Putin's Mistakes

The New York Times published a massive report on the failures and destruction of Putin's ill-advised invasion of Ukraine. The article itself may disappear soon behind a firewall, so there's not much time to read it all at leisure. So here's some of the highlights written by Michael Schwirtz, Anton Troianovski, Yousur Al-Hlou, Masha Froliak, Adam Entous and Thomas Gibbons-Neff:

President Vladimir V. Putin’s war was never supposed to be like this. When the head of the C.I.A. traveled to Moscow last year to warn against invading Ukraine, he found a supremely confident Kremlin, with Mr. Putin’s national security adviser boasting that Russia’s cutting-edge armed forces were strong enough to stand up even to the Americans.

Russian invasion plans, obtained by The New York Times, show that the military expected to sprint hundreds of miles across Ukraine and triumph within days. Officers were told to pack their dress uniforms and medals in anticipation of military parades in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.

But instead of that resounding victory, with tens of thousands of his troops killed and parts of his army in shambles after nearly 10 months of war, Mr. Putin faces something else entirely: his nation’s greatest human and strategic calamity since the collapse of the Soviet Union...

The Times investigation found a stunning cascade of mistakes that started with Mr. Putin — profoundly isolated in the pandemic, obsessed with his legacy, convinced of his own brilliance — and continued long after drafted soldiers like Mikhail were sent to the slaughter.

At every turn, the failures ran deeper than previously known:

In interviews, Putin associates said he spiraled into self-aggrandizement and anti-Western zeal, leading him to make the fateful decision to invade Ukraine in near total isolation, without consulting experts who saw the war as pure folly. Aides and hangers-on fueled his many grudges and suspicions, a feedback loop that one former confidant likened to the radicalizing effect of a social-media algorithm. Even some of the president’s closest advisers were left in the dark until the tanks began to move. As another longtime confidant put it, “Putin decided that his own thinking would be enough.”

The Russian military, despite Western assumptions about its prowess, was severely compromised, gutted by years of theft. Hundreds of billions of dollars had been devoted to modernizing the armed forces under Mr. Putin, but corruption scandals ensnared thousands of officers. One military contractor described frantically hanging enormous patriotic banners to hide the decrepit conditions at a major Russian tank base, hoping to fool a delegation of top brass. The visitors were even prevented from going inside to use the bathroom, he said, lest they discover the ruse.

Once the invasion began, Russia squandered its dominance over Ukraine through a parade of blunders. It relied on old maps and bad intelligence to fire its missiles, leaving Ukrainian air defenses surprisingly intact, ready to defend the country. Russia’s vaunted hacking squads tried, and failed, to win in what some officials call the first big test of cyberweapons in actual warfare. Russian soldiers, many shocked they were going to war, used their cellphones to call home, allowing the Ukrainians to track them and pick them off in large numbers. And Russia’s armed forces were so stodgy and sclerotic that they did not adapt, even after enduring huge losses on the battlefield. While their planes were being shot down, many Russian pilots flew as if they faced no danger, almost like they were at an air show.

Stretched thin by its grand ambitions, Russia seized more territory than it could defend, leaving thousands of square miles in the hands of skeleton crews of underfed, undertrained and poorly equipped fighters. Many were conscripts or ragtag separatists from Ukraine’s divided east, with gear from the 1940s or little more than printouts from the internet describing how to use a sniper rifle, suggesting soldiers learned how to fight on the fly. With new weapons from the West in hand, the Ukrainians beat them back, yet Russian commanders kept sending waves of ground troops into pointless assaults, again and again. “Nobody is going to stay alive,” one Russian soldier said he realized after being ordered into a fifth march directly in the sights of Ukrainian artillery. Finally, he and his demoralized comrades refused to go.

Mr. Putin divided his war into fiefs, leaving no one powerful enough to challenge him. Many of his fighters are commanded by people who are not even part of the military, like his former bodyguard, the leader of Chechnya and a mercenary boss who has provided catering for Kremlin events. As the initial invasion failed, the atomized approach only deepened, chipping away at an already disjointed war effort. Now, Mr. Putin’s fractured armies often function like rivals, competing for weapons and, at times, viciously turning on one another...

People who know Mr. Putin say he is ready to sacrifice untold lives and treasure for as long as it takes, and in a rare face-to-face meeting with the Americans last month the Russians wanted to deliver a stark message to President Biden: No matter how many Russian soldiers are killed or wounded on the battlefield, Russia will not give up.

One NATO member is warning allies that Mr. Putin is ready to accept the deaths or injuries of as many as 300,000 Russian troops — roughly three times his estimated losses so far...

The more setbacks Mr. Putin endures on the battlefield, the more fears grow over how far he is willing to go. He has killed tens of thousands in Ukraine, leveled cities and targeted civilians for maximum pain — obliterating hospitals, schools and apartment buildings, while cutting off power and water to millions before winter. Each time Ukrainian forces score a major blow against Russia, the bombing of their country intensifies. And Mr. Putin has repeatedly reminded the world that he can use anything at his disposal, including nuclear arms, to pursue his notion of victory...

The article goes into greater detail about how Russian folly, under-planning, lack of flexible battlefield command, and straight-up hubris exposed both Putin and his military for the empty shells they are. Putin in particular gets raked over the coals regarding his disgust of Western nations as "weak and broken" alongside his paranoia those same Western nations were plotting Russia's utter ruin. Well, congratulations to Mr. Putin: It's not the West that's ruining Russia, it's himself.

Mr. Putin rose to power as a deft politician. He could flash charm, humility and a smile, painting himself as a reasonable leader to Russians and foreigners. He knew how to control his facial muscles in tense conversations, leaving his eyes as the only guide to his emotions, people who know him said.

But during his presidency, he increasingly wallowed in a swirl of grievances and obsessions: the West’s supposed disregard for the Soviet Union’s role in defeating Nazi Germany; the fear that NATO would base nuclear missiles in Ukraine to strike Moscow; modern-day gender politics in which, Mr. Putin often says, Mom and Dad are being replaced by “Parent No. 1 and Parent No. 2.”

There is well-known quote, misattributed to Abraham Lincoln but was really by Robert Ignersoll (who was talking about Lincoln at a speech in 1883), that goes "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." Putin was given power, and held onto it for thirty years, and it exposed his character as misogynist, mistrustful, and corrupt.

Once again, Mr. Putin seemed convinced that future generations of Russians could be threatened by the West. He had spent years preparing for precisely such a clash, devoting hundreds of billions of dollars to Russia’s military, supposedly to modernize it and strip out the corruption that had sapped it in the 1990s.

But while Russia made significant headway, Western officials said, a culture of graft and fraud persisted under Mr. Putin that emphasized loyalty above honesty, or even skill. The result was a hodgepodge of elite troops and bedraggled conscripts, advanced tanks and battalions that were powerful only on paper.

“Everyone was stealing and lying. This was a Soviet, and now Russian, tradition,” said Col. Vaidotas Malinionis, a retired Lithuanian commander who served in the Soviet military in the 1980s. Looking at satellite images of the army camp where he served, he said the old barracks and mess hall were still there, with no sign of modernization, and a few buildings had fallen down. “There has been no evolution at all, only regression,” he said.

European, American and Ukrainian officials warned against underestimating Russia, saying it had improved after its muddled invasion of Georgia in 2008. The defense minister overhauled the armed forces, forcibly retired about 40,000 officers and tried to impose more transparency on where money went...

Then, in 2012, that minister — in charge of dragging the military out of its post-Soviet dysfunction — became embroiled in a corruption scandal himself. Mr. Putin replaced him with Sergei K. Shoigu, who had no military experience but was seen as someone who could smooth ruffled feathers.

“Russia drew a lot of lessons from the Georgia war and started to rebuild their armed forces, but they built a new Potemkin village,” said Gintaras Bagdonas, the former head of Lithuania’s military intelligence. Much of the modernization drive was “just pokazukha,” he said, using a Russian term for window-dressing...

Potemkin Village is an old meme regarding things under both Tsarist and then Soviet (and now Putin) rule: A fake, pretty village built in a pretty part of Russia to show off to foreign dignitaries - and oft-times to Russian leaders who like to think everything under their rule is working - and to hide the reality of poor, rotting villages just out of sight. This manufactured self-delusion is such a part of the Russian psyche that they believe other nations do it as well. My dad - a Navy pilot for 20 years - would tell of a Soviet pilot who defected to the U.S. in the 1960s who ended up stationed at his base, and how that pilot visited the base commissary (grocery store) and couldn't believe it was really stocked with so many goods all the time. Dad would tell how that pilot would sneak back during the night to make sure it was real. I know I digress, but it's an anecdote I needed to share. 

Also hark back to the infamous 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, where the Russians were primed to host a glorious event, only to get caught with unfinished buildings, poorly designed rooms, unsafe water, and other logistical nightmares. That's what it's been like under Putin's rule as his oligarchical cronies pilfered and overbilled and underdelivered.

Here's a more relevant anecdote from Putin's deluded empire, how that corruption affected their own military preparedness:

Contractors like Sergei Khrabrykh, a former Russian Army captain, were recruited into the stagecraft. He said he got a panicked call in 2016 from a deputy defense minister. A delegation of officials was scheduled to tour a training base of one of Russia’s premier tank units, the Kantemirovskaya Tank Division, whose history dates to the victories of World War II.

Billions of rubles had been allocated for the base, Mr. Khrabrykh said, but most of the money was gone and virtually none of the work had been done. He said the minister begged him to transform it into a modern-looking facility before the delegation arrived.

“They needed to be guided around the territory and shown that the Kantemirovskaya Division was the coolest,” Mr. Khrabrykh said. He was given about $1.2 million and a month to do the job.

As he toured the base, Mr. Khrabrykh was stunned by the dilapidation. The Ministry of Defense had hailed the tank division as a unit that would defend Moscow in case of a NATO invasion. But the barracks were unfinished, with debris strewn across the floors, large holes in the ceiling and half-built cinder-block walls, according to photos Mr. Khrabrykh and his colleagues took. A tangle of electrical wires hung from a skinny pole.

“Just about everything was destroyed,” he said.

Before the delegation arrived, Mr. Khrabrykh said, he quickly constructed cheap facades and hung banners, covered in pictures of tanks and boasting the army was “stronger and sturdier year by year,” to disguise the worst of the decay. On the tour, he said, the visitors were guided along a careful route through the best-looking part of the base — and kept away from the bathrooms, which had not been repaired.

The punchline?

After the invasion started, the Kantemirovskaya Division pressed into northeastern Ukraine, only to be ravaged by Ukrainian forces. Crews limped away with many of their tanks abandoned or destroyed...

After the invasion, American officials noticed that much of Russia’s equipment was poorly manufactured or in short supply. Tires on wheeled vehicles fell apart, stalling convoys, while soldiers resorted to crowdfunding for clothes, crutches and other basic supplies as the war wore on...

Anybody with a basic understanding of military history will tell you that logistics matter. Your supply chain for your armies better be well-managed and well-stocked, otherwise you're screwed. It's a fact of warfare back to the days of Ancient Sparta well through the World Wars and into modern conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan. It's a lesson the Russians apparently failed to learn (again, because they had the same problems in World War I and their Afghanistan conflict of the 1980s) as their leadership's greed got the better of them.

Under Putin, the Russians had no other plan other than "March on Kyiv and claim victory" as their objective:

Unlike its more limited campaigns in places like Syria — or the big hypothetical war with NATO it had long planned for — the invasion of Ukraine was simply “not what the Russian military was designed to do,” putting it in a position it was probably “least prepared” to deal with, said Clint Reach, a researcher at RAND.

In other words, the Kremlin picked the “stupidest” of all potential military options by rushing forward and trying to take over Ukraine, said General Budanov, the Ukrainian military intelligence chief.

Russia had not trained its infantry, air and artillery forces to work in concert, move quickly and then do it all again from a new location, officials said. It did not have a clear Plan B after the march on Kyiv failed, and commanders had long been afraid to report bad news to their bosses...

The Russian Army - feared by Western powers for its size and mechanized armor - wasn't trained or prepped for any kind of occupation. The same kind of problem happened with American forces in the Iraq/Afghanistan wars of the 2000-10s, but in the U.S. case we at least had better trained troops, guys who had been drilled and prepped for anything and were able to adjust to battlefield conditions at a moment's notice. 

As a result, the American forces suffered fewer disasters and fewer casualties over a long period of time: About 15,000 troops lost over roughly 19 years.

Russia's forces, in nine months of fighting in Ukraine, have lost over 100,000 troops (the number can be even higher than that). 

I swear to God. If the United States had seen those kind of losses in the first nine months of fighting in Afghanistan in 2002 or in Iraq in 2003, not only would the anti-war protests in our streets continued non-stop, Congress itself - even with Republicans in control of both houses - would have started bipartisan impeachment hearings on Bush and Cheney. There's no way Americans would have accepted such bloody losses through such incompetence and disregard for our troops' lives.

When one Russian unit arrived in eastern Ukraine, it was quickly whittled down to a haggard few, according to one of its soldiers.

During fighting in the spring, he said, his commanders ordered an offensive, promising artillery to support the attack. It never came, he said, and his unit was devastated.

Yet commanders sent them right back into the melee all the same.

“How much time has passed now? Nine months, I think?” he said. “In this whole time, nothing has changed. They have not learned. They have not drawn any conclusions from their mistakes.”

He recounted another battle in which commanders sent soldiers down the same path to the front, over and over. On each trip, he said, bodies fell around him. Finally, after being ordered to go a fifth time, he and his unit refused to go, he said.

In all, he said, his unit lost about 70 percent of its soldiers to death and injury, ruining any faith he had in his commanders...

The low morale is commonplace across Russia nowadays.

The resignation exists in Moscow, too, where opposition to the war is common, but rarely expressed above whispers.

“We’re giving each other looks, but to say something is impossible,” one former Putin confidant in Moscow said, describing the atmosphere in the halls of power.

Putin's autocratic grip on Russia seems unbreakable even as his people suffer. His delusions and hatred prevent him from admitting any truth that he's the one who screwed up.

In late November, at his suburban Moscow residence, Mr. Putin met with mothers of Russian soldiers. It was a distant echo of one of the lowest moments of his tenure: his encounter with the families of sailors aboard a sunken submarine in 2000, when a crying woman in a remote Arctic town demanded, “Where is my son?”

Twenty-two years later, the Kremlin was careful to prevent such outpourings of grief. Around a long table with individual teapots for the handpicked women — some of them state employees and pro-Kremlin activists — Mr. Putin showed no remorse for sending Russians to their deaths.

After all, he told one woman who said her son was killed in Ukraine, tens of thousands of Russians die each year from car accidents and alcohol abuse. Rather than drinking himself to death, he told her, her son died with a purpose.

“Some people, are they even living or not living? It’s unclear. And how they die, from vodka or something else, it’s also unclear,” Mr. Putin said. “But your son lived, you understand? He reached his goal.”

He told another mother that her son was not only fighting “neo-Nazis” in Ukraine, but also correcting the mistakes after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Russia “enthusiastically indulged in the fact” that the West was “trying to control us.”

“They have a different cultural code,” he told her. “They count the genders there by the dozens...”

Those words are not coming from a rational man. Putin is indulging in the fear-mongering common among Far Right apologists who view their Culture War bullshit as real, and are willing to sacrifice the lives of others to justify that fear. Look at how Putin rationalizes that the soldiers he sent to die in Ukraine "would have died some other way" like drinking themselves to death (which, by the way, is a serious problem in Russia already). The cruelty towards his own Russian people can't stay hidden.

The world has been debating Mr. Putin’s willingness to use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine. People who know him don’t discount the possibility, but they also believe he expects to defeat the West and Ukraine in a long-term, non-nuclear test of wills.

As one senior NATO intelligence official put it, Russian generals “acknowledge the incompetence, lack of coordination, lack of training. They all recognize these problems.” Still, they seem confident of an “eventual victory” because, the official said, “Putin believes this is a game of chicken between him and the West, and he believes the West will blink first.”

Personally, I doubt it. Too many Eastern European nations are willing to keep Ukraine supplied to ensure a revived Russian Empire doesn't come knocking at their borders. The fact that Russian's military might was never that mighty to begin with - and the reality that sooner or later Russia's gonna run out of missiles and tanks even with the equipment they're getting from their few allies in Iran and China - points to an eventual collapse.

Putin is behaving like he can outlive his enemies, but he's 70 years old and rumors abound he's suffering in poor health. Putin is behaving like he's got enough allies surrounding him to keep him propped up, but he really doesn't: Allies like Belarus, Iran, and China are facing their own problems at home.

Putin keeps making mistakes, trapped by the illusions every dictator suffers from: He believes he is the chosen Great Man of History, that he is the indispensable hero of his nation's story, that he will achieve glory through the sacrifices of others, and that he is never ever wrong.

Everyone else is dying for his mistakes. But it would be an even greater mistake to let him walk away unharmed from the suffering he's caused. Putin needs to answer for his sins, either in a war crimes tribunal or in a Ukrainian jail cell, or in a Russian hospital bed dying from the rot eating at his own body.

Upcoming Projects for 2023

Couple of personal notes intermixed with the blogging: 

Driven by the need to have a printed book to apply Royal Palm Literary Award stickers on the covers, I will be putting together key articles from this blog for publication. I did it before with Surviving the Age of Obstruction back in 2016, and I figure a good follow-up to that would be articles about the rise of trump and the destruction he wrought upon the world for 6-plus years.

...

I shall not use the obvious title "Surviving the Eternal Shitgibbon" since I don't own the trademark on "Shitgibbon," so I DO need a better title to market the damn thing. The subtitle "A Diary of the Trump Years" I think is unavoidable.

I may pull the first book from print, though. It never sold - it had to be the weak title I gave it, and publishing through a bad POD service didn't help - and I want to start fresh.

The other project on my mind is writing a book on American -Isms. Having blogged a bit about libertarianism and pragmatism, I figure I need to define the other major -isms - liberalism, conservatism, socialism, fascism, populism, racism - in our nation's political forums. I want to do this for my niece and nephews, all of whom are in their early 20s and I worry about the disinformation floating out there threatening to suck their brains dry.

So I may be busy this Saturnalian weekend as well as the early months of 2023 getting projects done.

I do know I need to keep blogging here. After all, tomorrow Monday promises to be a busy day.

Thoughts About the 2022 Midterms

A lot of post-midterms articles are out there on the Intertubes, a number of wry observations and urgent recriminations towards Republicans, and I would recommend glancing at Rude Pundit's to get a taste of the schadenfreude getting served over the GOP's historic failures.

I say "failure" even as the Republicans claimed (slim) control of the U.S. House of Representatives - and retained control of a number of Red states - because it's been traditional in the modern era of partisan politics that the party in opposition to the White House - this year the Republicans in opposition to the Democratic President Biden - wins big in the following midterms. This year, the Republicans were expecting a "Red Wave" to counter the 2018 "Blue Wave" that gave Democrats control of the House vs. donald trump.

The polling - mostly from conservative-leaning providers like RCP - were all pointing to a huge 30-seat flip of the House. There were a number of projections Republicans could regain a tightly fought Senate, even in spite of the crazed candidates running in various campaigns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, and Arizona (and several others).

Republicans were beating the war drums hard on the economy, railing against signs of a recession as inflation (re: gas prices) soared to levels that hurt any President's standing with voters.

This was also all happening with the 2022 district realignments for the House, where the updated Census numbers required new maps and allowed the parties - yes, Democrats did it too - to aggressively gerrymander those districts to give them advantages. Republicans held the gerrymander advantage due to controlling enough battleground states to outduel the Dems (who also shot themselves in the foot by not gerrymandering New York to their advantage, screw you Andrew Cuomo).

Throw in the Republicans attempts at voter suppression - far greater than what they had in 2018 and 2020 - and there was every likelihood that turnout would drop, hurting Democratic chances.

And with all of that going the Republicans' way... they STILL failed to retake the Senate - which added an extra Democratic seat meaning the 50-50 power-sharing is no longer working and Mitch McConnell can suck it - and their win in the House was by a meager five seats, causing headaches for party leadership they weren't expecting.

It is, according to historians, the worst midterm performance for an opposition party since 1962. There was a similar situation for Democrats in 2002 failing against Dubya, but the 9/11 attacks and the patriotic fervor clearly skewed the situation. There were the Republicans failing against FDR in 1934, but the Great Depression was still happening and a lot of Americans still hated them and Hoover for screwing them over.

The Republicans ought to be rejoicing in that they control the House, which they can use to investigate Biden's administration family for scandals every day they meet on the Hill, and file every impeachment complaint until all they do is vote on embarrassing Biden and Harris for the 2024 campaign (lacking control of the Senate, no impeachment will go their way: For the Republicans it's all about making the Democrats look corrupt and weak to their own voting base). They are openly planning repeated hearings over Russia's planted evidence Hunter Biden's laptop, as it's the only thing they can do other than force federal shutdowns to break the entire government.

Instead, the Republicans are in-fighting over the poor results. They were expecting a wave and all they got was a trickle. The My Pillow guy Mike Lindell - who is constantly shilling conspiracy theories for trump's Big Lie about "stolen votes" - is challenging for control of the RNC, arguing the current head - Mitt Romney's daughter Ronna McDaniel - failed to inspire better turnout. There were a number of reports of GOP leaders railing against trump's involvement, pushing on them unstable and unpopular candidates like Hershel Walker in Georgia who hurt turnout among needed independent voters.

There are going to be post-mortems, autopsies, follow-up reports, what have you, which the Republicans will ignore like they did after they were stunned in 2012, when they expected four years of Tea Party fauxrage would turn America against Obama. The GOP's response after that loss was to double-down on the Far Right fearmongering to encourage their voting base to stay faithful, and they've been spiraling downward ever since thanks to trump's takeover in 2016.

If the midterms are showing me anything, these are the observations I've made:

Like Bob Burnett points out at Common Dreams, the American electorate is polarized to the point of frozen stasis. In previous eras before the Culture War shifted all of the Conservative votes to the Republicans after 1994, there was an expectation of centrist/moderate party voters crossing the aisle to vote for candidates or issues regardless of party. By 2014, branding won out: Republicans (tm) can no longer find themselves voting for ANY Democrat (tm) (and the same goes for Dems refusing to vote for any GOPer) even when the issues should compel them to vote for the other party that's in favor of those issues.

While this means you can rely on your party base, it means you can't expect any more voters to flip your way. Whatever independent/No Party Affiliate voters are out there, you find yourself praying for them to show up for you to overcome any demographic limitations you've already set for your party with the gerrymandering and suppression. And voter turnout for NPAs is unreliable at best.

The results are also telling me that for the Republicans this is the best they can do for turnout, and they STILL screwed up. This is as far as they can get for voter turnout and numbers going their way. Even WITH the extreme gerrymandering favoring them, even WITH the voter suppression laws they put in place to reduce turnout numbers... the Republicans STILL couldn't pull off a Red Wave of their own.

For every voter the GOP had on their side showing up angry over inflation, the Democrats had voters showing up angry over the loss of abortion rights. For every Red state they held onto, the Republicans lost control of a couple of state legislatures they could not afford to lose.

And this was the midterms. Voter turnout for Presidential election cycles are higher, and 2024 could well be a repeat of 2020 in that regard.

This is also something hurting Republicans in the long run: The inevitable demographic shift of older (Boomer) voters to younger (Gen Z/Millennial) voters is starting to happen. One of the things the Republicans realized in 2012 was that by 2028, simple dying off of the older generations that make up the Conservative voting base will increase just as the kids who grew up watching Republicans burn everything down will get old enough to vote. (The divided Generation X sitting between the two generations is too small a voter bloc - they're the ones not showing up to vote at all - to help Republicans) We are looking at a one-two punch for Liberal-leaning younger voters that could flip even Red states Blue in ways that suppression and gerrymandering can't stop. 

It's one big reason why the Republicans doubled-down anyway: They figured that the 2028 demographic shift was unstoppable, so they worked in the short-term to dominate Congress and the White House to ensure the one thing that could counter that Blue shift - a Far Right Supreme Court - would be in place to prevent the full liberalization of America that would undo everything they've done since Reagan's tenure.

In the short term, the Far Right won. In the long term, the bill for all the damage they've done - the racism, the deficits, the corruption made worse by trump's rise to power - is coming due. This middling, frustrating midterm fiasco for the Republicans is the beginning of the end of the control they've had on the public discourse since 1980.

And it terrifies them. The Far Right Republican base have a pretty good idea what these midterms mean, and the panic showing through their ongoing performative outrage is going to get worse.

The Wingnuts are about to double-down on the previous double-down to turn crazier than they've ever been. Stay safe, people.

And Io Saturnalia!

A Major Grift

So yesterday, donald "Prep Me For a Perp Walk" trump got on his social media app claiming "A MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT" happening today (Dec. 15th).

Speculation went rampant. Some were pondering him making a media attack on the various criminal and civil cases he was facing in New York City, with this weird artwork of him posing in a superhero outfit outside his Trump Tower.

Bill Kristol went as far as suggesting this was trump making a move for the Speakership of the U.S. House (fun fact, anybody can serve as Speaker, you don't have to be an elected Representative).

I have to admit I saw Kristol's tweeting on the matter as well as a few others repeating the same thing, and I have to admit I panicked. The possibility of trump forcing himself upon the Congressional Republicans in a do-or-die decision carried the possibility of party breakdown and open civil war.

So what DID happen when trump made his MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT this morning?

Trading cards.

The goddamn Shitgibbon is shilling trading cards of his likeness - drawn as 'manly' figures like cowboys, astronauts, and superheroes - for his followers to gobble up like collectibles, all at the low low price of $99.00 a card. And they're not even physical cards: They're NFTs, fully digital, not even real at all.

The tension went from "What the fuck will happen" to "WHAT THE FUCK HE DOING NOW?"

I had to go to Kotaku's Sisi Jiang for more detail:

A new line of, expensive Non-Fungible Tokens is apparently the “major announcement” Trump first teased yesterday, in a Truth Social post declaring that “AMERICA NEEDS A SUPERHERO!” The accompanying teaser video showed a brief glimpse of a muscled, Trump-like figure adorned like Superman, complete with animated lasers beaming from its eyes. And now we know: That “major announcement” is just a new line of NFTs.

Aside from Trump shooting flaming lasers out of both of his eyes, other NFTs in the range feature him photoshopped awkwardly in gaudy outfits. But wait, there’s more! If you buy one of these “digital collectibles,” you could win the opportunity to meet him over dinner, play a round of golf, or speak to the ex-president over a Zoom call.

I don’t know what’s more depressing: the sheer insecurity that oozes from these NFT trading cards, or the plausibility that his cult of Republican goons might actually purchase these in droves...

If he manages to sell 40 of these “trading cards,” then he’d be able to pay off the $4,000 he owes for being found in contempt of court on Tuesday. I wish him all the best.

All of this storm and fury coming out of trump, and it all ends up yet another grift from him, another attempt to squeeze as much money from the TRUMP (tm) brand he possibly can before the courts take whatever real money he has left from his crumbling empire.

I should have known. We all should have known. Everything about trump is about him making money. Even the Presidency, and the ongoing campaigning he does to try and get back into high office so he can avoid criminal accountability for every con job he's been running all these years.

If the results of last week's jury decision is any indication, trump is quickly losing revenue streams he used to rely on. he's going back to the "Trump Steaks" scheme of old where he took someone else's product and slapped his name on it to sell it at a higher price. Here he's taking other people's artwork of him and shilling them as collectibles even as everyone else can visit the website and copy the images for themselves without giving a rat's ass what the NFT status will be.

It's a joke of a con game. Damn me - and everybody else - for getting suckered by it.

In the meantime, you don't need to waste any $99 on something that's not even worth a wooden nickel. You ought to spend that $99 on coming up with a collectible card game that people can actually play, and getting a gaming company to buy it/market it for you. Make something useful and real, America. Gods help us if anybody buys trump's junk.

The Crimes Clearly Defined

There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.
-- Albert Camus

Following up on the local aspects of the January 6th Insurrection here among the Tampa Bay denizens. A jury convicted a man involved with the riot on charges related to his involvement on Capitol Hill (via Dan Sullivan at the Tampa Bay Times (paywall)): 

Jeremy Brown, a former U.S. Army Special Forces master sergeant linked to the Jan. 6 insurrection, was found guilty Monday on six of 10 federal criminal charges related to weapons and classified information that authorities found in his Tampa home.

After a weeklong trial, a jury of six men and six women deliberated about five hours Monday afternoon before deciding that Brown was guilty of illegally possessing two guns, a pair of hand grenades and a single classified document related to the search for a formerly missing soldier in Afghanistan.

But the panel also found Brown not guilty of possessing four other documents related to national defense, which federal agents found on a CD inside his girlfriend’s recreational vehicle...

I do wonder if the federal prosecutors will now go after the girlfriend for those classified docs in her RV, or did she turn state's evidence already...? Anywho:

Federal agents found the illegal items last year during a search of Brown’s property amid a probe into his connection to the events of Jan. 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol.

He’s accused in a separate case in Washington, D.C., of being among the rioters who disrupted certification of the 2020 election results, though Brown is not accused of actually entering the Capitol building.

Brown didn’t deny that the sawed-off shotgun and the short-barreled rifle that agents found at his home were his. The guns were not registered in a federal database, as required by law.

But his attorney, Roger Futerman, argued to the jury that most of the other items — including the grenades and a CD with a red label marked “secret” which contained documents detailing military activities in Afghanistan — were planted by federal agents.

The defense lawyer pointed to forensic evidence that showed DNA on the hand grenades came from someone other than Brown. He also highlighted a number of peculiarities in the way agents conducted and documented the search. Most notably: they turned off Brown’s home security cameras upon entering.

“The evidence was manipulated and planted,” Futerman said. “I can’t tell you when it was planted or who planted it. But the forensics don’t lie.”

Futerman also asserted that for Brown to be guilty of possessing classified material related to national defense, there would have to be proof that he had a “bad purpose” for the material...

Having followed the classified documents scandal involving trump at Mar-A-Lago (and now arguably other unsecured places), I've seen that argument Futerman makes, and that it's already been debunked. The government doesn't have to prove "bad purpose" regarding classified documents, all they have to prove is that you SHOULD NOT HAVE THOSE DOCS IN THE FIRST PLACE, and it's looking like the jury understood that.

Arguing that the feds planted evidence is always a legal defense, but without actual proof of the frame-up what the hell else could Futerman claim? Brown confessed to having illegal firearms anyway, why would the feds throw in (metaphorically) a bunch of illegal grenades and (not-so-metaphorically) classified documents? If they were trying to frame Brown with relation to his January 6th actions, why didn't the feds set up more "fake evidence" tying him to that in order to create a "stronger case" on the insurrection charges Brown will face later in DC?

The jury had to consider the conspiracy angles that Futerman was selling them, and refused to buy what he was offering. The simplest explanation after all - that Brown was caught red-handed by the people investigating him for crimes elsewhere - is usually the correct one.

Brown is, by the by, one of hundreds - as of this week, there are 465 rioters who've already plead guilty, out of 960 charged (so far), and by my count about 12 convicted by juries - tied into trump's insurrection effort that have faced the music (also known as "fucked around, found out"). There were roughly 2000 people present at the break-in to the Capitol building, although not all of them have faced legal consequences so far. The Justice Department seems to be focusing on the more violent ones, the rioters who actively attempted to interfere with the Electoral College count and the confirmation of Joe Biden's Presidential win.

trump's insurrectionists can whine and claim they're being framed all they want. But we all witnessed what happened that January 6th. Their crimes are clearly defined. It's now a question of them paying for what they've broken.

Suspicions About A DeSantis Ally

This was something unsettling happening this weekend in Jacksonville, Florida: A DeSantis political ally and fundraising supporter found dead of a suspected suicide (via Ryan Dailey for news channel WCJB): 

Kent Stermon, a Jacksonville-area businessman and member of the state university system’s Board of Governors, was found dead in an apparent suicide Thursday night, law enforcement officials confirmed on Friday.

Stermon was found “deceased, alone in a locked vehicle” in the parking lot of a post office in Atlantic Beach by a post-office employee, an Atlantic Beach Police Department report said.

“There is no suspected foul play. The investigation is being worked as a suicide,” a news release from the police department said.

According to the report, Stermon had been sought as a missing person by the sheriff’s office shortly before he was found deceased. Stermon apparently took his own life amid an ongoing probe by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office...

Stermon was president and chief operating officer of Total Military Management, a logistics company that enables “Department of Defense qualified transportation service providers to better serve the military marketplace,” according to its website.

A politically connected figure in Northeast Florida, Stermon --- who was named “citizen of the year” by the sheriff’s office in 2016 --- was part of the host committee for the 2020 Republican National Convention in Jacksonville.

Stermon also was a donor to Gov. Ron DeSantis and served on his transition team in 2018. Stermon contributed a combined $53,250 to DeSantis and his political committee Friends of Ron DeSantis between 2018 and 2022, including a $25,000 contribution to DeSantis’ committee on Nov. 30, 2021.

DeSantis appointed Stermon to the Board of Governors in March 2019. Stermon served as chairman of the board’s Audit and Compliance Committee.

This was a connected guy making money off of government contracts, with his hands in a lot of Republican activities. Notice the quid pro quo of DeSantis putting Stermon on the Board of Governors overseeing our state university system.

Just what exactly were the law enforcement investigating Stermon for?

The Politico website has something to note, not official of course (reported by Matt Dixon):

Waters said that because the investigation remains active, there is “limited information available to release at this time.” The Florida Times-Union reported, citing unidentified law enforcement sources, that authorities were examining allegations of sexual misconduct.

When I heard the news about Stermon, my first thought was "Is any of this tied to the Joel Greenberg/Matt Gaetz matter we've been waiting years on for resolution?"

Last we heard anything major about that ongoing scandal was back in 2021, when Greenberg agreed to plead to six major charges the feds had out of THIRTY-THREE (!) possible, in exchange for Greenberg giving more details about any other illegal activities tied to his county and state-level work with other politicians (hint: Republicans) and business figures (hint: also Republicans).

It's been almost 18 months waiting, but this December the feds finally put Greenberg away, with the judge sentencing him to 11 years in prison. Prosecutors argued for a relatively lighter sentence on Greenberg because he had given them useful information about other state-level figures - the numbers bounce between eight to twenty-five other suspects - involved in the sex trafficking investigation.

With Stermon under similar investigation when he took his own life, I am pondering if there's a link here.

I'm also wondering about this week's other state scandal of the "Don't Say Gay" hypocrite State Rep. Harding getting charged with acts of wire fraud involving COVID-19 bailout funds that Greenberg was also committing.

I'm still waiting for Matt Gaetz to face these moments. Gaetz was tied to so many of Greenberg's antics - and Gaetz has shown so much bad behavior on his own related to these matters - it's impossible to believe he will walk away from any justice here.

Give us that wonderful Saturnalia gift of Gaetz in a perp walk, people.

Ukrainian Spirit for 2022

Just making a quick note about this, as I haven't written about Ukraine for some time: Russia is getting it's collective ass kicked, Putin is desperately lobbing rockets at civilian targets committing war crimes because he can't do anything else to win, and the world is heading into a long winter waiting for Putin to admit defeat before his own army freezes to death.

As we're getting to the end of the year, media outlets tend to start doling out honors: Few rank higher than TIME magazine's Person of the Year award, although to be honest there's been a lot of years they get it wrong (Elon Musk?! YOU FOOLS).

This year, however, was a no-brainer: The minute Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky uttered "I need ammo, not a ride" on the eve of the Russian invasion into his country, he triggered every pro-Churchillian editor and pundit into fangirlish delight. It was obvious TIME was going to name Zelensky as Person of the Year:

slightly surprised TIME didn't redo their classic red border
with a blue and yellow pattern. Alas.

In recognition that all of Ukraine is fighting for their existence in the face of Russian imperialism, the magazine is sharing the honor with "Ukrainian people's fighting spirit." But yeah, it's the steel balls on Zelensky we're honoring here.

I can think of a couple of bastards - Putin and trump - fuming at the honor going to the guy humiliating their own broken identities. Good. Suck it, losers.

 

The Hypocrisy of Pickpockets in Florida

The government of my country snubs honest simplicity but fondles artistic villainy, and I think I might have developed into a very capable pickpocket if I had remained in the public service a year or two.
-- Mark Twain

Some days, you got to remind yourself that the louder and pious the elected official behaves in public, the likelier it is that elected official is a hypocritical pickpocket.

Case in point: This morning the news let out that the Florida state legislator who authored the odious "Don't Say Gay" law that the Far Right Republicans shoved down our throats was charged by the feds for stealing from the federal COVID-19 bailout funds. Via Edwin Rios at the Guardian: 

A federal grand jury has indicted the Florida state representative Joe Harding, the Republican lawmaker who authored the “don’t say gay” bill, for Covid business relief fraud and money laundering, the justice department announced on Wednesday.

Between December 2020 and March 2021, Harding, 35, committed wire fraud when he took part in a “scheme to defraud” the Small Business Administration and obtained Covid-related relief funds for small businesses under false pretenses, according to a federal indictment.

Harding, whose biography lists him as a “home healthcare executive” and a member of the Chamber of Commerce, allegedly “fraudulently obtained” more than $150,000 in funds from the Small Business Administration...

Harding’s home health agency is located in Ocala. After state redistricting created a new electorate, Harding moved to Ocala to be closer to his job and ran for house district 24, according to Florida Politics. He authored the Parental Rights in Education Act, which prohibits educators from talking about matters of gender and sexual identity in schools, a move that advocates worried would “erase” LGBTQ+ students and their history...

It's not mentioned in the article, but I bet you a couple wooden nickels that Harding is one of those happy Christian warriors, the kind who love to claim they follow all of Jesus' teachings and live by every word they can quote from the Bible. The state-level Republicans are full of such Bible Thumpers who enjoy the sadism of thumping everybody else's heads with the thick Bibles in their hands.

Considering how Harding is openly crusading against Gays and Trans identities, he's likely one of those Christian warriors who'll quote the passages against homosexuality and any kind of gender identity they view as deviancy.

I guarantee you Harding will never quote the parts of the Bible where Jesus commanded us to love each other, the open act of Grace that defines acceptance regardless of race or gender or gender preference. 

Based on the federal charges leveled against Harding, he certainly never paid attention to God's Commandments like, oh:

You shall not steal (taking $150,000 that didn't belong to you).

You shall not covet thy neighbor's belongings (a thief in high office tends to covet the trappings of wealth, the cars, the big toys, the even bigger houses).

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor (lying in general - such as falsely claiming workers you never hired - tends to be a violation of ethics as well as faith).

Harding is one of many Republicans who rail on religious grounds against the very existence of gay and trans people, and then hypocritically commit crimes against everyone else thinking that their political and religious status will shield them from accountability.

Well, guess what Harding? Your hypocrisy does not shield you. You are now about to answer to Man's Law with regards to your greed and envy.

Just wonder how you'll excuse all that greed away with the God's Law that you never held true.

P.S. KEEP SAYING "GAY", FLORIDA. Harding doesn't speak for us, that's for damn sure.

Update: That was quick. Harding resigns from his office. It won't change much - the Florida lege is so dominated by Republicans they could lose 20 of them and not blink an eye - but it does suggest he had no room to run.

A Terrible Job of Hiding

I was going to write about the final results of the 2022 Midterms, with the Georgia runoff victory for Warnock giving the Democrats 51-seat control of the Senate, but then this afternoon the social media was jumping up and down about new developments in the Top Secret Classified Documents scandal at donald trump's Mar-A-Lago.

Well actually, the documents NOT at donald trump's Mar-A-Lago.

It turns out that Former President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice) trump was just leaving classified folders of vital information all over Palm Beach County. Via Hugo Lowell at The Guardian: 

Donald Trump’s lawyers found at least two more documents bearing classification markings inside boxes at a storage unit in Florida when they searched through items that were brought from the White House at the end of his administration, one source familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.

The new discovery could exacerbate the former president’s legal exposure after the FBI seized 103 documents marked classified at his Mar-a-Lago resort in August as part of the justice department’s criminal investigation into the possible unauthorized retention of national security information and obstruction of justice.

The presence of documents marked classified in a second location beyond Mar-a-Lago, earlier reported by the Washington Post, appears to confirm the justice department’s suspicions, communicated to Trump’s lawyers in October, that Trump possessed additional government records...

Trump’s lawyers were ordered in recent weeks to conduct a more thorough search of items in the former president’s possession by Beryl Howell, the chief US district court judge for the District of Columbia, in a sealed order issued as part of a closed-door court battle.

The order capped a weeks-long process that started after the justice department expressed concern that Trump still had additional documents marked classified in his possession, potentially at other properties, after the FBI seized thousands of materials at Mar-a-Lago on 8 August...

This wasn't anything associated to Judge Cannon's Special Master situation in South Florida - which is still unresolved after the 11th Circuit's ruling - but associated with the ongoing investigations being conducted back in Washington DC, where jurisdiction over federal classified materials are handled. This points to the likelihood that the Special Counsel's office that took over multiple investigations into trump's misdeeds is closing in on criminal charges sooner rather than later. The FBI and Justice Department are NOT slowing up on finding out where every still-missing document can be found. And they seem to have a pretty good idea already what trump's taken: They're still digging because they know there's more classified documents out there.

While it was trump's own lawyers - hiring an outside team to do the digging - that uncovered the fact that even more classified materials are out there in the wild, this revelation proves that it's not just Mar-A-Lago that was trump's only hiding spot for Top Secret stuff he shouldn't have had. If the documents are in more than one location, then every location trump and his people have access to are ripe locations for hiding these docs.

Making it worse is how trump is stashing these classified documents in places that could easily be gotten to. I know, a storage facility in this day and age will have security cameras, double locks, gates and doors, all that. If a foreign power or corrupt corporation found out trump had documents in a storage unit, it would be all too easy to rent a storage unit nearby, walk in normally like you're accessing your own bin, break the lock to trump's storage, sift through what you can find at leisure, and calmly walk back out before anyone notices the busted lock.

It would be easier than getting into Mar-A-Lago, which is notoriously easy to get into in the first place.

This is both hilarious - that trump is just stupid enough to do this - and horrifying - that trump is just stupid enough to do this - enough that we can't ignore this report.

Frankly, I did a better job of hiding my porn stash from my parents when I was 18 way better than trump did hiding our national security secrets.

(Pause)

Shut up. October 1988 was a good month. (Waves hi to Shannon)

Like the elaborations of a bad liar, donald trump is doing a terrible job of hiding the evidence he should never have taken.

Time to issue search warrants for EVERY property trump owns and visited since January 2021. There's bound to be more documents out there to recover that trump's taken with him.

Special Counsel Jack Smith better move fast. Those spies are rushing to the U-Haul Storage buildings nearest to every other trump property as I type this.

Let the Guilty Verdicts Be Read: trump Is Toast December 2022 edition

Let the Schadenfreude be served. Let the people celebrate. Send some to the common pulpits, and cry out "Liberty, Freedom, and an End to trump franchises!"

I want to hug the army of the Potomac investigators into trump's tax schemes. I want to get the whole of the army of Vicksburg Manhattan District Attorney's office drunk at my own expense. I want to fight some small trump and thrash him.
-- paraphrasing/updating the celebratory words of Henry Adams

Ah, just in case you didn't hear the joyous cheers this afternoon, that New York City criminal trial on the Trump Organization's tax mischief had the jury verdict returned, and the jury found trump's corporate empire guilty on ALL counts (via Andrea Bernstein, Ilya Marritz, and Brian Mann at NPR):

A jury in Manhattan has found former President Donald Trump's company guilty of a long-running criminal tax fraud scheme that lasted into his presidency.

Though Trump and his company have repeatedly faced criminal investigations, this case marks the first time his company has been charged, tried, and convicted on criminal charges.

Trump built his political brand, in large part, on his claim that he was an aggressive and successful businessman...

Considering the number of bankruptcies trump filed over the decades, he was gaslighting about the "successful businessman" bit, and this court verdict confirms it. I digress, let's return to the report:

In all, the jury found two entities controlled by Trump guilty on 17 counts of criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records. The maximum penalty is $1.6 million.

"This was a case about lying and cheating, false documents to the aid of evading taxes for the benefit of individuals and the corporation," Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg said, speaking with reporters after the verdict was delivered.

In a statement, the Trump Organization criticized the verdict and promised to appeal, arguing that blame should fall on the company's executives and not on the firm itself.

"The notion that a company could be held responsible for an employees' actions, to benefit themselves, on their own personal tax returns is simply preposterous," the statement read...

This is trump trying to shift the blame on his handlers, on the people who answered to him when it came to running his corporation. If that was true, then it undercuts any claim trump makes about being the guy who makes all the tough decisions, of being in control of anything. trump can't run from being held accountable here: the company getting convicted has his name on it.

At issue in this trial was whether Weisselberg and another top executive, Trump Organization comptroller Jeffrey McConney acted "in behalf of" the corporate entities when they compensated Weisselberg and other top executives by paying for the apartments and luxury benefits that did not get reported to the tax authorities.

Well, issue resolved. The jury believed that Weisselberg and McConney acted in behalf of and on orders from the company executives... which is pretty much trump and half his family.

If there's any damper on the festivities happening tonight, it's the reality that donald trump himself - nor his eldest sons and daughter who were part of these schemes - will not face direct punishment for these crimes. For reasons I still don't fathom, the Manhattan DA's office decided not to pursue trump himself, focusing on the corporate entity itself as though the evidence they had was sufficient only for that.

Thing is, the swiftness of this jury decision, and the fact the jurors convicted on ALL counts, underscores the possibility that even one criminal charge - say, the First Degree charge on Scheme to Defraud - could have been proven in court today. It seems a shame that the DA refused to risk that.

The good news: With the wrap-up on this case - even before the jury verdict was read - DA Bragg had decided to reconsider a criminal matter that should directly imperil trump. Remember the Stormy Daniels Hush Money payoff that sent trump's bagman lawyer Michael Cohen to the slammer? Bragg reportedly is looking into using the information revealed in the tax fraud convictions to reopen the Daniels affair. If you'll recall, trump squeaked out of that matter as "Unindicted Co-Conspirator Individual One." All things being equal, with Cohen and Daniels likely to testify against him, trump won't stay unindicted for long.

A more direct impact from this verdict is that trump's business empire faces dire financial disruptions from here on. Not just the fines - which honestly aren't that severe for even a middling operation like trump's - but the reality that banks, lenders, and other corporations may be restricted in doing any business with the Trump Organization at all. trump's ability to keep grifting is going to take a huge hit.

And this criminal trial has ties to an even bigger headache for trump: The New York State's civil case against trump and his corporation for tax fraud and other financial shenanigans on a grander scale than what the City Attorney could pursue. Not only facing $250 million in fines, the civil case headed by State AG Letitia James could impose harsh sanctions that could pretty much shut the Trump Org completely down. James had a strong case going before this verdict, she has a stronger case going forward.

The best possible thing we can see now is how this jury conviction hurts trump's political chances heading into 2024. Before all this, trump could brazenly strut about claiming he was a great businessman, the best, successful at everything, untouchable. This conviction is the first real dent into trump's illusory gaslighting. All his "success" came from cheating, from evading taxes. trump is not really a success at all.

trump may not be directly convicted, but his empire, the one with his name on it, is convicted. This becomes an albatross around trump's neck he cannot remove. Every political rival he'll face will be able to kick him on these jury rulings and he won't be able to bluff and lie his way out of it.

We can say it truthfully: trump is a tax fraud.

trump is vulnerable now.

trump is toast.

Revel in the Schadenfreude, America.

A Raging, Fading Voice of trumpian Madness

donald trump just cannot ever admit he loses. trump had to lie about winning the Popular vote in 2016 when it was really the broken Electoral College flipping for him instead of Hillary. trump had to lie about winning anything in 2020, when both the popular and Electoral vote went for Biden: We saw where those lies led to delusion and violence on Capitol Hill.

Everything since January 6th 2021 for trump has been his repeated complaints of voter fraud, and repeated attempts to paint himself a victim of librul conspiracy: All to convince anyone else with the power to restore his "rightful" place in the White House believe his Big Lie and grant his gaslighting wish. 

It's been two years, and yet for all of trump's protestations, there's never been any proof of his claims being real. None of his lawyers won any court case that could prove vote fraud of any kind happened. The opposite's been proven - much to trump's dismay - that trump and his handlers tried to interfere with the elections, especially in Georgia where the grand jury investigation into trump's misdeeds is close to ending - with indictment recommendations - any week now.

The slow yet steady grind towards trump's legal fate must be getting on his nerves, because this weekend trump crossed yet another line in his shameless effort to bluff his way out of doom. trump's now blasting on his personal social media that he wants to demolish the Constitution because it's in his way. Joe Gandleman at The Moderate Voice has the appropriate outrage towards trump's madness:

As Georgia voters are poised to decide who fills a Senate seat in what is seen as a critical and close election, former President Donald Trump is calling for the “termination” of the Constitution and the bypassing of all laws to restore him to power or hold a new election...

This will also likely put GOPers in Congress on the spot: will they strongly reject or repudiate Trump’s call to deep six the constutiton and laws? Or will they, as usual, try not to comment, pretend they’ve got a sudden call on their cellphones, rush into restrooms, comment on how they love democracy but not mention Trump, etc.

Gandleman's anger is as much towards the Republicans who avoid any accountability for the monster they're supporting as towards the monster himself, and I don't blame him. He then shared Tweets from fellow sideline punditry, highlight the growing frustration that trump is out here threatening to take a sledgehammer to the one thing - the Constitution and the people it serves - a President is supposed to defend and uphold. There's a dozen-plus Tweets, but I would like to share this one:

Shoutout to those who called us “alarmists” for referring to Trump as an authoritarian. Here he is literally calling to suspend the Constitution, to put himself in power again. This comes after he incited a violent insurrection. We were alarmed—not alarmist—because it’s alarming. pic.twitter.com/tgrVawK6yW

— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) December 3, 2022

donald trump is openly calling for the destruction of the entire government - spelled out by that Constitution he hopes to burn to ash - on which our nation depends as a bulwark of democracy and (admittedly) Western civilization (as well as global political/economic stability). he is basically calling for the destruction of the United States. All so he can avoid the Legal Accountability Wolves snapping at his heels.

We've been here before, by the by. Far Right Republicans have made it clear since 2014 2009 1994 1980 that if they cannot Rule they instead will Ruin. trump is simply trumpeting that message loud and clear. 

It's now a question of if the American People are hearing this message and recoiling in horror from it.

The First Option Means trump is Running Out of Time

When last we left donald trump's legal woes revolving around his theft of Presidential papers and lax handling of classified documents, the 11th Circuit appellate was reviewing whether Judge Cannon's efforts to shield trump with a Special Master delaying tactic was even legal.

Well, the 11th Circuit came down hard on their decision against trump. Let Emptywheel guide us to our table so we can feast on the Schadenfreude:

The 11th Circuit has, as expected, vacated Aileen Cannon’s order enjoining the government from investigating Donald Trump, remanding it with an order to dismiss the suit...

The opinion’s key point is that, were they to rule for Trump, it would create an impossible precedent, either halting much pre-indictment access to seized material, or creating an exception only for former Presidents.

(quoting from the court ruling) In considering these arguments, we are faced with a choice: apply our usual test; drastically expand the availability of equitable jurisdiction for every subject of a search warrant; or carve out an unprecedented exception in our law for former presidents. We choose the first option. So the case must be dismissed.

[snip]

The law is clear. We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so. Either approach would be  a radical reordering of our caselaw limiting the federal courts’ involvement in criminal investigations. And both would violate bedrock separation-of-powers limitations. Accordingly, we agree with the government that the district court improperly exercised equitable jurisdiction, and that dismissal of the entire proceeding is required.

Much of the opinion is an Richey analysis–the analysis Cannon worked so hard to manufacture. It’s not all that interesting. The key point is that, as Jay Bratt told Judge Cannon on August 30, the precedent in the circuit is clear.

But in conducting a Richey analysis, which it ultimately called a “sideshow,” the opinion took repeated swipes at the efforts Cannon went to make shit up to benefit Trump...

The only thing specific to Trump’s status as an ex-President, besides the opinion’s repeated reminder that he is not special, is the way with which the opinion twice dismissed Trump’s claim that if he had designated these documents his personal property under the Presidential Records Act, it would allow him to keep it. That’s nonsense, of course, because warrants authorize the seizure of personal property as a general rule...

A very conservative panel, including two Trump appointees, just confirmed that he’s not special anymore.

Emptywheel does note the court gives trump seven days to file an appeal, which trump's lawyers will likely do because it will both delay the FBI a little further as well as give trump the hope that taking it to the Supreme Court where three of his own appointees and two more Far Right Justices can arguably rewrite the entire legal system to protect trump's ass.

It's a part of trump's defense that he's claiming "personal property" regarding everything seized by the FBI at Mar-A-Lago back in August. Problem is, we're talking about a lot of classified materials that nobody else besides trump can argue were declassified to allow trump to claim them as personal. And there's still a high likelihood trump took the type of classified documents - especially regarding nuclear secrets! - that he couldn't have declassified by himself at all.

For any of this legal fight to fall trump's way, the Supreme Court itself when it gets his appeal is going to have to either declare the Presidential Records Act fully Unconstitutional (as well as accept that Cannon was within her powers to set up a Special Master that nearly every legal expert - and now the 11th Circuit judges - claims she never had power to do), or that trump as ex-President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice) retains Executive Privileges in ways that would break the checks and balances of the Constitution itself.

Right now, it's looking like the Justice Department will be able to continue their investigation into what documents trump actually took, and assess which documents are still unrecovered, and figure out just how badly trump violated our nation's security.

I hope trump doesn't sleep well for the rest of the month. I hope he starts plotting which nation he can fly to avoid extradition first chance he gets.

I hope the Special Counsel that AG Garland set up last month is ready to arrest trump for every federal law he broke.

It's December, kids. Time to be festive. IO SATURNALIA.

Do Call It Sedition, What trump's Rioters Did (w/ Update)

In the ongoing legal drama that has been the aftermath of the January 6th Insurrection to interfere with Congress' duties to confirm the 2020 Electoral College results: A major courtroom matter involving the most serious charges yet - direct allegations of seditious conspiracy - got resolved today, with guilty verdicts for one of the major trumpian supporters. More via Ryan Lucas and Carrie Johnson at NPR: 

Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the far-right Oath Keepers, has been found guilty of seditious conspiracy and other offenses in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

A federal jury in Washington, D.C., also convicted Rhodes of obstructing an official proceeding and tampering with documents. He was acquitted of two other conspiracy counts.

Rhodes did not enter the Capitol during the riot, but instead stood outside like a "battlefield general" surveying his troops, prosecutor Jeffrey Nestler said.

All five defendants on trial in this case were charged with seditious conspiracy but only one in addition to Rhodes, Kelly Meggs, was found guilty. The three other defendants — Jessica Watkins, Kenneth Harrelson and Thomas Caldwell — were acquitted on that central charge...

The jury did seem to consider the weight of applying sedition to all five standing trial: They determined those three were not as involved as Rhodes or Meggs. Still, they were found guilty on other charges related to the insurrection:

But all of the defendants were found guilty of obstructing an official proceeding as well as a mix of other charges.

Jurors returned their verdict after nearly three full days of deliberations...

The prosecution of the Oath Keepers leader and his co-defendants is the most consequential Jan. 6 case yet to have gone to trial.

Prosecutors accused the five of plotting to prevent, by any means necessary including force, the peaceful transfer of presidential power to Joe Biden.

Rhodes and the other Oath Keepers were the first Jan. 6 defendants to go to trial on seditious conspiracy charges. Two more seditious conspiracy trials — one involving more Oath Keepers and the other a group of Proud Boys — are set to start in the coming weeks...

The earliest trials of those arrested for their attack on the nation's Capitol to disrupt the Electoral College vote had focused on lesser charges, focusing mostly on assault and trespass and such. Those cases - either leading to guilty convictions or guilty plea deals - all built up to the evidence needed to convict Rhodes and Meggs on charges of seditious conspiracy, which is a very serious matter because - at least as I understand it - this opens up the door to pursue conspiracy charges with the insurrection's coordinators - hi Roger Stone and Steve Bannon! - who were tied to Rhodes' Oath Keepers and other groups involved in the violence.

The thing about a conspiracy: If you can prove one end of the partnership guilty of it, you ought to be able to convict the other partners of that conspiracy as well.

Every link between Stone, Bannon, and anybody else - especially any Congresscritters who aided in planning and staging the riots - to the Oath Keepers should now be under full legal scrutiny, and for there to be ANY justice at all in this matter those partners in sedition deserve getting charged for their crimes as well.

This was a good day for America (also because the U.S. Men's Soccer team beat Iran 1-0 and advanced in the World Cup. That's right. Americans are finally good at soccer!) but this day needs a follow through.

This sedition didn't start with Rhodes or his Oath Keepers or Roger Stone or Steve Bannon. It started with donald trump refusing to admit he lost, and demanding violence to keep himself him power. All conspiracy links point to him. trump needs to see his day in court for this sedition as well.

Still waiting on trump to get arrested. Let justice be done.

Update 11/30/22: David A Graham at the Atlantic does a good job spelling out the importance of nailing Rhodes with sedition:

Sedition (or seditious conspiracy, as federal law defines the crime) is likely unfamiliar to many people, and for good reason: It’s extremely rare. The charge involves “conspir[ing] to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States … or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States...”

Tellingly, the federal law against seditious conspiracy dates to the Civil War; on January 6 of last year, rioters carried the Confederate battle flag in the halls of the Capitol, a desecration that never happened during the war. But actual cases are few and far between, in part because instances of seditious behavior that actually amount to anything—much less a ransacking of the Capitol—are rare. The last time the government successfully prosecuted someone under the charge was in a mid-1990s case against the radical Muslim cleric Omar Abdel-Rahman and some followers for a plot to bomb New York City landmarks. In 2010, the Justice Department charged members of a bizarre far-right militia called the Hutaree with seditious conspiracy, but they were acquitted two years later.

These rare successes made some observers wonder whether DOJ had erred in bringing the charge against the Oath Keepers, either because it might be too hard to prove or because it might open the door up to dubious future prosecutions. But the convictions offer some vindication for the decision. Not only did the prosecutors succeed in convicting Rhodes and company, but by convicting him of this particular charge, they put the lie to the idea that what happened on January 6 was simply a few overzealous people who got a little excited but posed no threat to the peaceful transfer of power. It also shows why the riot at the Capitol was not equivalent to violence that broke out in cities in summer 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, which was lawless but not part of any conspiracy against the federal government...

What happened on January 6 2021 was a concerted, planned attack to disrupt a constitutional confirmation of a legal Presidential election. It wasn't a protest, it wasn't a groundswell of outrage by the majority of Americans. It was a very small, very violent minority of trumpian worshippers riled up by lies, fearmongering, and rage to seize power they feared was no longer theirs.

The Justice Department has successfully proven there was a conspiracy behind it all. Now they need to go after the ones who planned it and especially go after the one who demanded the attack. Still waiting on trump to get arrested.

The Revolutions Will Not Be Localized

Gets to you, doesn’t it? That’s what a reckoning sounds like. You want it to stop, but it just keeps coming. It’s when it stops, that’s when you’ll really want to start to fret.
-- Maarva (Fiona Shaw) from the episode "Reckoning" for Star Wars: Andor

I mentioned a few months back that Iran erupted into nationwide protests over the death of a young woman Mahsa Amini, who had been killed by authorities punishing her for improper wearing of the hijab.

The protests did not abate. Riots remain commonplace even as the Ayatollahs crack down harder on their own people. The protesters even went as far as to burn down Ayatollah Khomeini's museum/birthplace. 

The Iranian government is escalating violence in the Kurdish regions, as Amini was Kurdish and her ethnic group isn't beholden to the religious extremism of the Shia leadership. Via Oliver Holmes at the Guardian:

A nationwide uprising has convulsed the country since the death in September of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was allegedly beaten into a coma by the Islamic Republic’s “morality police” after they arrested her for wearing a headscarf they deemed inappropriate.

Since then, hundreds of people have been killed in a bloody crackdown on a popular revolt calling for an end to the decades-long authoritarian rule of the country’s top clerics.

Government attacks on rallies escalated at the weekend in predominantly Kurdish areas of Iran, with videos showing scenes reminiscent of a war zone.

Hengaw, a Norway-based rights group that monitors abuses, posted footage on Monday of what it said were state forces travelling to the cities of Bukan and Mahabad. The armed convoy included pickup trucks with mounted machine guns...

The Guardian article provided a map:

The protests are focused on the capital Tehran, but all those dots are everywhere in Iran. The frustration with the Islamic regime has been there for decades, and it's not going away:

Facing one of the boldest challenges to its hardline rule since the 1979 revolution that overthrew the western-friendly Shah of Iran, Tehran has shut down internet access in many areas. It has repeatedly blamed foreign enemies and their agents for orchestrating the protests and accuses “terrorists” of killing several dozen security force members.

However, the UN office of the high commissioner for human rights (OHCHR) said more than 300 people had been killed so far in Iran’s crackdown, including more than 40 children. These killings occurred across the country, with deaths reported in 25 of 31 provinces...

OHCHR spokesperson Jeremy Laurence said reports from mainly Kurdish cities were particularly distressing, with accounts of more than 40 people killed by security forces over the past week.

“Significant numbers of security forces have also been deployed in recent days,” he said.

“We urge the authorities to address people’s demands for equality, dignity and rights, instead of using unnecessary or disproportionate force to suppress the protests,” he added. “The lack of accountability for gross human rights violations in Iran remains persistent and is contributing to the growing grievances...”

These rulers, these religious extremists, cannot stop violating the rights of their citizens because they've never really cared for their citizens in the first place. All they cared about are the power and control, and Fear - via public displays of punishment and violence - was the only tool they have to keep that power and control.

Now the corrupt clerics in charge of this theocratic prison are going to test the limits of uprising again: To see if they can kill enough protesters to terrify the rest of Iran into submission, or if they run out of bullets first.

Iran's not the only nation coping with a restless and frustrated population. I woke up this morning to reports coming out of China of nationwide protests against the corrupt one-party rule there. Via Helen Davidson and Verna Yu also with the Guardian:

People opposed to China’s stringent Covid restrictions have protested in cities across the country in the biggest wave of civil disobedience on the mainland since Xi Jinping assumed power a decade ago.

Protests triggered by a deadly apartment fire in the far west of the country last week took place on Sunday in cities including Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu, Wuhan and Guangzhou, according to footage shared on social media, in defiance of a series of heavy-handed arrests of demonstrators on Saturday night.

In the early hours of Monday in Beijing, two groups of protesters totalling at least 1,000 people were gathered along the Chinese capital’s 3rd Ring Road near the Liangma River, refusing to disperse...

This is more widespread than just Tiananmen Square. It's in a number of China's biggest metros:

The protests erupted on Friday in Urumqi, the regional capital of the far west Xinjiang region, after footage of a fire in a residential building that killed at least 10 people the day before led to accusations that a Covid lockdown was a factor in the death toll.

Urumqi officials abruptly held a news conference in the early hours of Saturday to deny Covid measures had hampered escape and rescue. Many of Urumqi’s 4 million residents have been under some of the country’s longest lockdowns, barred from leaving their homes for as long as 100 days...

Personally, I'm not entirely in agreement with what the protesters here are fighting against: COVID is still out there and the people do need to protect themselves from the spread of the virus. However, I do understand where the frustration is coming from: Here in the United States, we had numerous protests by anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers opposed to the quarantine restrictions we had here (which were never as severe as overseas). As a result, even two years (now maybe three) on since the outbreak, my own nation isn't even reporting on the severe uptick in COVID cases as we head into winter. There's pandemic fatigue everywhere, and everyone is struggling to abide by the safety rules.

But I may be wrong. Even global health care experts note that China's restrictions are pretty harsh even for their tastes:

China has stuck with Xi’s zero-Covid policy even as much of the world has lifted most restrictions. While low by global standards, China’s case numbers have hit record highs for days, with nearly 40,000 new infections on Saturday, prompting yet more lockdowns in cities across the country. Beijing has defended the policy as life-saving and necessary to prevent overwhelming the healthcare system.

Speaking to US political talk shows on Sunday, Dr Anthony Fauci, the outgoing director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, described China’s approach to Covid as “very severe and rather draconian”.

“A prolonged lockdown without any seeming purpose or endgame to it … really doesn’t make public health sense. In many respects it baffles me,” Fauci said.

The frustrations the Chinese people are feeling may be justified if their own government isn't working towards a more amenable - yet hopefully effective - quarantine policy. There is a tone-deafness in the leadership contributing to that anger.

There is also - at least in my reading of events - an underlying and unspoken problem at the root of the protests: Anger at how Chairman Xi has taken total control of the Chinese government for his own corrupt ends:

In an unusually bold act that appeared to indicate the level of people’s desperation, a crowd in Shanghai late on Saturday night called for the removal of the Communist party and Xi during a standoff with police, chanting: “Communist party! Step down! Xi Jinping! Step down!” Chinese people usually refrain from criticizing the party and its leaders in public for fear of reprisals...

Widespread in-person protests are rare in China, where dissent has been all but eliminated under Xi, forcing citizens mostly to vent their frustrations on social media where they play cat-and-mouse games with censors.

Just this October, Xi staged a takeover - complete with public removal of power-sharers and potential rivals - of the Chinese Communist Party that holds one-party rule over the mainland. He's essentially completed the process every autocrat/dictator performs en route to authoritarian dominance. As a result, everything that happens in China happens on Xi's orders. It now literally is all about him, and the people really didn't have much say it thanks to a government that offers no choices.

Xi may be talking about "fighting corruption" as he seizes full control of it all - not just the political but also the financial and social and spiritual well-being of China - but you need to remember Putin promised the same reforms for Russia and he turned his reforms into a massive shakedown that spread more corruption wherever he got his hand in. I can't be the only one who remembered that. I get the feeling the Chinese people remembered that as well, and are terrified by the same outcome.

So now we have a nation of billions rising up against a one-party communist regime ruled by hundreds that is giving orders to armies of millions to keep the billions in line. This is where we've seen it before - not just Tiananmen but also the Hong Kong protests eight years back - and it was bloody and shameful then and it will be again. The only difference is now all of China is rising up, and it's not a question of how soon the anger will ebb.

Now the corrupt despots in charge of this sweatshop prison are going to test the limits of uprising again: To see if they can kill enough protesters to terrify the rest of China into submission, or if they run out of bullets first.

I'm not repeating myself as a joke. History keeps repeating because the Cycle of Revolution just leads to the same dictators and crooks replacing each other. Something new needs to rise up in Iran, and in China, AND in Russia: To end the one-party corruption that has gripped those nations for decades in one form or another. A rebellion towards justice and moderation, towards open speech and better choices.

This is what a reckoning sounds like: Frustrated people unwilling to be prisoners anymore.

The Long Wait for Justice Upon trump

I wrote earlier this month that my impatience over the handling of donald trump's legal woes - especially into the matter of him stealing hundreds if not thousands of classified documents when he left the White House in 2021 - would hopefully get satisfaction once the Midterms were over and his fate wouldn't affect the decision-making of American voters.

Well, damn the Man. It's pretty much the end of November. We're all still waiting for that hammer to drop.

Even as every day after the votes have been counted, there is more movement towards making trump accountable for all the crimes he's committed in violation of our voting rights and in violation of our national security.

Just this Tuesday before Turkey Day, trump faced a number of legal defeats that all signal his time running out (via Robert Katzberg at Slate):

On Tuesday, a three-judge panel from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral argument on the federal government’s contention that Judge Aileen Cannon overstepped her authority in limiting the Justice Department’s access to and use of the documents seized earlier this year at Donald Trump’s home in Florida, Mar-a-Lago. Despite the technical nature of the hearing’s dialogue—one that covered, among other things, the nature of interlocutory appeals, the scope of Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, and the limits of equitable jurisdiction—it appears that the government’s position will, at least in part, win the day. Throughout the session, counsel for the former president was unable to satisfactorily respond to skeptical questions from all three panel members. Ignoring the wisdom that one can never predict what a court will do based upon oral argument, it seems that the panel will either rule that Judge Cannon had no jurisdiction to rule on the investigation in the first place, and will vacate all of her prior rulings, or it will severely curtail the review process that she created. In sum, the government had a good day...

If the 11th Circuit does what now seems likely, once the newly appointed special counsel gets up to speed, an indictment of the former president for unlawful possession of the materials found at Mar-a-Lago should quickly follow. The case is both a prosecutorial “slam dunk” and the most effective way to begin prosecuting all matters related to the Jan. 6 riot and the attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

As has been noted by a number of legal observers, the Mar-a-Lago prosecution is much like a simple drug possession case. Donald Trump was in possession of something proscribed by law: not a controlled substance like heroin, but documents that were legally required to remain with the government. The materials in question did not even have to have been classified for their removal to have broken federal law...

Given that there's been already 100 documents deemed classified that shouldn't have been in trump's possession, and trump is facing more than just the Presidential Records Act he violated. Back to Katzberg:

And speaking of the defense, as someone who prosecuted and defended federal white-collar criminal cases for more than four decades, there is none. The ongoing absurdities the former president and his supporters have put forth—whether his undocumented, magical declassification of the top-secret materials; the alleged planting of the documents at his home by the FBI; or any of the other risible claims made—may have provided helpful fodder in the right-wing media, but none of it will help the former president in a court of law.

Everything trump's argued about in social media can't stand in a courtroom under oath. trump nor his lawyers can't prove planted evidence, especially when he's been complaining that the documents in his possession are his to begin with. Gaslighting the media is easy: Gaslighting a judge leads to perjury.

The only rational way trump can get out of his blatant violation of the Presidential Records Act is to argue the law itself is Unconstitutional. trump's only defense is that Executive Privilege extends even to former Presidents, but to do so would grant ex-Presidents powers that would conflict with the authority of the current Chief of State. Would this Far Right Supreme Court even go THAT far to protect trump?

For the Justice Department to dig this long - and fight this hard against trump's delaying tactics via judge-shopping for Cannon's help - it would be folly to not follow through on this case. That trump is at least facing a courtroom for his theft of these documents - at the earliest by 2023, to avoid his presumed Presidential run for 2024 - has to be a settled thing. It's now a question of when (it just better be SOON dammit).

For all that happened this past Tuesday, the Reuters newswire documented more:

The conservative-leaning U.S. Supreme Court cleared the release of Trump's tax returns to the House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee...

The committee in its request invoked a federal law that empowers its chairman to request any person's tax returns from the tax-collecting Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

Trump's lawyers have said the committee's real aim is to publicly expose his tax returns and unearth politically damaging information about Trump...

Although Reuters didn't go into the reason(s) why the Ways and Means were looking at trump's taxes, if I recall from other sources it was because the Committee was digging into trump's many violations of the Emoluments Clause. trump had been using his properties to entice and squeeze as much money out of the government (forcing the Secret Service to reside at his hotels at double-billing!) and foreign lobbyists since Day One. It had been this long going after trump on this open grift - delayed either by Republican control of Congress or trump's control of the Justice Department - that only now have the courts cleared this matter.

Problem is, the current Democratic control of Ways and Means is going to end in a month: Republicans won a narrow victory to control the House, and there is no way the MAGA wingnuts running the GOP caucus is going to expose their God-Emperor trump to public scrutiny. If there's anything the current committee can use the tax returns info they now have, they better make it quick before Christmas.

If there's anything else that should get resolved before Christmas, well the New York criminal trial into the Trump Organization got a lot of testimony during the first half of the month, leading up to the prosecution resting their case with the defense resuming matters after Turkey Day (via the Guardian and the AP newswire):

Prosecutors in the Trump Organization’s criminal tax fraud trial rested their case on Monday earlier than expected, pinning hopes for convicting Donald Trump’s company largely on the word of two top executives who cut deals before testifying that they schemed to avoid taxes on company-paid perks.

Allen Weisselberg, the company’s longtime finance chief, and Jeffrey McConney, a senior vice-president and controller, testified for the bulk of the prosecution’s eight-day case, bringing the drama of their own admitted wrongdoing to a trial heavy on numbers, spreadsheets, tax returns and payroll records...

The Trump Organization’s lawyers opened their defense by calling to the witness stand the accountant who handled tax returns and other financial matters for Trump, the Trump Organization and hundreds of Trump entities since the 1980s.

Donald Bender, a partner at Mazars USA LLP, said McConney would call him “numerous times” a week about various tax issues and that he got emails from Weisselberg so often, he even made time to respond while away in the mountains or vacationing in Paris.

Bender said he interacted far less frequently with Trump, his biggest client, attending his 2005 wedding, but otherwise talking to him maybe a couple times a year.

Once Trump became president in 2017, Bender said he would visit him twice a year at the White House so he could sign his tax extensions and returns but those trips ended when the Covid-19 pandemic began.

Trump blamed Bender and Mazars for the company’s troubles, writing on his Truth Social platform last week: “The highly paid accounting firm should have routinely picked these things up – we relied on them. VERY UNFAIR!”

trump's defense is obviously an attempt to dodge accountability for himself, but considering trump himself was the company CEO - had sold himself for years as a great decision-maker and leader - it's kind of hard to tell a jury and the world that he was kept out of the loop for major financial decisions that kept his businesses afloat. Harder still to admit his own business "savvy" didn't clue trump into the many tax dodges happening under his authority.

While trump himself won't face criminal liability here - by a quirk in the law, it's his corporation that's on trial - if the New York legal system can prove guilt here and issue judgment on Trump Organization to where trump can't use it to manage his ongoing cons, this would be a huge victory for holding the corrupt in high office accountable for their sins.

All of this going on while trump jumps into the 2024 Presidential campaign two years early in an obvious attempt to use his status as a "candidate" to avoid any criminal prosecution heading his way. In spite of Attorney General Garland hiring a Special Prosecutor to take over not only the Mar-A-Lago investigation but a multitude of other trump-related investigations as a response.

All we can hope for, all we've been able to hope for since 2015, is the long arc of justice to find trump guilty of the crimes he's openly committed for decades. If justice can be done by the time we're gathered at the Christmas trees to open the presents, please and thank you.

Here's hoping for a festive Saturnalian season.

A Few Things To Be Thankful For 2022

I am thankful that the Democrats held onto the US Senate this midterms.

I am thankful that we are one day closer to donald trump facing criminal charges for violating the Presidential Records Act.

I am thankful we all survived to witness the 10th anniversary of the almighty Butt Fumble.

I am thankful that today at Thanksgiving dinner I get to meet a nephew I haven't seen in 20 years and a niece I've never met.

I am thankful I get one more chance to share the greatest Thanksgiving television episode of all time.

 REPEAT AFTER ME: "As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly."

Look For Me On Counter Social Now (w/Update)

With all the talk the last two weeks of Elon Musk's destruction of Twitter as a corporate entity - his mass firings, driving the employees to flee under demands of "hardcore" doubling down on work, pushing for fee-based services that would drive users away, and allowing for extremist BS to spread that would drive advertisers away - most everybody hadn't actually quit Twitter because we were enjoying the drama too much, and some of us were masochistic enough to stay to watch the pending technological collapse of the media app in real-time.

It would have to take an act of sadism and cluelessness for Musk to drive people away from Twitter even as he was driving the app over the cliffs, and Musk reached that today with the announcement that he's letting donald trump - who lied, bullied, lied more, mocked people, lied a lot more, and made outrageous demands through his Twitter feed on an hourly basis until he crossed too many lines and got banned - back on twitter without restraint.

With that, I made my announcement and made my peace. Goodbye, Twitter.

I will not support a Twitter where Elon Musk brings back a lying, racist monster like trump without consequences to let him poison this forum any further. I am gone. Goodbye Twitter, and good luck. look for me on @pwartenberg@counter.social#RIPTwitter #ElonMuskIsATroll

— Witty Librarian For Ukraine (@PaulWartenberg) November 20, 2022

I am done with Twitter now, and if it falls apart under the strain of too few workers keeping it together with duct tape and spit, then I will just have to read about it on NPR's website when it happens.

I will miss you all. Except for the ones I know on Discord and Facebook, mostly the Lost Golden Horde Battalion of the TNC.

You can find me now on the alternative social media app Counter.Social under @pwartenberg and I wish you good luck in your journeys ahead.

More to say about this hectic month later. A little too busy with NaNo and with working a vendor table at Lake County Comic Con this Sunday.

I will part with this, my most famous tweet of all time:

that's how it starts, with the oohing and the ahhing. then comes the screaming and the running... pic.twitter.com/iZDXx7T4EQ

— Witty Librarian For Ukraine (@PaulWartenberg) April 9, 2017

Update: I'm also looking into this HIVE app, but it's mobile-only.

Even Further Update (12/5/22): Well, damn. HIVE turned out to be a bit unhelpful. Counter Social works okay but I'm having a hard time finding people and following them. In the meanwhile, Musk may have invited trump to rejoin Twitter but it turns out trump signed an exclusive rights deal with his own (failing) social media app, meaning trump legally can't get on Twitter even if he wanted to. It all turned into Much Ado About Nothing, I suppose. Anyway, Musk is turning out to be a real idiot running the company into the ground, and violating a ton of international labor laws in the process. I will see you back on the Titanic on the Twitter feed, peeps.

Even Further Revision to the Update (12/11/22): Going back to Twitter is not a good idea. Elon Musk is intentionally promoting every bad-faith right-wing meme on the site, in the process of defaming former Twitter officials in order to justify letting extremists promoting violence and misinformation to return to the site. Other people I know are going back to quitting the site, refusing to let their traffic contribute to Musk's stat numbers. Musk is intentionally starting fights to get views. It's disgusting.