Who Owns What, When It's All Debt?

Update: Thanks again to Steve in Manhattan for including this article at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! 

P.S. I am waiting at home this morning to get new toilets installed, so while I'm sitting here I'd like to promote my book Notice a Trend to help pay the bills uh encourage more man reading! And women reading! And sentient rock creatures who travel through space! And...

This is something Comrade Misfit posted over the weekend, and I wanted to delve into this nightmare a little more (by Victor Tangermann at Futurism):

AI companies are pouring untold billions of dollars into enormous data centers in their efforts to sustain increasingly complex and resource-intensive AI models.

It’s an extremely costly undertaking built on seemingly bottomless hype — and a mountain of debt. As Japanese financial newspaper Nikkei Asia found in a recent investigation, just five US tech giants — Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle — are hiding an estimated $1.65 trillion in debt that doesn’t appear on balance sheets. That’s even more than the $1.35 trillion in debt the five companies officially reported in their financial data for the most recent quarter.

This is the sort of thing that screams FRAUD. And nobody's doing anything about it except let it pile up.

Meta alone has amassed around $420 billion in off-balance-sheet debt, according to Nikkei, highlighting how precarious the AI industry’s steep investment in AI has become, and inspiring comparisons to energy company Enron, which collapsed in spectacular fashion in 2001 because of similar debts hidden behind shell companies. Like Enron, they’re using special purpose vehicles, or off-balance sheet arrangements such as legally distinct subsidiaries, as a way to make their financial reporting look healthier than it actually is — often a glaring sign that something is deeply amiss behind the scenes...

That none of these accounting tricks - those shell companies or "special purpose vehicles" - were outlawed when we had the chance spells out just how broken our federal government is when policing the uber-rich megacorps that are "too big to fail."

For the love of God, in my own lifetime we've witnessed financial collapse - the bankrupting of Savings and Loans - after financial collapse - the era of Enron and other tech companies collapsing under their own greed - after financial collapse - the mortgage industry meltdown of 2007-08 that led to a near decade of unemployment and housing woes. That last one directly affected me and my poor parents when I lost my job in 2008, and spent four years looking for a job and unable to sell my home to afford relocating to places where jobs were available.

I've learned a lot from that last economic collapse. For starters, I learned that we shouldn't bail out the CEOs first, we should bail out their victims - us - first, and then send those goddamn bastards to jail for their incompetence and greed. 'Cause one of the things I guarantee you is that these tech companies are getting us to pay in some form or another to cover for the massive costs they're adding up to keep their bubbles afloat. We've seen what happens when those bubbles pop: us taxpayers foot the goddamn bills (again).

I've also come to wonder why these businesses are allowed to accrue so much debt in the first place. My basic understanding of economics tells me debt is bad, and too much of it is very bad. I understand that in the complexities of running a business, companies may borrow loans to cover for expenses today on an understanding that in the future they will have more money to be able to pay off such debts. That they can use those debts to obtain more loans and add more debt to where they have more debts than money on hand is where things start looking insane IMHO.

This is where something like regulations and laws should be in place demanding that businesses hold themselves accountable to some degree: To prevent them from building up too much debt in the first place. You know, some sort of debt cap that says "whoa there, pay this off first before you go putting yourselves into billions more in debt." Without those regulations in place - and we've seen the damage when we've deregulated financial systems like Savings and Loans and the securities/financial markets - those corporate idiots can't stop themselves, spiraling into an ongoing cycle of borrowing and debt all because they're hoping their ship of gold-pressed latinum reaches port that big tech breakthrough pays off.

And this begs the question "WHO is lending these greedheads more and more money to put them further into debt?" The large international banks, obviously, but you have to ask them "At what point do you call in those debts? At what point do you stop lending to these guys - these techbros addicted to their AI hopes - when it's clear they're not going to deliver on any profit?"

In what way is all of this debt any good? Who benefits from this?

Because debt leads to one thing: Control. Any person - or business - deep in debt to another person has to obey the creditor. Otherwise, you lose your business, your car, your home, your livelihood, your very identity.

Debt is another form of slavery.

And if the megacorps collapse under debt, that cascade of financial ruin spreads out: Every other person doing business with them loses money and goes into debt they can't pay, which spreads out even further. A lot of us fell into debt after the housing crisis almost 20 years ago (!), and a lot of us are still paying that off.

Who owns all that debt? We don't, and yet we're the ones who are going to get stuck paying for it (again).

Goddammit. This cycle of economic short-sightedness and greed needs to end.

The Epstein Elites Kan't Speel

I apologize for not blogging that often this month, I will attempt to get back up to speed, but in the meantime this kid (oh GOD I'm old) Josh Johnson is blowing up YouTube with clips of his stand-up routines skewering the billionaire techbro bastards currently tearing down every aspect of human civilization.

And these illiterate elites are trying to shove their artificial intelligence as though that fakery can compensate for their stupidity. Argh.

I'll check back in soon.

To the AI Bots Raiding My Blog

In the past few weeks, I've noticed an insane uptick in traffic to this blog. Normally I'd be thrilled that more people are finding my ramblings to be coherent and plausible (yes I'm an influencer at last) except that I have no idea where the traffic is coming from. 

At least until I saw one source was ChatGPT. 

Crap.

The onslaught by our tech overlords to insert their Artificial Intelligence bots into every crevice of the Internet - Gemini on Google, Copilot on Microsoft products, whatever the hell they call it on Apple devices - is creating an environment where anything posted on the Internet can get vacuumed up by these AI bots as use in someone else's work. Without citing sources or providing links to the original work, and in the case of artists and musicians (and even professional writers) failing to pay them for their work. Violating copyright laws left and right.

So let me state here, loud and clear.

I did not give consent, I DO NOT give consent, I WILL NOT GIVE CONSENT TO HAVE MY WRITINGS USED WITHOUT CREDIT TO MY EFFORTS.

I'm not making any money off this blog, so I can't claim loss of revenue. But I do claim my rights as the person who wrote this junk to get cited by others referencing what I've written. These are my thoughts and opinions and I'm damn well entitled to defend them.

What bothers me is how these AI systems could well go after my published writings, the stuff I have as ebooks. THAT is a source of revenue, I should get paid for what's on the market, and if anybody steals "Road Trip to Vegas" or "The Brides of WiFi" I will be very vexed indeed.

I'm reading up now on how to block AI scavengers from this blog. I've gotten as far as "robots.txt" but I have no idea how to apply to a Blogger site. If anyone's got pointers, please help.

And to the Silicon Valley thieves who think they can take everything and leave us with nothing: Please die in a fire. It's the least YOU can do to save the world from your greed.

Judgment Cometh and That Right Soon: trump is Toast (and Now Broke) (w/ Update)

Update 5/8/24: I think I wrote this thing too fucking soon. When I insisted towards the end that trump was facing four criminal trials in short order, I jinxed it or something. Three of those trials are now suffering delays due to trump-appointed judges or his spamming of the appeals system, and the likelihood is trump won't see those three trials until 2025 after the November election. If that Shitgibbon pulls off a goddamn steal of the election - either through a broken Electoral College or getting a Republican-controlled Congress to gift it to him - he will shut those trials down and never answer for his sins. He's currently facing trial in Manhattan for his hush money schemes to silence stories about his sex scandals during the 2016 election, but he HAS to answer for the serious acts of insurrection and document theft he caused. 

For the LOVE OF GOD, America, do NOT vote for trump or the Republicans this November...

We were waiting for this. trump's civil case over tax evasion and acts of fraud came due today (via Ximena Bustillo at NPR): 

The Friday decision from Judge Arthur Engoron orders Trump and his flagship organization to pay the bulk of that amount: nearly $355 million. Trump's two sons and co-defendants, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., are each liable for $4 million. Allen Weisselberg, a former Trump Organization executive, is liable for $1 million. The total is even higher with interest — more than $450 million overall, according to the attorney general's office.

"Their complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological. They are accused only of inflating asset values to make more money. The documents prove this over and over again. This is a venial sin, not a mortal sin," Engoron wrote in the court filing. "Yet, defendants are incapable of admitting the error of their ways..."

trump is of course not admitting to his errors and is screaming on his social media bubble about how unfair this is, A TOTAL WITCH HUNT, it's a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham. etc.

If you want to view the full travesty of a mockery of a sham, the court filing should be here.

If you want popcorn, that should be in Aisle 9 at your local Publix. If you don't have a local Publix I assure you there will soon be one. (evil laughter from Publix HQ in Lakeland FL)

The judge also decided to limit Trump and his co-defendants' ability to do business in the Empire State. Trump and his companies are prohibited from serving as an officer or director of any New York business or applying for loans for three years. His sons are limited from similar leadership roles for two years.

Jeffrey McConney, ex-controller of the Trump Organization and also a defendant, was not ordered to pay any amount, but he and Weisselberg are permanently barred from serving in the financial control function of any New York corporation or similar business entity registered or licensed in New York state.

One of the thing trump - and his sons - can't do is get any loans from banks that do business in New York, which was one of the ways he'd been inflating his personal wealth and perpetuating his ongoing grifts over the decades. Considering New York City is the financial capital of the world - well, it's one of the major centers along with London, Tokyo, Hong Kong and (checks notes) that one nation-state that allows shell companies to money-launder off-shore accounts - this is tossing a wooden shoe into trump's gears real quick. If trump is trying scheme up anything else to make money down the road... he might not be able to. At least not for the next three years.

This is also going to put a crimp on trump's ability to pay not only the penalties in this case but also the fines and penalties in the Carroll defamation and sexual assault decisions (add in another $88 million to trump's bill).

I mentioned earlier that trump - like most rich folk - doesn't have a lot of real cash on hand to be able to pay these kinds of fines. Most of the wealth is on paper, on the estimated values on properties and businesses owned, and on the amounts floating around in investment portfolios and the stock markets. Either trump is going to be forced to sell a number of properties - at fair market value, NOT the inflated prices trump claimed - or use other people's money. There's a reason why a lot of people - myself included - viewed trump's effort to claim control of the RNC this week was to claim the revenues flowing in to the party organization's campaign coffers.

It's going to be a question of how trump can get to any of that RNC money, if the court-appointed oversight by judge Barbara Jones is expanding over the next 14 months to ensure this order gets enforced (even during the appeal process, by the looks of it).

And he doesn't have that time afforded to him. trump is facing more court trials, specifically the criminal cases. A quick update on those:

The ruling comes at a crucial time for Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. Engoron's decision comes a day after another judge set the date for what could be Trump's first criminal trial, related to hush money payments issued during the 2016 election.

He is facing a combined 91 state and federal charges, including several related to his role to stay in office after he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden...

Just this week, the judge overseeing that Hush Money trial - the DA is trying to claim it's an "election interference" trial because trump evaded campaign finance rules and lied to voters about the matter, but seriously it's the Hush Money To Stormy Daniels case - ruled against trump's bid to have the case dismissed and set the jury selection to start March 25, 2024 (it's also Bustillo but it's a different NPR article, well that IS her beat):

New York Judge Juan Merchan has rejected an attempt to dismiss the charges in the hush money case against former President Donald Trump, and a jury trial will begin as originally scheduled on March 25.

The case was brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who charged Trump with 34 felony counts last year, alleging he falsified New York business records in order to conceal damaging information before the 2016 presidential election. That included hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels, who was threatening to go public with charges that she had had an affair with Trump not long after he married Melania Trump. Trump, who was present for Thursday's court hearing before Merchan, has denied the affair.

You should remember, this is the matter that brought "bagman" lawyer Michael Cohen to the national stage ("I have a hard drive just labeled 'YIKES'!"), and there was enough proof back then - with trump as un-indicted co-conspirator Individual-One - to get Cohen to plead out. It took awhile - and Bragg overcoming his initial reluctance when he took office - for these charges to come out, but it's here now, it's starting in March and should be finished in four weeks, meaning in late April we'll see if trump gets convicted on even one count or survives his first criminal trial.

The next trial was technically the matter in DC federal court regarding trump's involvement in the January 6th insurrection, with four felony counts there. However, Judge Chutkan postponed that trial awaiting the ruling on trump's claim of Absolute Immunity, which an appellate court rebuked and which the Supreme Court received this week to determine if they need to hear the matter.

A number of legal experts are arguing SCOTUS doesn't even need to hear the appeal, and that is a choice the justices can make. They could still take it, and deliberate the matter in order to give trump what he REALLY wants - more delay - but they'd still have to make a ruling on it this term year (by late summer if they pad it out). If they dismiss trump's appeal, this trial could start as early as mid-May (depending on another trial): If SCOTUS takes it, they still have to rule on it by August (and like the 11th District of Appeals, they dare not approve in favor of absolute presidential immunity, it would literally kill the Constitution) and the trial could start by September (cutting it close to Election Day).

That other trial that could skew the DC trial schedule is the one in South Florida regarding trump's mishandling of federal classified documents at Mar-A-Lago. Ostensibly it's set for late May, but Judge Cannon overseeing that matter has been causing havoc with the pre-trial elements - such as wanting to expose the Justice Department's witness list to trump's lawyers earlier than usual, and against Special Counsel Jack Smith's wishes - that a potential delay could be happening in that trial as the appeals courts straighten the mess. Outside legal experts -some of them former federal prosecutors - argue Cannon should be removed from this case considering how she's risking witness safety, but that could delay the start of trial as well.

If by some miracle the Mar-A-Lago trial does start by May, it's still expected to take two or three months to complete considering the sheer amount of classified documents - and their mishandling - to go through. It would affect whenever the DC trial starts, which I would argue deserves to go first because of its immediacy and its importance in confirming trump's culpability over the nightmare of January 6th. Hopefully this will get straightened out soon.

Thrown into this mix is the fourth criminal matter trump faces in Fulton County, Georgia... which hit a huge delay when one of the co-defendants filed a complaint against DA Fani Willis over possible misconduct with an affair with one of the special investigators hired by the DA's office. The judge overseeing that trial held a hearing the last two days, during which the worst part of trumpian (damn you Roy Cohn) legal tactics - public smearing of opponents - was on full display.

Igor Derysh at Salon has more details:

Thursday’s evidentiary hearing on the misconduct claim against Fulton County, Ga., District Attorney Fani Willis yielded a lot of drama but little evidence of wrongdoing, legal experts say.

Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee held a hearing after Ashleigh Merchant, an attorney for Trump co-defendant Mike Roman, alleged an improper relationship between Willis and top prosecutor Nathan Wade and claimed that Wade used his earnings from the case to fund trips for the pair...

“I simply don’t see any new evidence that requires disqualification. It’s a credibility pissing match so far. Ugly. Dramatic. But the needle hasn’t moved,” tweeted Georgia State University Law Prof. Anthony Michael Kreis.

“As an excavation of a now-defunct relationship, it was Bravo-worthy (and frankly, sad). But as an evidentiary hearing, it wasn’t the win the defense promised, especially under the governing legal standard,” agreed MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin...

Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance told MSNBC that the hearing featured “a lot of spectacle but not very much substance.”

"Ultimately, at the end of the day yesterday, it was just a big nothingburger," she said. "There was nothing to show that Fani Willis and Nathan Wade had the financial conflict of interest that Georgia law recognizes, something akin to a prosecutor who only gets paid if they win a case. That's the classic case in Georgia law where there is a conflict that results in disqualification. That wasn't there yesterday in the courtroom..."

If trump and his co-defendants were hoping to throw the whole prosecution out, that wasn't going to happen. At the least, the judge could have removed Willis from overseeing the matter and handing it off to another prosecutor in the DA's office. Whether it delays this trial any further - which legal experts considered an open-shut case because of so much direct evidence against trump including that audio tape - is unlikely, because it's all the other trials' schedules that's interfering when this one starts.

Again, to all the Republican voters out there, to all the Republican Party leaders out there: You could have avoided all this. trump was dirty and corrupt and vulgar in the years before 2016. You had all the warning signs when he first campaigned - the failed casinos, the civil trial involving trump's university scam, the reports of sexual assault, the open racism and sexism - that trump was going to be a disaster of a human being. AND YOU STILL VOTED FOR THAT.

We've had other corrupt men in high office before, just that none of them reached the criminal lows that trump has. trump's not facing criminal trials because he's a "great conservative American," he's facing criminal trials now because 40 years of bills over his bullshit are finally coming due.

The civil trials are mostly done, and trump has to pay those dues soon. The criminal trials start March, and the countdown to just even ONE felony conviction begins.

Tick fucking tock, trump.

Update: This got to be a very popular tweet.

at this rate, trump should raise the $355 million in 30,527 days.
That's almost 83 years.
It could work.

— Witty Librarian 2024 (@PaulWartenberg) February 17, 2024

History In This Moment Where A Con Man Finally Faces Justice

Headline at NBC News (via Jonathan Dienst):

Law enforcement agencies are prepping for a possible Trump indictment as early as next week

Multiple agencies are discussing potential security plans for in and around the Manhattan Criminal Court in case Trump is charged in connection with an alleged hush money payment to Stormy Daniels.

Local, state and federal law enforcement and security agencies are preparing for the possibility that former President Donald Trump will be indicted as early as next week, according to five senior officials familiar with the preparations.

An honest word to describe all this is "Historic."

It was historic back in 2016 when the United States elected - through a broken Electoral process where he lost the Popular vote but won enough states - a person in donald trump who had never before held elected or nominated office.

It was historic that our nation invited into the White House a corrupt con man with a history of civil court cases, criminal allegations, and other misdeeds to where it can honestly be said trump was the most corrupt person to enter the Presidency.

Yell and scream all you want about the other Presidents of our times, but how many of them were honest-to-God as crooked as trump? trump was going into the White House after 2016 with serious allegations of money laundering from the 1980s and onwards, a series of failed bankruptcies that should have exiled him from the business community (or at least should have convinced banks to stop lending him money), and was even embroiled in a civil suit regarding fraud with his failed "Trump University" by the time he put his hand on a Bible to swear an Oath of Office he never took serious.

Remember all the trump rally chants in 2016 screaming "Lock Her Up" about the allegedly corrupt Hillary Clinton? All those investigations into her and not trump (not until it was too late)? Turns out Hillary never crossed the lines, never broke the law as her critics and haters accused. Even her Clinton Foundation that was attacked as a "fake" non-profit? It's still running, while trump's clearly fake non-profit was shut down for trump's abuse of non-profit regulations.

Remember all the Far Right demagogues convinced that Obama was crooked? Not just his "illegal" status arguing over his Hawaiian birth certificate, but attacking him on any other allegations of fraud and misconduct. Remember Solyndra? Investigations found it was the company that was corrupt, not Obama. And yet, the Tea Party (proto-MAGA) mobs howled for Obama to face their "justice".

There were - still are - a lot of angry Liberal Democrats railing against George W. Bush, especially as the War of Terror shifted from avenging 9/11 towards an uncalled and costly invasion/occupation of Iraq. When Putin just got tagged by the international courts for War Crimes against Ukraine, a lot of social media replies fell along the lines of "Now do Bush." But it should be noted that the Democrat who followed Dubya into the White House - Obama - did not pursue war crimes (or any other allegations of corruption) as a legal matter, not even pursuing it as a partisan method of punishing the Neocon pro-war Republicans. For all the evidence of human torture and battlefield atrocities happening under Bush the Lesser's watch, there did not seem to be enough for a sustainable indictment (or at least not enough to prevent the collapse of half our military and intel agencies if we did pursue it).

There were a lot of angry Liberals when Bush the Elder pardoned every major figure involved in Reagan's Iran-Contra scandal, closing the lid on that particular criminal matter, but even then the criminal allegations barely reached either Reagan or Bush, and calls for their arrests stayed on the fringes.

If you're buying into donald trump's claims that every criminal investigation is a WITCH HUNT and every prosecutor is doing so for partisan (and racist) political points, you'll have to explain why these sort of things never happened to every other former President in modern times. The closest we've ever gotten to any President under criminal investigation was Richard Nixon, facing tax evasion, obstruction, and other criminal charges in the wake of his resignation after Watergate. It took Gerald Ford's pardon - in Ford's earnest attempt to end the "long national nightmare" of scandal - to avoid that particular mess, and even then there was enough evidence for a case and a lot of Americans who preferred Nixon face his sins in a courtroom.

Look at trump's efforts to apply that belief - that partisan politics motivate criminal charges towards our political figures - to his political enemies Obama and Hillary. trump pushed for investigations into his claims he was unfairly persecuted by Obama's Justice Department, and that Hillary was corruptly dealing with others to steal the 2016 elections from trump. All of that wrapped into John Durham's special counsel investigations... that proved none of trump's claims and exposed Durham as a fool (or worse).

If you're buying into the most honest, simplest explanation into why trump is facing criminal (and civil) charges on a scale before never placed upon a political figure in American politics, it's because America never before had a con artist crook like trump operating on such a criminal scale before reach our highest political office.

All of these grand jury investigations - not just in New York involving his corrupt business practices, but also Georgia involving trump's attempt to influence the vote count in 2020, and in DC involving his call to insurrection and riot on January 6th - can't be happening without honest-to-God evidence, witnesses to his (and others) involvement, proof that something criminal took place. Durham had no evidence except for trump's gaslighting, and look where that got him. NYC prosecutors have evidence that trump paid off people to cover up his acts of adultery leading into 2016, and they've got to a grand jury to deliberate.

This is all historic because we've never had a corrupt con artist reach this high before.

This will all be historic when the indictments finally come down, because trump's panicked reactions to every criminal charge will trigger both celebration and riot.

Gods help us. The week of March 20-25 will be one of the most chaotic in our nation's history. As unsettling as September 11th and about as farcical as the Lorena Bobbitt trial.

The cops may try to get ready for it but I doubt the rest of us can.

Update: Infidel753 has a few thoughts, mostly concerns about how this will either inspire trump's supporters to vote for him in 2024, or leave the Republican primary race in the hands of DeSantis, who threatens to be worse and could win because the media are ignoring the warning signs about DeSantis' assaults on free speech.

Beware the Ides of trump

Saw this tweet recently:

 

PS and by "imminent" I don't mean Fanni Willis's cryptic formulation "legally imminent." This is imminent as in next few weeks. As in Beware the Ides of March...
Prosecutors Signal Criminal Charges for Trump Are Likely https://t.co/m97jNjJYWc

— Harry Litman (@harrylitman) March 9, 2023

What this all refers to: the New York City prosecutors are about to wrap up their grand jury investigation into allegations trump paid bribes and covered up his affairs - especially with porn actress Stormy Daniels - during his 2016 Presidential campaign. From Bill Chapell and Andrea Bernstein at NPR:

Former President Donald Trump has been invited to testify before a New York City grand jury — a move that is widely understood to mean Trump could soon face criminal charges related to his financial dealings and the payment of hush money to Stephanie Clifford, the adult film star also known as Stormy Daniels.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's office invited Trump to testify next week, according to a person familiar with the investigation.

In New York, an offer to speak in front of a grand jury is typically the last step before a criminal indictment. State law mandates that potential defendants must be given an opportunity to appear before a grand jury to answer questions before they are indicted...

Neither Trump nor his lawyer has signaled whether Trump would accept the invitation, but it is unlikely he would agree to appear. In recent weeks, former Trump campaign officials and business executives have traveled to the D.A.'s office in Lower Manhattan to testify under oath...

trump is unlikely to show, as all he'll do is plead the Fifth (like he did with the New York state tax fraud testimony).

Any possible indictments may not actually happen next week - as the grand jury has to deliberate matters, an official decision from the DA's office will come later - but seeing as how the deadline to testify just happens to fall near March 15th, some sense of poetic karma is in play here.

trump's been on social media screaming "WITCH HUNT" but also arguing that the statue of limitations on such investigations have passed. Under normal circumstances, he'd be right. But the DA's office apparently argued to a judge for extensions on the timeline - since trump was out-of-state between 2017 to 2021 causing damage elsewhere - to where it's unlikely trump's lawyers can throw the matter out on that technicality.

There had been a long time of inaction by Bragg - leading to several assistant DAs resigning in anger about it - to the point where nobody expected this to return as a problem for trump. However, when the criminal case into Trump Organization for tax fraud came back last December with Guilty verdicts across the board, Bragg reopened the matter with this grand jury. Something must have happened more than just the discovery that trump at last was vulnerable: reportedly the deeper examination of trump's finally-released tax returns exposed direct ties to trump's paying off his then-lawyer / bag-man Michael Cohen, which gave the DA's office proof they didn't have when they got Cohen to plead out back in 2018.

This isn't a time for celebration just yet: After all, there's no guarantees the NYC grand jury will come back with indictments to file. We're still looking at months if not years before any indictments come to actual trial, with trump kicking and screaming about it all the way down.

But this is a time for great preparation. If you're inclined, start putting in orders for the champagne. If you're concerned, start watching for angry MAGA drivers speeding about in their coal roller trucks flashing their AR-15s.

Let justice be done, America. trump is toast.

Hoping for trump's Last Chapter

I like a good detective story myself. Lots of nonsense written, though. 'Criminal discovered in last Chapter. Everyone dumbfounded.' A Real crime - you'd know at once!
-- Mysterious Affair at Styles, Agatha Christie 

Okay, back to blogging about how much trouble donald "Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice)" trump is this year.

In case you're having trouble keeping track of what trump is in trouble for, Bess Levin at Vanity Fair created a simple list of oh twenty or so criminal and civil cases/investigations/trials. If you can't afford the VF firewall, Mahablog cribbed a cheat sheet for us cheapskates: The list seems to be in order of severity/likelihood of trump getting convicted/held liable. Just to keep it simpler than this, let me just list the big ones:

*The Classified Document/Mar-a-Lago investigation

*The Justice Department investigation into January 6/plot to overturn the election

*Fulton County (Georgia) district attorney Fani Willis’s criminal investigation into election interference

*The Manhattan District Attorney’s Criminal Case Against the Trump Organization, Etc.

*The New York Attorney General’s Civil Investigation Into the Trump Organization

The biggest questions regarding each of these are: 

1) How serious are the charges?

2) Is there clear-cut evidence of a crime (aka The Smoking Gun)?

3) Will the authorities (US Department of Justice, state attorneys, county attorneys) bring charges and go to trial?

4) What are the consequences if trump is found guilty? 

For what I know, it looks like this:

The Classified Documents at Mar-A-Lago started out as a seeming back-burner issue compared to trump's involvement in the January 6th Insurrection, but when the FBI got a search warrant to recover more boxes of presidential documents earlier this August, this case moved to the top of the list.

1) How serious are the charges? Massive. The fact it had to take a search warrant approved by the US Attorney General and a judge underscores how serious this is. When it was just the likelihood of trump and his handlers violating the Presidential Records Act, it was still a serious matter because there were felonies attached to the deed under 18 USC 2071 (and the possibility trump could get blocked from any future elected office). Bumping this all up to really fucking serious matter are the allegations trump hoarded classified / top secret documents that violate national security matters covered by 18 USC 793, which is putting us into ESPIONAGE-level (we're talking Rosenbergs/Hanssen/Ames level) charges. Along all of this, the warrant specified possible Obstruction charges (where trump may have taken/hidden/destroyed documents relevant to other federal inquiries) are in play with 18 USC 1519, which seems almost like an afterthought.

2) Is there clear-cut evidence of a crime? The fact trump had boxes of records taken from the White House still at Mar-A-Lago 18 months after he left - and that he and his lawyers lied that he had kept more - should be clear-cut enough. While trump himself doesn't seem to think what he did was a crime - he kept telling his National Archives contacts that the docs "are mine" - and indeed wants those documents back, the fact is the Presidential Records law spells it out very clear that the documents belong to the federal government (represented by the National Archives). trump's ignorance of the law is no excuse. 

With regards to the other related charges - especially the espionage stuff - it all depends on what the FBI finds among the documents recovered: if there are indeed classified documents including stuff on nuclear security matters (something trump has NO unilateral power to declassify) among what trump hoarded, that's evidence of espionage and we're talking Crime of the Century (atop everything else trump's done).

3) Will the Justice Department bring charges and go to trial? Given how much has already taken place - the months of fighting over the recovery of these docs to begin with, with the escalation to search warrant to underscore how serious this is - we're not talking so much about IF the DOJ will press charges, it's a question of When. It may take months for the FBI to secure all the documents and dust them for fingerprints (part of the espionage matter is determining if uncleared persons had access), as well as interviewing other potential witnesses to anything happening with those docs. 

The government has trump dead-to-rights on violating 18 USC 2071. The more serious matters involving 793 and 1519 are not yet confirmed. But if trump DID violate 793 - even once by sharing classified documents with a foreign agent of any kind - it would be insane for Justice to overlook trump when they've gone after people like Reality Winner who release one measly document as a whistleblower. They'd HAVE to go after trump for mishandling classified info with his level of brazenness. And if they find trump violated the 1519 obstruction, the DOJ would have to pursue THAT because if they don't it will encourage future acts of obstruction against other investigations they're running. 

This is too public a case now: Roll over on any of this and they become trump's bitches like everyone else who've rolled over.

4) What are the consequences for trump if found guilty? Again, it depends on the number of charges the Justice Department will put on the table. Every felony, it should be noted, carries with it fines and jail time: minimum times aren't given, but the maximum for 2071 (b) - the one directly related to trump - is three years; the max for 793 is ten years per count (and from what I've read the Justice guys can use each document (thousands of them) as separate counts!); and the maximum for 1519 is twenty years (again, if Justice can identify separate acts of obstructing, those would be separate counts!). Given the severity of the charges - especially 793 - it is unlikely trump won't get the minimums if found guilty, but he won't get the maximums either due to political optics. It all depends on HOW MANY counts trump will face.

Whew. That was just part one...

The DOJ Investigation Into January 6 not only covers the planning of the riotous insurrection that day, but also the plotting to overturn the election through other means - such as Fake Electors - before January 6 became a last-ditch effort.

1) How serious are the charges? Pretty serious, if there are any to write about. The grand jury - if there is one - into this matter has been tight-lipped, there's been little evidence at all that there's even an investigation until the House Select Committee started referring possible charges back in June from their inquiry to Justice for consideration. What we do know is that the DOJ has been pursuing those rioters who were directly involved in storming Capitol Hill, getting many of them to plead out and testify towards others' involvement, which are signs of laying a foundation of evidence to pursue the higher-ups who planned the attack. The only evidence we have that trump may be under investigation is a subpoena from January 6th prosecutors asking the National Archives (see above) to hand over any documents they may have on the matter (whish may be where the 1519 charges above are heading).

At the least, considering the insurrection itself, trump may be looking at an Incitement charge under the anti-riots law 18 USC 2101, likely under a(2) to organize, promote, encourage, participate in, or carry on a riot. A lot depends on what else the Justice Department digs up from other testimony and evidence.

2) Is there clear-cut evidence of a crime? The riot itself is pretty fucking obvious. They've used clips from it for a Star Trek episode for Q's sake. The trick is proving any direct link between the rioters and trump, and that what trump did was intentional to cause that crime in the first place.

This is where the House Select Committee's role investigating the Insurrection has been helpful. They've brought in documents and eyewitnesses who confirm trump's behavior leading up to and during the riots to provide evidence of awareness (other people warning him of the illegality of the riot) and intent (his documented behavior, especially his refusal to respond to calls for help for 187 minutes). Future committee sessions are arguably going to provide proof of links between the planners and rioters that could prove criminal behavior

3) Will the Justice Department bring charges and go to trial? Given the severity of the matter - there was almost an overthrow of the entire federal government! - the DOJ dare not sweep this one under a rug. It does not help trump any that he is running again to be President with every sign that he has learned from his mistakes and will seize power earlier - corrupting every legal safeguard in the Executive branch especially the Justice Dept. itself - and more ruthlessly than before.

The argument revolves around what charges the DOJ could bring to the table. The 2101 anti-riot law is the most likely one, but others - such as evidence trump was involved in the scheme to deploy fake electors in battleground states which violates 52 USC 20511 2(b) involving the procurement, casting, or tabulation of ballots that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held - are of serious enough matters that the people involved - not just trump but the people who agreed to be fake electors and the people who schemed the whole thing - need to be held to account.

4) What are the consequences for trump if found guilty? Again, it depends entirely on what charges end up getting filed. With the anti-riot law, trump would be looking at fines and a five-year maximum. If we throw in the fake electors charges, trump could face fines and another five-year maximum as well. Any other charges would require further review.

Onto part three...

The Georgia Voter Interference affair, a state-level investigation that could also apply federal charges - if pursued - along with the state charges the Fulton County DA can bring to trump and others (for example, Rudy Giuliani was openly named "a target" of the grand jury proceedings he was forced to testify in this past week).

1) How serious are the charges? Serious enough that before the Mar-A-Lago warrant happened, THIS was the legal matter most observers believed was the one trump couldn't wriggle out of. What DA Willis is looking into are the possibilities trump attempted to coerce false testimony from state-level election officials - including Secretary of State Raffensperger - to "find me 11780 votes" (a very specific number that would have flipped the state from Biden) and then provide a slate of fake electors in violation of state law (as well as that 52 USC 20511 mentioned above).

2) Is there clear-cut evidence of a crime? This one has the best smoking gun of them all: trump himself on a phone call to Raffensperger where trump lies to him about having other states going along with the ruse, where trump clearly tries to pressure the state official to "find him" those extra votes, and where trump implied Raffensperger and other Georgia officials would be in legal trouble if they didn't help him. If it quacks like extortion and coercion...

3) Will the Justice  Appropriate legal authorities bring charges and go to trial? This is one of those matters where trump is facing state violations for willfully tampering with election results - under this law here and also this law - as well as federal code (again with the 52 USC 20511). Given how DA Willis is pursuing this matter - she's even working to compel Georgia governor Kemp to testify! - this may likely be a serious matter when it passes the grand jury to trial sooner rather than later (although delays by Lindsey Graham - who had applied his own pressures in favor of trump, even though he's not even the Senator from that state - may actually push this investigation into 2023). Whether the DOJ pursues this depends on their other fake electors probes related to the January 6th investigation.

4) What are the consequences for trump if found guilty? The federal charges would be the same as mentioned above for the 20511 code, a five-year max per charge. 

At the state level, trump would be looking at jail time if convicted of a first-degree felony (maximum three years on each count), but merely fines if convicted as a second-degree misdemeanor. The tricky thing is what happens if he's convicted on any of the felonies: Would trump pressure the state's governor - if it remains Republican under Kemp - for a pardon? While the pardon gets him out, it does leave him vulnerable to any civil matters on this, as well as the fact he'd have to admit as part of the pardon deal that he committed the crimes he's accused of (which also admits he knowingly lied about voter fraud and that he lost for real). If trump succeeds in stealing the vote for himself in 2024 after getting convicted in Georgia, the legal ramifications of having trump in state prison interfering with his ability to even show up at Inauguration to take the oath of office would be incendiary at least.

Welcome to the fourth one, Gods for such a lazy man trump has been busy breaking a lot of laws...

Heading up now to New York, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Criminal Case vs Trump Organization actually had some fireworks last week.

1) How serious are the charges? It's a little serious, but not as bad as the other matters already mentioned. Mostly because trump himself is not at any severe risk.

In one of those oddities of the legal system, the case getting pursued here filed tax fraud charges on the Trump corporation rather than on trump the person. Even though you would think - logically - that trump as CEO making all the decisions were criminally liable as well.

If any one person was charged, it was the financial officer Allen Weisselberg, who pled out last week to many of the charges applied to him. The deal is going to be half-and-half to most observers: Weisselberg will get five months in prison (with some of it served as home arrest, it sounds like) and will make himself available to testify "if the court case proceeds further to trial," but he will NOT testify directly against trump... which is where it gets frustrating. WHO in the end is actually going to be put on trial here?

2) Is there clear-cut evidence of a crime? There was enough evidence for criminal charges already made. At least fifteen years' worth of tax filings that trump and company had spent decades hiding from review, and there was enough on Weisselberg to compel a guilty plea from him before trial.

3) Will the Manhattan DA's office (insert Law & Order donk-donk noise here) bring charges and go to trial? This is the good thing: They already have. The charges were filed last year, and this past February the legal attempt to dismiss all charges was overruled (the judge did dismiss one of the fifteen charges). Jury selection on the matter is set to begin October 24 (mark your calendars!). 

The bad thing is, it does not look like the DA in charge - previously Cy Vance, now Alvin Bragg - is going to pursue the matter any further than having the company itself on trial. In spite of anger from some of the assistant DAs - several who resigned in protest - Bragg is worried about pursuing a case if there's not enough evidence to convict trump himself with absolute certainty. Granted, the caution is warranted (when you come at the trump, you best not miss...), but the assistant DAs who pursued the investigation were certain trump committed more felonies. Also, what would happen if during trial more evidence comes to light that trump is hiding more acts of fraud, or if there's perjury involved, or anything similar. Would those matters be pursued if they happen? A lot of this depends on who will actually testify at the trial (would the defense lawyers risk putting trump himself under oath on the stand?).

4) What are the consequences for trump the Organization if found guilty? As things stand, the consequences for trump himself seem non-existent. HE'S not on trial, technically it's his business that is.

Thing is, I cannot tell what kind of penalties a conviction would apply to a legal corporate entity. I'm not a lawyer and definitely not an expert on business law. I'm waiting on word back from people I'm asking about this...

Where the conviction(s) would not look good for anyone associated with the organization - trump and his family members (Donald Jr, Eric, Ivanka, son-in-law Jared) he's kept as his inner circle - it doesn't seem likely any of them will face jail time or direct fines. Weisselberg's insistence to not testify directly against trump may be the shield that saves him. 

But if the corporation is found guilty... There would be definitely fines and financial penalties of some sort. There may be - if severe enough - legal cause to dissolve the company (I would assume): If that happens, what would trump use as a base of his corporate "empire"? Is this Organization an umbrella of all of trump's holdings - his properties, his golf courses, his hotels and office buildings, and so on - and would all of those holdings be vulnerable to something like asset forfeiture? Again, I really need to find out what the actual stakes are.

And, finally... oh this has taken all day to write...

The other New York case, the state Attorney General’s Civil Case against Trump Organization. Different from the Manhattan (county) criminal case - both in the level of investigation and as a civil court matter - AG Letitia James has gone after trump in the most direct way possible, which involved getting the man himself to testify under oath, something the other major cases haven't done (yet).

1) How serious are the charges? Reasonably serious, even for a civil matter where the possibility of jail time isn't certain (but possible). 

Where the criminal case in Manhattan focused on specific instances of tax fraud, the state's case has looked at a larger picture where trump's organization misled tax agencies (both state and federal) as well as banks regarding the values of various properties and holdings. Given the fact that when trump gave his deposition last week he invoked his Fifth Amendment right from self-incrimination over 440 times, we could be looking at that many number of liability counts against trump himself if this goes to trial.

2) Is there clear-cut evidence of a crime? As similar to the Manhattan criminal probe, AG James found enough to justify a grand jury hearing into the whole thing. Given the complexity of the legal code when it comes to business and taxes, there may not be a "clear-cut" proof, but if it can be mapped out to potential jurors then there's a case here.

3) Will the NY Attorney General's office bring charges and go to trial? This is almost a certainty: James has dug up too many items for investigation - at least 440 of them to force trump to zip his lips - to just walk away from the matter. Unlike a criminal case - where DA Bragg has concerns about 100 percent proof before going after trump - in a civil matter the burden of proof for the state is lesser, so AG James is more likely to proceed on some charges of some kind.

An interesting development due to trump's invoking his Fifth is that James could charge trump with more direct liability than he would have faced if he had answered any of the questions. This would mean trump, from what I'm gathering, would have to pay more severe fines out of his own pocket (considering how he's a clown living on credit, this would be disastrous to him).

4) What are the consequences for trump AND the Organization if found guilty? As mentioned earlier, as a civil matter trump may not see jail time. But in terms of money...

Where I have a question about the penalties on a company under criminal charges, with the civil charges it's clear the Attorney General can invoke a "death penalty" on the company if repeated and persistent acts of fraud take place. Considering AG James can well bring 440 charges to the courtroom against trump, that's a noticeable amount of repeated and persistent fraud.

If the trump Organization is fully dissolved, where would that leave trump financially? Again, are we talking about most of his properties getting seized in forfeiture? Are we talking about getting fined to the point where his creditors - waiting on reportedly millions of dollars in loan payments - will bail on him and he can't borrow one more penny?

If there are legal experts with a better sense of what's at stake, I do hope to hear back from them.

So... WHEW. That's the top five major criminal/civil matters trump is facing this 2022.

So about the OTHER fifteen or more...

Just go to jail, trump. It'll make it easier on everybody else.

Republicans Will Vote For a Convicted trump

One of the oddities of the American electoral system is that our Constitution barely spelled out any requirements for the office the Presidency.

All that's needed are that the candidate be of 35 years of age, a natural-born citizen of the United States, and having lived in the United States for 14 years.

There are no other qualifications, like say the candidate having previous elected experience (as a Governor or Senator or Congresscritter), or that the candidate has a college degree of some kind, or that the candidate pass some kind of intellectual competency test.

This becomes an oddity because it leaves open the possibility of some monstrously unqualified person running for - and winning - the office of the President. You could have someone who didn't even finish getting a high school education and shows a decided inability to write and read or even perform basic math. You could have someone who displays open psychological disorders like extreme sociopathy and narcissism (oh wait, we already had...). You could have someone getting elected President while sitting in a jail cell as a convicted felon.

Don't laugh, that almost happened. Sort of.

We've had people putting their name in for the highest office in the land while sitting with their homies in Cell Block D. Victoria Woodhull did it in 1872, running as a protest candidate at a time women weren't allowed to vote or hold office. Eugene V. Debs ran on the Socialist Party ticket in 1920 while sitting in jail for violation of the Espionage Act. Lyndon LaRouche ran for President in 1992 while in jail for tax and mail fraud.

It should be noted none of those examples even had a snowball's chance in hell. Woodhull wasn't taken seriously by the (mostly male) voters and none of them were ready for women to have such basic rights until the 1900s when the 19th Amendment finally passed. Debs - who had the best success among these examples with about a million votes - was running as a Socialist in a place - the United States - that never embraced socialism as a political philosophy even during the Progressive Era of the early 20th Century (much to the dismay of the Bernie Bros to this day). LaRouche was a verifiable conspiracy nut spouting racist and incoherent thoughts, and never garnered any major support even when he tried running on a Democratic Party label.

So why should this even be a problem for us?

Because donald trump, currently facing at least THREE criminal investigations and several civil court trials (one of which - the New York inquiry into tax fraud - could involve jail time), could well be a convicted felon by the time the 2024 election cycle rolls around... and the goddamned Republican Party - with enough base voters to give trump at least 62 million votes and at most 74 million - will likely have trump at the top of their ticket for another shot at the Presidency.

We're going to have a future 2024 campaign where one of the candidates - trump - will be forced to wear an orange jumpsuit while Zooming his debate performance from the Florence SuperMax prison.

I'm not the only one looking at this train wreck happen (again). David Frum is documenting the horror over at the Atlantic (paywall):

...Big-money Republicans hoped that 2022 would be the year the GOP quietly sidelined Trump. Those hopes have been fading all year, as extreme and unstable pro-Trump candidates have triumphed in primary after primary. Their last best hope was that the reelection of Ron DeSantis as governor of Florida would painlessly shoulder Trump out of contention for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Now that hope, too, is dying.

DeSantis ran in 2018 as a craven Trump sycophant. He had four years to become his own man. He battled culture wars—even turning against his former backers at Disney—all to prove himself the snarling alpha-male bully that Republican primary voters reward. But since the Mar-a-Lago search, DeSantis has dropped back into the beta-male role, sidekick and cheering section for Trump.

Trump has reasserted dominance. DeSantis has submitted. And if Republican presidential politics in the Trump era has one rule, it’s that there’s no recovery from submission. Roll over once, and you cannot get back on your feet again...

Or as I like to say it "Once you become trump's bitch you will ALWAYS be trump's bitch." Back to Frum:

Historically, conservatives spoke the language of stability; progressives, the language of change. This summer, however, the Trump Republicans are speaking the language of confrontation, of threat, of violence. Five days ago, Peter Wehner described here at The Atlantic the angry shouts on right-wing message boards and websites. That language of menace is now being used by the former president himself. Allow me impunity or else face more armed violence from my supporters is the implicit Trump warning...

I've mentioned before how terrifying trump is as a political figure: In nearly every situation where a political scandal would bring down an elected official, for some godforsaken reason trump defies gravity and becomes even more entrenched as the standard-bearer for the twisted and broken GOP. In my own words back in 2016:

Here's where my hope turns to despair. For more than a year we've seen Trump campaign exactly in this manner: Shameless, reckless, lying, self-serving, arrogant, noisy, inhuman, insane. Everything he did last night was a greatest hits version of every horror Trump displayed on the campaign trail... and in all those previous disasters, Trump's numbers went up. He kept moving, he kept lying, he kept winning in the worst ways. That shamelessness is key: Most other politicians would never sink to the levels Trump does, because they are actually concerned about their reputation and their futures. Trump doesn't care: He believes his reputation is flawless - hint: it's not - and his soul unblemished, so he continues to behave this way because nobody stops him and because too many people buy into his con game.

The normal dynamics of an election cycle tells us that what happened to Trump tonight would sink any campaign. The law of gravity regarding any single gaffe requires that Trump sinks below his support and fades into zero. But that has not happened to him yet: And after all of the failures and insults and chaos, Trump keeps gaining ground he should not gain. I've seriously begun worrying that either the polls are rigged or that there really are that many clueless voters buying into Trump's scam...

Well, the elections in 2016 and 2020 proved to me there were a lot of voters buying into trump's scam (you may notice I hadn't developed the habit of insulting him by typing his name in lower caps), but it turned out they weren't clueless. Those voters were mostly as spiteful and hateful as he is, and as he granted them license to be that hateful to the world they have sworn him undying loyalty.

It is that shared spite that drives trump's support. To the MAGA voters out there, all of these criminal investigations are not honest efforts to protect our Constitution and our national security: They eagerly accept trump's deflections of them as shams and witch hunts by craven bureaucrats and liberals afraid of trump's "true" popularity and greatness. To these voters, they don't care if trump exposed classified information or violated the Espionage Act, they don't care if trump evaded paying taxes, they don't care if trump has been flushing documents down toilets like he had everything to hide, they don't care if trump has been lying to them for decades. Because to them trump is TRUMP (God/Savior/Emperor) and he can do whatever he likes.

This view among the MAGA crowd is, by the way, open hypocrisy considering how these same wingnuts were screaming - STILL screaming - "But Her Emails" with regards to Hillary Clinton's private server and email scandals... both of which were heavily investigated by Republican-led Congresses and Justice Departments and nothing found criminal. Hillary doesn't break the law and yet the Far Right still screams "Lock Her Up".

For all the fears that when - not if - donald trump finds himself in handcuffs facing criminal charges - be it in Georgia for election law violations, be it in South Florida for espionage, be it in Washington DC for ignoring the Presidential Records Act - that trump's followers will erupt into violence; the equally shocking thing is that even with trump in handcuffs by 2022 and in jail by 2024, the vast majority of Republican voters will still vote for a felon convicted by a jury of his peers.

If there's any good news, it's that trump may appeal to his rabid base but he's not that popular to the general voting public. He lost the popular vote in 2016 when he got 62 million to Hillary by 3 million voters, he only won the Presidency through a broken Electoral College system that favored smaller states. He lost the popular vote in 2020 when he got 74 million to Biden by 7 million voters, which was enough to give Biden the Electoral count as well.

With varying demographic realities - the slow shift to younger Millennial and Gen Z voters who are more liberal as aging conservative Boomers die off - and with the likelihood that enough Independent voters in 2024 will recoil from the reality that the Republican candidate is in jail, it seems unlikely trump can reclaim those 74 million he got in 2020. As long as Biden and the Democrats retain the 81 million who voted for him, trump can't win.

Then again: motherfucking trump defies political gravity (and the Republicans may try to cheat with election results in their GOP-controlled Red states).

Gods help us.

Elections matter, America. If trump does indeed meet justice and is found guilty of his crimes, for the LOVE OF GOD DO NOT ELECT AN HONEST-TO-GOD CROOK TO THE WHITE HOUSE.

Shall We See The End of Tweeting Soon?

Welp, all my efforts as a Gen Xer to stay hip and cool with all the newest social media apps since 2007 have all gone for naught, because one of the apps I've gotten addicted to in the past 15 years might finally crash and burn now that another oligarch has seen fit to buy his way into media domination.

In short: Greedhead Elon Musk just bought out Twitter for 44 BILLION DOLLARS. Via Lauren Feiner at CNBC: 

Twitter’s board has accepted an offer from billionaire Elon Musk to buy the social media company and take it private, the company announced Monday...

The cash deal at $54.20 per share is valued at around $44 billion, according to the press release. Twitter would become a private company on completion of the deal, which requires shareholder and regulatory approval...

Okay, my first thought was "Crap, they're letting the narcissistic billionaires in, there goes the neighborhood."

Second thought was "WHERE THE HELL DID MUSK DREDGE UP 44 BILLION DOLLARS in the first place???" Was that pocket change hiding in the sofa cushions or something?

Seriously, you know anybody with 44 BILLION DOLLARS lying around they can use to just buy a large-scale social media app like they were buying groceries?

Why even bother to spend so much in the first place? Musk tried buying his way onto the company's board a week or two ago, only to get thwarted by some of the regulations set in place for publicly-traded companies. So, his solution was to sledgehammer the entire process with a massive buyout and take Twitter private.

Why the hell is he so desperate trying to buy this social media app?

Forget the line he's trying to sell to the public about his interest in Twitter. This is not about encouraging free speech, or bringing his "brand" of innovation to improve security or service to a cornerstone of global social media. No, what Elon Musk is doing is Buying speech, there is nothing FREE about what he's doing. From here it's looking like Musk wants control over one of the many social networks that have openly derided his - and other billionaires' - obsessions with space travel, his self-marketing overkill, his lack of genuine philanthropy, his business model of racism in his workplaces, and more.

Musk's call for a more open Twitter runs the serious risk of creating an environment of lax rules governing online behavior. Twitter already has problems with online harassers, raging haters, and sociopathic doxxers looking to bully and threaten people because of their gender, ethnicity, religious beliefs, and/or political beliefs. Musk is poised to make things worse.

While Twitter as a social media app eventually became a business looking for ad revenues and profitability, it still served as a relatively free and easy-to-use app that people rallied to as a means to get instant news and updates from people they know, in a way faster and more satisfying than other major apps like Facebook. Its limited character count required savvy messaging in short sentences, allowing for clever snark and witty repartee (but also the trolling nightmares of direct insults and death threats).

For ill and for good, Twitter became a dominant means of getting news AND opinions out there, which mainstream media scooped up and gobbled for all its worth. On the bright side, it connected the world in ways other social media apps couldn't, passing along news of tragedies and victories faster than professional reporters could. It got the messages out in places and situations where dictators and despots couldn't stop them.

On the dark side, it got us donald trump tweeting out his racism and sexism and bullshit gaslighting. It got bad enough to where even Twitter had to suspend his ass because trump crossed the code of conduct lines too many times.

Rumor is Elon Musk is looking to buy Twitter so he could open up the rules of conduct and allow the likes of trump back on it, possibly seeing money to be made on ragetweets attracting more views than ever before. It seems unlikely, given how eager a lot of current Twitter users are about to jump ship if Musk ever invites that Shitgibbon back on. It's more likely Musk would make an attempt to overwhelm Twitter users with his godless Bitcoin crypto scams.

Either way, we're seeing an end to a troubled yet useful social media app getting bought out by a billionaire ready to twist that product into an unrecognizable mess. Sort of like what happened to Tumblr, which never recovered from unpopular policy changes under new management. 

The talk now is about escape plans. Saving your Twitter history to a zipped archive for future civilizations to find. The next social media app everyone can congregate to that won't be threatened by an oligarch's buyout anytime soon.

It's not TikTok by the way. China owns THAT already.

The Last Con of donald trump

This ending may yet include bangs - especially if trump's mobs decide to try their rioting on state capitols this weekend - but by most measures donald trump's empire is about to end with a whimper. Let us refer to Jonathan Chait's overview of trump's troubles over at the New York Intelligencer: 

...But now, finally, the end is at hand. Trump is suffering a series of wounds that, in combination, are likely to be fatal after Joe Biden is sworn in on January 20. Trump is obviously going to surrender his office. Beyond that looming defeat, he is undergoing a cascading sequence of political, financial, and legal setbacks that cumulatively spell utter ruin. Trump is not only losing his job but quite possibly everything else.

One crisis, though the most opaque, concerns Trump’s business. Many of his sources of income are drying up, either owing to the coronavirus pandemic or, more often, his toxic public image. The Washington Post has toted up the setbacks facing the Trump Organization, which include cancellations of partnerships with New York City government, three banks, the PGA Championship, and a real-estate firm that handled many of his leasing agreements. Meanwhile, he faces the closure of many of his hotels. And he is staring down two defamation lawsuits. Oh, and Trump has to repay, over the next four years, more than $300 million in outstanding loans he personally guaranteed...

If this were still 2015, Trump could fall back on his tried-and-true income generators: money laundering and tax fraud. The problem is that his business model relied on chronically lax enforcement of those financial crimes. And now he is under investigation by two different prosecutors in New York State for what appear to be black-letter violations of tax law. At minimum, these probes will make it impossible for him to stay afloat by stealing more money. At maximum, he faces the serious risk of millions of dollars in fines or a criminal prosecution that could send him to prison.

Trump reportedly plans to pardon himself along with a very broad swath of his hangers-on. But a pardon hardly solves his problems. For one thing, a federal pardon is useless against state-level crimes. For another, the self-pardon is a theoretical maneuver that’s never been tested, and it’s not clear whether the courts will agree it is even possible to do so.

And what’s more, a pardon might constitute an admission of guilt, which could open up Trump to more private lawsuits. Remember how O. J. Simpson was ordered to pay $34 million to the families of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, even after he beat the murder rap? The families of victims of the January 6 riot might well sue Trump for his role in inciting the violence. Trump might try pardoning himself to make sure he can’t be charged with criminal incitement, but admitting the crime makes it even easier to bring a civil suit against him.

The easiest way out of the self-pardon dilemma would be for Trump to make a deal with Mike Pence, under which he would resign before leaving office and Pence would grant him a pardon. Unfortunately for Trump, Pence is still sore about the whole “whipping up a paramilitary mob to lynch him” episode. ABC reported recently that Trump does not want to resign, in part because he doesn’t trust his vice-president to pardon him.

The assumption until now has always been that Trump wouldn’t really be convicted of crimes or sentenced to prison, despite the fairly clear evidence of his criminality. American ex-presidents don’t go to jail; they go on book tours.

That supposition wasn’t wrong, exactly. It rested on the understanding of a broad norm of legal deference to powerful public officials and an understanding of the dangers of criminalizing political disagreement. But what has happened to Trump in the weeks since the election, and especially since the insurrection, is that he has been stripped of his elite impunity. The displays of renunciation by corporate donors and Republican officials, even if they lack concrete authority, have sent a clear message about Donald Trump’s place in American society...

I have written before on this blog during his campaign and then in the aftermath of 2016 that this - his run for high office, his tenure as President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice) - was it for him, the last con job in a string of con jobs he'd been running since his days as a racist landlord.

Everything about trump - the pandering and yelling toward the media to PAY ATTENTION TO ME, branding his name atop every property he could get his hands on, the grifting, the cheap products, the fake online university, the broken casinos, the busted sports league, the overall drive to promote himself as a success with every failure trailing in his wake - was about feeding his ego and satiating his greed. Neither of which could be served with each endeavor he undertook, even the only successful thing he truly had, a barely entertaining reality TV show that was as fake as he still is.

Getting into the White House was the next big con in his game. Oh sure, the talk is that he hoped to lose to Hillary in 2016 and then use the outrage from that to market his own cable "news" network to rival Fox's. But he had to know there was a risk he'd win, which the Electoral College did for him, and which led to his gleeful abuse of high office to line his own pockets some more.

And like every other con game trump played out, he had no idea what he was getting himself into and how poorly he was going to mismanage the whole thing. Four years of it, surrounding himself with a rotating parade of Yes men (and women) alongside other con artists using his administration to pull their own fleecing. Anyone halfway competent at their job didn't last more than a year. Anyone who conflicted with trump's graft and schemes found themselves isolated, banished, and fired.

There are so many points of corruption in trump's tenure it reaches further past what I can comprehend from where I sit watching it all: The violations of Emoluments Clauses using his hotel properties to entice foreign lobbyists to stay at his places and pay him the honor of doing so; Forcing Secret Service and other government agents to stay at his resorts at overbilled rates; Handing out no-bid contracts to business allies with hints of kickbacks; basically trump and his family ripping off taxpayers at every opportunity to indulge in God-knows-what... 

And then failing to realize that sooner rather than later trump will be out of the Oval Office and unable to hide all of the con jobs he pulled during his tenure. Even if trump HAD stolen his second term away from trump, there was no sign that trump would actually start managing his lifestyle habits any better in terms of what he needed to do.

Every trump con, where he jumped from one deal to another, seemed like he was trying to keep two or three steps ahead of creditors that he kept borrowing money from in order to keep his failing empire of half-abandoned resorts and buildings open. Even before the pandemic hit the tourist (and resort) industry, trump properties were deep in the red. trump had been living on credit even as President Loser of the Popular Vote, yet it never seemed like trump was using his corrupt practices to pay off those bills. You'd think that someone with 300 million dollars in guaranteed loans - as Chait pointed out earlier - would make an effort to pay those loans back.

It's as though trump thought - still thinks - he can keep using this big con job of being President Loser of the Popular Vote to extend his deadline, spin out his dues to another day, another year.

trump rarely had to pay for the bills that piled up on him. Sure, he filed for bankruptcy often enough - at least four or six you can find on Google searches - but those were his businesses, never his own ass. trump could walk away from them and still imagine himself - lie to himself - as a success story. "Aha, I tricked the courts into buying my sob story," trump probably mused, "now I can use that as a means to start a new business and find more suckers to finance me."

But he's now at a point where bankruptcy court can't save him. While his properties and business holdings are likely facing financial ruin as before, this time trump is now a direct target to fail. trump's flaunted too many rules, crossed too many lines, failed to pay his dues in ways that demand legal retribution... and he's running out of lawyers and legal loopholes to save him.

trump is facing legal matters that can hit his own person. The sexual assault and defamation lawsuits. Criminal investigations into his Emoluments violations launched by either a fully-led Democratic Congress or by Biden's Justice Department (maybe a special prosecutor backed by both branches), still needed after years of courts arguing over who had standing to sue on the Emoluments (with majority control of Congress, Dems now have a chance). State criminal investigations as mentioned by Chait and so many others, not just the tax evasion in New York but now elections interference in Georgia and elsewhere.

These are things that are going to stop trump from moving on, finding another con job or tricking potential business partners into another half-baked venture to promote his name in big gold letters.

I kept saying this was it for trump, because this was too big a con job to pull off. trump in the Executive Branch was too high-profile and too disastrous with his inept bankrupt leadership to lead to anything else.

It was too big for trump to resign early on when he had a chance to escape. It was too big for trump to risk self-pardons on (because the exposure of accepting his own pardon would be an admission of crimes, and likely doomed to fail even in Republican-led courts). It was too big for trump to moderate himself and avoid any stupid efforts at overreach, to avoid committing any further crimes that would trap him once he left the legal protections of the Oval Office.

And now it's too late for him. trump is stuck in a trap of his own making, and he can't charm or bully or bluff his way out now. trump's made too many enemies in too many places, and he's running out of resources - money obviously, but allies and cronies especially - he can rely on to survive.

This is it for trump. No more con jobs. No more social media assaults. he's done.

And good riddance.

One Sentence About My Thoughts Regarding Jeffrey Epstein's Death in Jail

For starters I'm not buying the suicide report because he'd already tried something like this earlier and for the love of GOD should have been under 24/7 suicide watch just to make sure nobody tried to shiv him, because Jeffrey Epstein's career as a Pedophile Pimp for an exclusive club of billionaire greed-heads and political figures - a list including the Shitgibbon himself, Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew from the UK (!) - along with growing evidence Epstein was involved in human trafficking across the globe made him a high risk for certain powerful figures who would risk Epstein's death in jail and withstand the coming public outcry against such an obvious conspiratorial move by fearing the possibility of Epstein exposing global diabolical criminal activities, and so I call on the New York District Attorneys investigating Epstein and his Circle of Carnal Crime to keep digging and arrest every child-fucker and human slaver they can find. Gasp. Shit, that's two sentences. SHIT, THAT'S... okay you get my gist.