close ideological allies — working at an assortment of MAGA-prone think tanks, advocacy organizations, and legal groups — are formulating plans for a wide slate of “special prosecutors.” In this vision, such prosecutors would go after the usual targets: Smith, Smith’s team, President Joe Biden, Biden’s family, Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI director Christopher Wray. But they’d also go after smaller targets, from members of the Biden 2020 campaign to more obscure government offices.

“There are almost too many targets to keep track of,” says one Trump adviser familiar with the discussions. Trump and members of his inner orbit have already outlined possible legal strategies, examining specific federal statutes they could wield in a Republican-controlled Justice Department to go after Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who delivered Trump’s first indictment of this year.

 

People should treat this seriously. A second Trump term will be an authoritarian nightmare, and we have to prevent it.  There will be no guardrails and countermeasures next time. As it is, Trump is already vowing retribution and intimidation against the people involved in his legal cases.

Prosecutors on Friday night called a judge’s attention to a social media post from Donald Trump — issued hours earlier — in which they say the former president appeared to declare that he’s “coming after” those he sees as responsible for the series of formidable legal challenges he is facing.

Attorneys from special counsel Jack Smith’s team said the post from Trump “specifically or by implication” referenced those involved in his criminal case for seeking to subvert the 2020 election.

In a court filing just before 10 p.m. Friday, Senior Assistant Special Counsels Molly Gaston and Thomas Windom alerted the judge in Trump’s latest criminal case — U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan — to a combative post Trump sent earlier in the day.

“If you go after me, I’m coming after you!” Trump wrote in all caps Friday afternoon on Truth Social, which is run by a media company he co-owns.

The prosecutors said Trump’s post raised concerns that he might improperly share evidence in the case on his social media account and they urged that he be ordered to keep any evidence prosecutors turn over to his defense team from public view.

“All the proposed order seeks to prevent is the improper dissemination or use of discovery materials, including to the public,” Gaston and Windom wrote. “Such a restriction is particularly important in this case because the defendant has previously issued public statements on social media regarding witnesses, judges, attorneys, and others associated with legal matters pending against him. … And in recent days, regarding this case, the defendant has issued multiple posts—either specifically or by implication—including the following, which the defendant posted just hours ago.”

We'll see what Judge Chutkan does, ordering a response from the Trump legal team by Monday evening.

Denying Trump bail would be a choice fraught with its own dangers, but if you or I posted on social media that we were coming for people after being arraigned on federal charges, you'd better believe there would be consequences. The real "two-tiered justice system" the right keeps squawking about applies to Trump far more than it does Biden.

That's The Sound Of The Police, Con't

The sound of these six white former Mississippi sheriff's deputies who tortured two Black men and shot one in the mouth is a guilty plea deal on federal civil rights charges.

 

Six former Mississippi law enforcement officers have pleaded guilty to charges related to the torture of two Black men, US Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi Darren LaMarca said in a Thursday news conference.

The announcement comes after federal charges were filed against the former law enforcement officers, who “called themselves ‘The Goon Squad’ because of their willingness to use excessive force and not to report it,” according to a federal charging document.

“The people of Mississippi and those of Rankin County expect those who enforce the laws to follow the law, clearly these men did not – they held themselves above the law,” LaMarca said.

The charges include conspiracy against rights, deprivation of rights under color of law, conspiracy to obstruct justice and obstruction of justice, according to online federal court records.

Former Rankin County Sheriff’s Department deputy Hunter Elward faces the most serious of charges – discharge of a firearm during a crime of violence. Court documents name the other officers charged as Brett McAlpin, Jeffrey Middleton, Christian Dedmon, Daniel Opdyke and Joshua Hartfield.

The incident occurred on January 24 in Braxton, Mississippi, just southeast of Jackson. It came to light after two men, Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker, filed a federal civil lawsuit. Many of the claims in the lawsuit were reflected in the federal charging document.

The two men, who are Black, say six White law enforcement officers entered the home they were in and tortured them for nearly two hours, culminating with Jenkins being shot in the mouth.

“The defendants in this case tortured and inflicted unspeakable harm on their victims, egregiously violated the civil rights of citizens who they were supposed to protect, and shamefully betrayed the oath they swore as law enforcement officers,” US Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a statement.

FBI Special Agent in Charge Jermicha Fomby described the alleged actions as “horrific.” He added, “I did not expect this to be the actions that we would have subjected upon our citizens in the year 2023.”

“On behalf of our clients Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker, Black Lawyers for Justice thanks the United States Department of Justice for the historic legal results choices achieved today,” Malik Shabazz, the lead attorney for the victims, said in a statement.

In an interview last month, Parker told CNN: “Justice is what it all boils down to. I’m just like them, you know, whether they in uniform or not.”

 

These assholes are still facing state charges to boot and a plea deal on those charges is expected later this month, and I guarantee you that nothing would have happened to these bastard cops if Trump's "Justice Department" had been the ones in charge still. Merrick Garland got this done in seven months.

 

And yes, in 2023 we're still having to turn to Reconstruction-era anti-Klan laws to prosecute white supremacist bastard cops. Not a hell of a lot has changed for us Black folk, either.

 

Black Lives Still Matter.

 

Orange Meltdown, Con't

As we get closer and closer to Donald Trump's expected federal indictment on January 6th crimes, Trump Whisperer Maggie Haberman and crew find that Jack Smith's target letter included the notion that Trump's 2020 election fraud efforts may be prosecuted under civil rights statutes.

 

Federal prosecutors have introduced a new twist in the Jan. 6 investigation by suggesting in a target letter that they could charge former President Donald J. Trump with violating a civil rights statute that dates back to the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The letter to Mr. Trump from the special counsel, Jack Smith, referred to three criminal statutes as part of the grand jury investigation into Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse his 2020 election loss, according to two people with knowledge of its contents. Two of the statutes were familiar from the criminal referral by the House Jan. 6 committee and months of discussion by legal experts: conspiracy to defraud the government and obstruction of an official proceeding.

But the third criminal law cited in the letter was a surprise: Section 241 of Title 18 of the United States Code, which makes it a crime for people to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person” in the “free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”

Congress enacted that statute after the Civil War to provide a tool for federal agents to go after Southern whites, including Ku Klux Klan members, who engaged in terrorism to prevent formerly enslaved African Americans from voting. But in the modern era, it has been used more broadly, including in cases of voting fraud conspiracies.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to discuss the target letter and Mr. Smith’s theory for bringing the Section 241 statute into the Jan. 6 investigation. But the modern usage of the law raised the possibility that Mr. Trump, who baselessly declared the election he lost to have been rigged, could face prosecution on accusations of trying to rig the election himself.

A series of 20th-century cases upheld application of the law in cases involving alleged tampering with ballot boxes by casting false votes or falsely tabulating votes after the election was over, even if no specific voter could be considered the victim.

In a 1950 opinion by the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, for example, Judge Charles C. Simons wrote of applying Section 241 in a ballot box-stuffing case that the right to an honest count “is a right possessed by each voting elector, and to the extent that the importance of his vote is nullified, wholly or in part, he has been injured in the free exercise of a right or privilege secured to him by the laws and Constitution of the United States.”

In a 1974 Supreme Court opinion upholding the use of Section 241 to charge West Virginians who cast fake votes on a voting machine, Justice Thurgood Marshall cited Judge Simons and added that every voter “has a right under the Constitution to have his vote fairly counted, without its being distorted by fraudulently cast votes.”

The line of 20th-century cases raised the prospect that Mr. Smith and his team could be weighing using that law to cover efforts by Mr. Trump and his associates to flip the outcome of states he lost. Those efforts included the recorded phone conversation in which Mr. Trump tried to bully Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough additional votes to overcome Mr. Biden’s win in that state and promoting a plan to use so-called fake electors — self-appointed slates of pro-Trump electors from states won by Mr. Biden — to help block or delay congressional certification of Mr. Trump’s defeat.

“It seems like under 241 there’s at least a right to an honest counting of the votes,” said Norman Eisen, who worked for the House Judiciary Committee during Mr. Trump’s first impeachment. “Submitting an alternate electoral certificate to Congress (as opposed to casting false votes or counting wrong) is a novel scenario, but it seems like it would violate this right.”

 

It seems fitting to go after Trump with a law used to stop Klan intimidation of voters.

 

We'll see what happens, but expect Jack Smith to go to his grand jury very soon to get indictments.

Insuring The Worst, Ensuring The Worst

As climate change continues to drop more and more intense floods, fires, storms and blizzards, more and more insurance companies will jack up property insurance, or will simply stop issuing new policies altogether, making it impossible to afford to remain in disaster-prone areas.  Florida and California are the most susceptible to this as residents are paying the price. Flood insurance rates in South Florida are tripling in the wake of record Miami flooding and hurricanes last year.

 

Events of the past year have convinced more Florida homeowners of the need to carry flood insurance.

Flooding caused by hurricanes Ian and Nicole caught hundreds, if not thousands, of homeowners across the state by surprise, and without flood insurance.

Similarly, many homeowners affected by last month’s historic rainfall in eastern Broward County had no flood insurance and learned tragically that damage caused by water rising from the ground was not covered by their normal homeowner insurance.

It’s not just flood victims who are experiencing hard lessons about flood insurance.

Just as homeowners are realizing the increased risks of going without flood coverage, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has released data showing that coverage costs are exploding for properties in coastal areas most vulnerable to flooding.

The cost hikes stem from mandates by Congress to require rates charged by the National Flood Insurance Program, which is run by FEMA, to reflect the cost of flood risk to individual covered properties, and to pay down the program’s deficit, which was $20.5 billion as of last November, according to FEMA.

The result is a new risk pricing model called Risk Rating 2.0, which took effect on Oct. 1, 2021, for new NFIP policies and on April 1, 2022, for renewing policies. Rather than set rates solely based on a property’s elevation within a zone on a Flood Insurance Rate Map, the new approach considers more risk variables such as flood frequency, types of flooding, and distance to a water source, along with individual property characteristics like elevation and the cost to rebuild, FEMA’s website states.

Improved modeling, however, is of little comfort to homeowners who will have to pay more for flood insurance at the same time costs of regular multiperil property insurance are skyrocketing.

Recently, FEMA released a spreadsheet that compared average premiums currently and how high they’ll climb under the new pricing model.

For example, homeowners in Boca Raton’s 33432 ZIP code can look forward to a whopping 229% flood insurance premium increase, from an average $950 per policy to $3,128.

In Broward County, the 33305 ZIP code that includes Wilton Manors and Fort Lauderdale neighborhoods near the Middle River will pay 209% more, from $1,099 to $3,400.

In the 33315 zip code, which includes Fort Lauderdale’s Edgewood neighborhood that was among the hardest-hit by last month’s flooding, average rates will increase by 64% — from $863 currently to $1,420.

These numbers are averages. Within each ZIP code are less expensive homes with cheaper coverage costs and pricier homes that will cost even more to insure.

Unsurprisingly, homes nearest the coast, particularly in low-lying areas, cost far more to insure than homes on higher ground in western suburban cities.

For example, homeowners in Coral Springs’ 33071 ZIP code are looking at a total premium increase of just 17.6% — from $669 to $787.

FEMA says the new pricing model will also drive down the cost of flood insurance for customers with low-risk characteristics. Yet, none of South Florida’s ZIP codes will see average rates decrease, FEMA’s data shows.

 

And in California, State Farm will no longer issue new policies for any property in the state. 

Across the country, the climate crisis is wreaking havoc on insurance markets. As climate change fuels more intense storms and wildfires, home insurers in disaster-prone states like Texas, Louisiana, and Florida have stopped issuing and renewing policies. In some cases, companies have even gone under in the aftermath of a particularly damaging natural disaster. As a result, homeowners are contending with skyrocketing premium payments and even beginning to struggle to find insurers willing to cover them at all.

The latest sign of the insurance industry tumult came from State Farm, the largest homeowners insurance provider in California. Last week, the company revealed that it would no longer offer policies to new Golden State customers due to “historic increases in construction costs outpacing inflation, rapidly growing catastrophe exposure, and a challenging reinsurance market.”

“It’s necessary to take these actions now to improve the company’s financial strength,” the company noted in a press release. State Farm indicated it would continue to keep the customers it already has on its books in California.

California’s insurance industry has been struggling to stay afloat in a state increasingly ravaged by fires and floods. Since 2017, when a series of catastrophic fires caused $33 billion in damages, insurers in the state have lost two decades of underwriting profit. As a result, the cost of homeowners insurance has risen by a quarter since 2015, and insurance companies have been withdrawing coverage in the most fire-prone parts of the state in an attempt to reduce the liability on their books. Meanwhile, Californians who have been unable to secure policies from insurance companies have flocked to the California FAIR Plan, the state-run insurer of last resort. The result is an unstable insurance market that appears to be teetering on the edge of crisis.

 

I expect that large sections of the country will be uninsurable at all in the next few years, especially in coastal states and wildfire states. The federal government will have to step in, or no more buildings and homes will be built in entire regions of the country. And even then, expect a lot less new construction ahead.

 

For example in Arizona, the state is already limiting new construction because Phoenix's water situation is unsustainable. 

Arizona has determined that there is not enough groundwater for all of the housing construction that has already been approved in the Phoenix area, and will stop developers from building some new subdivisions, a sign of looming trouble in the West and other places where overuse, drought and climate change are straining water supplies.

The decision by state officials very likely means the beginning of the end to the explosive development that has made the Phoenix area the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country.

The state said it would not revoke building permits that have already been issued and is instead counting on new water conservation measures and alternative sources to produce the water necessary for housing developments that have already been approved.

On Thursday, Governor Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, said Arizona was not immediately running dry and that new construction would continue in major cities like Phoenix. The analysis prepared by the state looked at groundwater levels over the next 100 years.

“We’re going to manage this situation,” she said at a news conference. “We are not out of water and we will not be running out of water.”

Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and its suburbs, gets more than half its water supply from groundwater. Most of the rest comes from rivers and aqueducts as well as recycled wastewater. In practical terms, groundwater is a finite resource; it can take thousands of years or longer to be replenished.

The announcement of a groundwater shortage means Arizona would no longer give developers in some areas of Maricopa County new permits to construct homes that rely on wells for water.

Phoenix and nearby large cities, which must obtain separate permission from state officials for their development plans every 10 to 15 years, would also be denied approval for any homes that rely on groundwater beyond what the state has already authorized.

The decision means cities and developers must look for alternative sources of water to support future development — for example, by trying to buy access to river water from farmers or Native American tribes, many of whom are facing their own shortages. That rush to buy water is likely to rattle the real estate market in Arizona, making homes more expensive and threatening the relatively low housing costs that had made the region a magnet for people from across the country.

“Housing affordability will be a challenge moving forward,” said Spencer Kamps, vice president of legislative affairs for the Home Builders Association of Central Arizona, an industry group. He noted that even as the state limits home construction, commercial buildings, factories and other kinds of development can continue.

And as climate shifts render more and more of the country vulnerable to new flooding, fires, storms and disasters, we'll all be paying much higher premiums for property in the future. Eventually, millions of Americans will be stuck in homes that they can't sell because they are in uninsurable areas, and they'll get to wait until they are wiped out. I guarantee you that the people who can afford to move out will do so, leaving ruined economies and neighborhoods behind.

The people who will pay the highest cost will, as always, be those who can least afford it.

BREAKING: Orange Judgment

The jury in E. Jean Carroll's civil case versus Donald Trump didn't even take a full afternoon to find him liable for sexual assault and defamation and to award her a total of $5 million in damages.

 

A New York jury on Tuesday found former President Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s, but not liable for her alleged rape.

The jury awarded her $5 million in damages for her battery and defamation claims.

Asked on their verdict sheet if Carroll, 79, had proven “by a preponderance of the evidence” that “Mr. Trump raped Ms. Carroll,” the nine-person jury checked the box that said “no.” Asked if Carroll had proven “by a preponderance of the evidence” that “Mr. Trump sexually abused Ms. Carroll,” the jury checked the box that said “yes.” Both allegations were elements of Carroll’s battery claim.

The six men and three women also found Trump had defamed her by calling her claims a “hoax” and “a con job.”

Trump, a 2024 presidential candidate, has consistently denied Carroll’s claims. The jury verdict carries no criminal implications.

The legal standard for liability in the civil case — the preponderance of the evidence — was not as high as in criminal cases. The civil benchmark is that it’s more likely than not that something occurred, while the standard for convictions in criminal cases is proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Carroll sued Trump accusing him of battery and defamation in Manhattan federal court last year, alleging he raped her in the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman department store near his Fifth Avenue home in 1995 or 1996. She first went public with the claim in 2019 in her book, “What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal.”

Trump, first as president and then as a private citizen, called her account a fiction that she concocted to boost book sales, and has said the writer is “not my type.” He did not testify in the case, but portions of his videotaped deposition from October were played for the jury.

The verdict was required to be unanimous.

Carroll was her own star witness at the trial, which began April 25. “I’m here because Trump raped me,” she told jurors during her three days on the witness stand.

 

Oh, and Trump is scheduled to appear on CNN in a town hall segment tomorrow. Another good call by network head Chris Licht.

Sunday Long Read: Little Fires Everywhere

More and more local governments are falling to MAGA extremist terrorists, happening in blue states as well as in red. Our pair of Sunday Long Reads focus on two such counties, first, Ottawa County, Michigan in this piece by WaPo's Greg Jaffe and Patrick Marley:

 

 

The eight new members of the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners had run for office promising to “thwart tyranny” in their lakeside Michigan community of 300,000 people.

In this case the oppressive force they aimed to thwart was the county government they now ran. It was early January, their first day in charge. An American flag held down a spot at the front of the board’s windowless meeting room. Sea-foam green carpet covered the floor.

The new commissioners, all Republicans, swore their oaths of office on family Bibles. And then the firings began. Gone was the lawyer who had represented Ottawa County for 40 years. Gone was the county administrator who oversaw a staff of 1,800. To run the health department, they voted to install a service manager from a local HVAC company who had gained prominence as a critic of mask mandates.

As the session entered its fourth hour, Sylvia Rhodea, the board’s new vice chair, put forward a motion to change the motto that sat atop the county’s website and graced its official stationery. “Whereas the vision statement of ‘Where You Belong’ has been used to promote the divisive Marxist ideology of the race, equity movement,” Rhodea said.

And so began a new era for Ottawa County. Across America, county governments provided services so essential that they were often an afterthought. Their employees paved roads, built parks, collected taxes and maintained property records. In an era when Americans had never seemed more divided and distrustful, county governments, at their best, helped define what remains of the common good.

Ottawa County stood out for a different reason. It was becoming a case study in what happens when one of the building blocks of American democracy is consumed by ideological battles over race, religion and American history.

Rhodea’s resolution continued on for 20 “whereases,” connecting the current motto to a broader effort that she said aimed to “divide people by race,” reduce their “personal agency,” and teach them to “hate America and doubt the goodness of her people.”

Her proposed alternative, she said, sought to unite county residents around America’s “true history” as a “land of systemic opportunity built on the Constitution, Christianity and capitalism.’”

She flipped to her resolution’s final page and leaned closer to the mic. “Now, therefore, let it be resolved that the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners establishes a new county vision statement and motto of ‘Where Freedom Rings.’”

The commission’s lone Democrat gazed out in disbelief. A few seats away, the commission’s new chair savored the moment. “There’s just some really beautiful language in this,” he said, before calling for a vote on the resolution. It passed easily.

A cheer went up in the room, which on this morning was about three-fourths full, but in the coming weeks it would be packed with so many angry people calling each other “fascists,” “communists,” “Christian nationalists” and “racists” that the county would have to open an overflow room down the hall.

 

The second, Shasta County, California featured in this Guardian piece by Dani Anguiano: 

In a seemingly long gone era – before the Trump presidency, and Covid, and the 2020 election – Doni Chamberlain would get the occasional call from a displeased reader who had taken issue with one of her columns. They would sometimes call her stupid and use profanities.

Today, when people don’t like her pieces, Chamberlain said, they tell her she’s a communist who doesn’t deserve to live. One local conservative radio host said she should be hanged.


Chamberlain, 66, has worked as a journalist in Shasta county, California, for nearly 30 years.

Never before in this far northern California outpost has she witnessed such open hostility towards the press.

She has learned to take precautions. No meeting sources in public. She livestreams rowdy events where the crowd is less than friendly and doesn’t walk to her car without scanning the street. Sometimes, restraining orders can be necessary tools.

These practices have become crucial in the last three years, she said, as she’s documented the county’s shift to the far right and the rise of an ultraconservative coalition into the area’s highest office. Shasta, Chamberlain said, is in the midst of a “perfect storm” as different hard-right factions have joined together to form a powerful political force with outside funding and publicity from fringe figures.

The new majority, backed by militia members, anti-vaxxers, election deniers and residents who have long felt forgotten by governments in Sacramento and Washington, has fired the county health officer and done away with the region’s voting system. Politically moderate public officials have faced bullying, intimidation and threats of violence. County meetings have turned into hours-long shouting matches.

Chamberlain and her team at A News Cafe, the news site she runs, have covered it all. Her writing has made her a public enemy of the conservative crowd intent on remaking the county. Far-right leaders have confronted her at rallies and public meetings, mocking and berating her. At a militia-organized protest in 2021, the crowd screamed insults.

The response of parts of her community has left her shocked: “This isn’t how it’s supposed to be to be a journalist. I shouldn’t go to my car afraid one of these guys is gonna bash me in the head with a baseball bat,” she said on a beautiful spring day in Redding late last month.

But it has left her with a sense of urgency, a determination to warn readers about a movement that shows no signs of slowing down and could have national repercussions as extremists try to create a framework that could be replicated elsewhere. “I can’t imagine how bad things can get here,” she said.

 

There may still be a civil war situation, but the way things are going right now, Blue urban counties are losing fights agains Red state legislatures, and red state counties are making it clear that Democrats are no longer welcome and that they will be forced out.

 

Ignore your local government fights at your own peril.

Book Ban Bonanza

A federal judge earlier this month ordered that children's' books banned by county commission officials in Llano County, Texas's only public library be returned to shelves as county commissioners violated the Constitution. This week, the county commission is considering their response to the judge's order and will be voting on whether or not they should be permanently closing the county's library.

 

A small Texas county is weighing whether to shut down its public library system after a federal judge ruled the commissioners violated the constitution by banning a dozen mostly children's books and ordered that they be put back in circulation.

The Llano County commissioners have scheduled for Thursday a special meeting in which the first item on the agenda is whether to "continue or cease operations" at the library.

Leila Green Little, one of the seven local residents who successfully sued the county for banning the books, fired off an email Monday urging county residents to attend the special meeting and give the commissioners an earful.

“We may not get another opportunity to save our library system and, more importantly, the public servants who work there,” Little wrote.

In the message, Little also included a screenshot of a text message that Bonnie Wallace, who is vice chairman of the Llano County Library Advisory Board, sent to one of her supporters. It was obtained by the seven residents as part of the discovery for the civil suit they filed against the county on April 25, 2022.

It read, in part, "the judge has said, if we lose the injunction, he will CLOSE the library because he WILL NOT put the porn back in the kid's section!"

Wallace, who did not return a call for comment from NBC News, was referring to Llano County Judge Ron Cunningham, according to Little. The judge also did not return a call from NBC News. It was not immediately clear what books Wallace was describing as "porn."

The books that Llano County officials removed from the library shelves include Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents”; "They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group" by Susan Campbell Bartoletti; the graphic novel "Spinning" by Tillie Walden; and three books from Dawn McMillan’s “I Need a New Butt!” series.

Last year, an assistant principal at a Mississippi elementary school was fired after he read “I Need a New Butt!” to a second-grade class. The reason? Because the book used words like “butt” and “fart” and included cartoon images of a child’s butt.

Also removed from the library were Maurice Sendak’s "In the Night Kitchen"; Robie H. Harris’ "It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health"; and four other children's picture books with "silly themes and rhymes," like "Larry the Farting Leprechaun," "Gary the Goose and His Gas on the Loose"; "Freddie the Farting Snowman" and "Harvey the Heart Has Too Many Farts," according to the complaint.

The Llano County emergency meeting was called after U.S. District Court Judge Robert Pitman ruled last week in favor of the seven local residents who sued Cunningham, Wallace, the Llano County commissioners, and the other library board members for removing the books.

"Defendants claim to be on a hunt to eradicate 'pornographic' materials," the residents said in their complaint. "This is a pretext; none of the books Defendants have targeted is pornographic."

 

So yes, we've reached the point where screeching conservatives afraid of kids reading about butts and white hoods would rather shut down libraries than allow kids to read.

 

Republicans are getting involved in local government to shut that government and its services down: libraries, schools, public transportation, social services, the whole thing. They're doing so in order to keep the populace ignorant, miserable, and under control.

 

Of course, those who can afford books and private schools and cars and don't need social service programs will be fine. The rest of us are screwed, because we don't count as human anyway. The cost of civilization and all that has become "I got mine, now I'm taking yours."

 

The GOP way.

 

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

Trump is headed back to NYC, this time for NY AG Tish James's civil suit, as he must sit for yet another deposition involving the Trump Organization's tax fraud troubles.

Former President Donald Trump is scheduled to return to New York City Thursday to sit for a second deposition as part of New York Attorney General Letitia James' $250 million civil fraud lawsuit, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.

Trump previously sat for an hourslong deposition in August, prior to James filing her lawsuit that accused Trump, his eldest children and his company of fraudulently inflating the value of the Trump real estate portfolio and his net worth.

The attorney general's office has the right to depose relevant parties after the filing of the lawsuit as part of the discovery process.

Trump is expected to sit for this new deposition Thursday at the attorney general's downtown office. The former president has been seeking to delay the start of the trial in the civil case, but the judge has said the October start is firm "come hell or high water."

Trump did not answer many questions in the first deposition other than affirming he understood the ground rules and the procedures.

When Kevin Wallace, the attorney general's senior counsel, asked what Trump did to prepare for the deposition, he answered: "very little."

When asked questions about his finances, Trump repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment and continued to do so for the next several hours.

 

Expect more of the same, at least as far as Trump's answers are concerned.  The legal assault on Trump's fraud and criminal activity will continue, no matter what the GOP says.

 

 

The Biggest Of Book Bans

Missouri Republicans are eliminating all state funding for public libraries in retaliation for the ACLU suing the state over the state's recent book ban law in school libraries, and the results are going to be dozens of libraries shutting their doors for good.

 

Late Tuesday night, the Missouri House of Representatives voted for a state operating budget with a $0 line for public libraries. While the budget still needs to work its way through the Senate and the governor’s office, state funding for public libraries is very much on the chopping block in Missouri.

This comes after Republican House Budget Chairman Cody Smith proposed a $4.5 million cut to public libraries’ state aid last week in the initial House Budget Committee hearing, where Smith cited a lawsuit filed against Missouri by the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri (ACLU-MO) as the reason for the cut.


ACLU-MO filed the suit on behalf of the Missouri Association of School Librarians and the Missouri Library Association (MLA) in an effort to overturn a state law passed in 2022 that bans sexually explicit material from schools. Since it was first enacted in August, librarians and other educators have faced misdemeanor charges punishable by up to a year in jail or a $2,000 fine for giving students access to books the state has deemed sexually explicit. The Missouri law defined explicit sexual material as images “showing human masturbation, deviate sexual intercourse,” “sexual intercourse, direct physical stimulation of genitals, sadomasochistic abuse,” or showing human genitals. The lawsuit claims that school districts have been pulling books from their shelves.

“The house budget committee’s choice to retaliate against two private, volunteer-led organizations by punishing the patrons of Missouri’s public libraries is abhorrent,” Tom Bastian, deputy director for communications for ACLU-MO said in a statement to Motherboard.

Like in all ACLU cases, the organization is not charging the two Missouri library groups for services. Both library organizations are also run by volunteers – every state has an equivalent of these two organizations that serve public and school libraries. In other words, a politician either lied or didn’t have his facts straight, and now 160 library districts risk losing state aid in June.

“State Aid helps libraries provide relevant collections, literacy based programming, and technology resources to their communities,” Otter Bowman, president of the MLA told Motherboard in a statement. “Our rural libraries rely the most heavily on this funding to serve their communities, and they will be crippled by this drastic budget cut.”

This is just cruelty and retaliation, but that's who Republicans are. The purpose of government is to punish your political enemies for daring to oppose you at all. And the fact that if this becomes law and the state's public library budget is zeroed out meaning libraries in the reddest, rural counties in Missouri will close, well, that's the point.

Last Call For A Supreme Crackdown, Con't

The conservative legal eagles of tomorrow came from all over for the Federalist Society's yearly symposium in Texas this month, but they have one thing in common: the desire to end American democracy and replace it with fascist, theocratic white supremacist rule as Politico Magazine's Ian Ward reports.

To those who have followed the Federalist Society closely since its triumphs at the Supreme Court last year, the symposium’s focus on law and democracy may hardly seem incidental. Since its founding in 1982, the Federalist Society has championed “judicial restraint,” the notion that judges should limit their roles to interpreting the law as written, leaving the actual business of lawmaking to democratically elected legislatures. 

That approach made sense for conservatives when they still saw the federal judiciary as a liberal force dragging the country to the left. But now that conservatives have secured a solid majority on the Supreme Court — and voters in several red states have soundly rejected hard-line positions on abortion — a spirited debate is underway within the Federalist Society about the wisdom of deferring to democratic majorities as a matter of principle.

“From our very beginning, there has been an aspect of judicial restraint, and there has been an aspect that it’s judges’ jobs to interpret the Constitution, that whatever it says, that’s what they should do — and those two can sometimes be in tension,” said Eugene Meyer, the president and CEO of the Federalist Society, as we spoke in a back hallway of the conference center. 

I had only convinced Meyer to talk with me after assuring him and his handler that I wasn’t trying to back him into answering specific questions about cases currently before the Court. At Meyer’s urging, the society goes to great lengths to emphasize that it does not take policy positions or weigh in on the merit of individual cases, preferring to present itself as a neutral “debate society” for right-leaning intellectuals. But Meyer — who tapped his foot nervously as we spoke — was willing to admit that the intellectual winds within the organization are shifting.

“I think it would be fair to say there’s been some movement over time more in the direction of interpreting the Constitution and less in the direction of pure judicial restraint,” he told me.

When I spoke with Blackman, the South Texas college of law professor, he noted that that tension was neatly captured in two of the headline-making decisions that went conservatives’ way in the last Supreme Court term. In the Dobbs ruling, the conservative majority returned the abortion question to state legislatures, limiting federal judges’ role in determining the extent of reproductive rights. Meanwhile, in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen —  which struck down a New York law that set the requirements for individuals to receive a concealed carry permit for handguns — the Court trumped the decision of a state legislature in favor of conservatives’ preferred reading of the Second Amendment. 

But Blackman’s assessment of the direction of the intellectual current within the Federalist Society was even more candid than Meyer’s.

“The norm that judges be restrained and moderate — that ship has sailed,” he said. 

Inside the cavernous ballroom, panelists took turns delivering their remarks from a raised platform, flanked on one side by the American flag and by Texas’s Lone Star Flag on the other. The symposium is hosted by a different law school every year, but there was a tidy irony to the fact that this year’s gathering landed in Texas, which has in recent years seen an influx of conservative transplants seeking refuge from what they see as the insanity and insipient authoritarianism of Blue America.

“Democracy is what philosophers call an ‘essentially contested concept,’” said Daniel Lowenstein, a professor of law emeritus at UCLA and an expert in election law, during a panel on Friday evening. “Differences that seem on their surface to concern the meaning of the word ‘democracy’,” he added, are actually struggles to advance particular and controversial political ideas.”

What democracy does not mean, Lowenstein argued, was “plebiscitary democracy,” or simple rule by democratic majorities. Citing the Federalist Papers — the namesake of the Federalist Society — Lowenstein suggested that governance based on simple mathematical majorities would enable “tyrannical domination of the minority by the majority.” 

“The assumption that only plebiscitary forms [of government] are truly democratic is fallacious, and should be openly and directly contested by those supporting non-plebiscitary positions,” he added. 

Behind me, somebody whispered, “We’re a republic, not a democracy” — a tongue-in-cheek slogan that some conservatives have adopted as a way to slyly signal their approval of minority rule.

Later on in the same panel, Joel Alicea, a law professor at the Catholic University of America, diagnosed the apparent threats facing American democracy today — political violence, abuses of governmental power, and attempted election subversion, to name a few — as symptoms of a deeper malaise. 

“At this point in our society, we can’t even agree whether somebody is a man or a woman, which suggests such a deep level of moral disagreement — and even disagreement about basic notions of reality — that to say that society can form an overlapping consensus is hopelessly naive,” he said. Faced with such fundamental disagreements, Alicea said that citizens have to choose between two approaches: coercion, suppressing disagreements by means of force and intimidation, or conversion, the slow and steady work of persuading people who disagree with you to come around to your point of view. 

 

The people can't rule themselves, but must be ruled by a moral virtuous bureaucratic elite. Congrats, guys, you've discovered the Mandate of Heaven, I'm sure the Chinese would agree with you.

Christ.