Four For the Fourth: History Matters

As a student of history, I encourage others to learn about history as well.

As such, whenever I come across something that may work as a useful resource of knowledge, I examine the offerings and determine if it's worth sharing.

As such, I introduce you - if you haven't met him already - the History Matters Guy.

Created by a UK history professor as a quick video tutorial for students, he'd expanded from rather detailed and long video clips on large parts of European/American/World history to shorter, more focused videos on specific - and oft-times weird - moments that need a bit of clarity.

And like most things British, there is humor involved. Dry, sarcastic, often deep humor. Like this one.

NARRATOR: You had one job.

There's one I like in particular that explained a rather odd situation with Grenada - and a too-brief involvement of U.S. military there.

Not covered in the video: Because of it's Commonwealth status, the US accidentally went to war with the whole Commonwealth by invading Grenada without getting an OK from our allies first. Thatcher let it slide because communism got thumped.

I liked the bit where the poor Governor-General is tied up and wielded like baseball bats by both sides. The professor draws the best "I don't need this" side-eye in the business.

I wonder if the professor is going to come out with a History Matters regarding tonight's UK Parliamentary elections...

Here's one more American-themed history clip for you. THIS WILL BE ON THE AP AMERICAN EXAM (seriously):

(Thanks to James Bissonette, Kelly Moneymaker, Something-something Wolf, Dr. Howard Dr. Fine Dr. Howard, Three-Spinning-Pl..... ow stop hitting me)

Bit of an Update, What Hey: Wouldn't you know it, the History Matters guy released a video about the post-4th situation between the UK and the US, over whether the Brits tried to reclaim the colonies:

You cheeky bastards. Burning down the White House was the plan all along! ...so what was that bit about New Orleans...?

Hark! A Ranking of Doors Albums!

Is everybody in? Is everybody IN??? The ceremony is about to begin...
-- "Awake," the Doors (Jim Morrison)

Growing up the Tampa Bay area as a suburban white boy meant listening to hard rock n roll. Not "classic rock" which at the time meant the 50s, but "album-oriented rock" that dominated the 60s and 70s.

As such, I was raised on the likes of Led Zeppelin and the Who and Van Halen and Black Sabbath and Cream and Montrose and Creedence and Lynyrd and Hendrix (but also softer sounds like the Beatles and Fleetwood Mac and Moody Blues). Into all of that I also got into a band that had a short history but incredible impact on that era: The Doors.

Forming on the Los Angeles music scene in 1965, the Doors revolved around keyboardist Ray Manzarek and Jim Morrison, someone Ray knew from film school at UCLA. Morrison had confided to Manzarek that - as a wannabe poet - he'd been writing lyrical poems, and sang to him the earliest verses of "Moonlight Drive". Manzarek was convinced right then Morrison could be a singer, and brought along one of his brothers, bassist Patty Sullivan, and drummer John Densmore (whom Ray knew from a meditation group) to form this group named after Adolus Huxley's work The Doors Of Perception.

After a few shifts in the lineup - adding guitarist Robby Krieger to form the lineup we know today - the band recorded demos and worked their way through the clubs, earning a coveted spot as house band at the Whisky A Go Go.

Signed to Elektra Studios by 1966, controversy over their firing from the Whisky in August 1966 - when Morrison went explicit with that particular lyric in "The End" - added to the band's allure for their debut album by 1967.

The band's sound was an eclectic mix of electric blues, jazz, and the emerging psychedelic sound dominating the California scene. Guitarist Krieger was noticeably versatile compared to other guitarists of the era. Drummer Densmore employed effective range and included a lot of Latino (bossa nova) influence that gave the band a distinctive sound that felt like Los Angeles itself. Manzarek proved an adept keyboardist with an organ-type playing that sounded like a harpsichord, and allowed him to mimic bass-playing to where their live shows never needed one (the band did employ a slew of session artists to play bass in the studio).

Topping it all, however, was Morrison. Initially shy as a singer, something about being on the stage unleashed a performer few had ever seen in rock music. While there were other lead singers of bands who would strut or pose - Mick Jagger comes to mind - none of them reached the recklessness Morrison achieved (Jagger later went to him for advice on how to do it). He would cover every inch of the stage, act out scenes from the lyrics with his body, improvise poetry to any instrumental music during a jam. He became a shaman of sorts, seducing audiences with a wink and a snarl.

The band quickly hit it big on the charts - they were the first American band to "go gold" with their first seven albums - and even scored top single hits guaranteeing radio play. As a live act, they became must-see tickets. Morrison's reputation as a "bad boy" of rock n roll brought fame... and interest by law enforcement who were put off by the anti-war and counter-culture lyrics that filled the followup albums.

Morrison himself suffered to his demons. He had a history of disturbing behavior when he got drunk, and as the stresses of celebrity got to him the alcoholism - and other drug use - got worse. It affected recording and made him late for live shows during tours. By 1969, it had gotten so bad he pretty much had a breakdown on stage in Miami, threatening to show his cock (eyewitness testimony and insistence from the surviving band was certain he didn't) and then leading a riot of sorts with the crowd. The subsequent trial for incident exposure and other acts led to a guilty verdict in 1970.

While out on appeal, Morrison rejoined the band in L.A. to record one more album (L.A. Woman) before traveling to Paris in 1971 to get himself straightened out. The band noticed he was working to stay sober during the sessions and seemed in good spirits.

And then Morrison died - with a sizable amount of mystery over what actually happened - and was quickly buried in a Paris cemetery famed for its artists and poets.

The surviving trio - Manzarek, Densmore, and Krieger - recorded two more albums without replacing Morrison at singer, but the efforts were noticeably lackluster with fans and the Doors broke up. After rejoining in 1979 to record new music to back audio readings from Morrison's poetry, that was pretty much it.

The band's influence remains far reaching. Not only codifying the four-man format of a rock band but affecting the electric blues style that remains a staple of bar bands to this day. Musically, the Doors had a hand in popularizing 60s psychedelic rock as well as help merge the Latino rhythm sound - which would co-mingle with the coming funk scene of the 70s - to the L.A. hard rock scene that would remain dominant until the 80s. In some respects, the dark symbolism and anti-authority stances the band took as its persona influenced the burgeoning punk scene.

Morrison's on-stage antics informed the crazy behavior of future frontmen - David Lee Roth comes to mind - and his lyrical style - more freestyle than rhyming, although he could do both - set the standard for poetry in hard rock songs. There are others in rock history with high skill as poets - Bob Dylan is a freaking Nobel laureate, obviously - and others aspire to reach those heights, but Morrison was one who could arguably be Dylan's peer (alongside John Lennon, Joni Mitchell, several others). Morrison himself became the template for the "rock star as tortured artist" imagery we have to this day.

In terms of ranking the Doors albums, I'm going with - in my opinion - weakest works to their most epic, must-have albums. To be fair to the band as a whole, I've included the post-Morrison albums - which I didn't hear as a kid, they were out-of-print until CD re-issues finally happened in the 2010s - so I can share my experience and response.

The program for this evening is not new
You've seen this entertainment through and through
You've seen your birth your life and death
You might recall all of the rest
Did you have a good world when you died?
Enough to base a movie on?
-- "The Movie," Jim Morrison

Ranking Doors Albums - Weak to Epic

Title: Other Voices

Reasons: The first album by the surviving trio, and you can immediately sense the loss with the opening song being an almost chirpy, upbeat kind of thing. The hell?

With Manzarek and Krieger taking over at vocals - neither of them able to reach the low seductive growl that Morrison could - the songs just don't have that dark edge to them. The lyrics themselves read like forced attempts at rhyme, rather than the near improvisational flow Morrison could weave.

Coming out at a moment when funk as a sound became popular, you can see the attempt by the band to stay relevant and avoid the harder elements of the electric blues style. But it's the songs on here that stick to that style that impress, and it'd have helped if they stayed that course.

Epics song(s): none
Great song(s): Tightrope Ride, Hang On To Your Life
Good song(s): Variety is the Spice of Life, Wandering Musician

Title: The Soft Parade

Reasons: Generally considered the weakest effort by the band while Morrison was alive, and the album title tells the tale. "Soft" is the first word I think of when re-listening to this. Going more in the popular sound, bringing in a string orchestra as backing music to much of the performances, makes this a more pop-flavored, sickeningly sweet sound. Gone are the rough edges that made the first three albums more appealing to the fanbase.

Notable as the point where Morrison was falling to the bottle, his erratic behavior allowed the other band mates - Krieger in particular - more room to write their own lyrics and decide on the music getting played. The whole album is anchored by the titular track - yet another long song much in the vein of "The End" and "Turn Off the Lights" - that tries to reach again for those poetic highs but ended up garbled and uninteresting. A shortened, tighter-edited "Soft Parade" would have been so much better.

There are songs on here worth saving - and the hit single off this "Touch Me" did was it was supposed to do, sell records - but it's an effort you can skip once you download/stream those handful of songs.

Epic song(s): None
Great song(s): Touch Me, Do It, Wild Child, Wishful Sinful
Good song(s): Running Blue

Title: Full Circle

Reasons: I was dreading the follow-up to Other Voices as sinking lower in terms of non-Morrison input, but this album was actually likable to where I could re-listen to it again as a refresher and remember what I enjoyed.

There was still a 70s funkadelic vibe to much of the work, but they had mixed it in - in my opinion, rather well - with the Latino backbeats to give some of the songs the edge that the other album lacked. Where the songs struggled were - again - the lyrics, which aimed at simplistic rhymes and none of the imagery Morrison could add. The one song on this album that did become a hit at its release - "The Mosquito" - is a good example: the opening lyrics were painful and forgettable, but the music itself that takes up most of the performance is pushed by an uptempo rhythm that made an incredible instrumental piece.

Just saying, if Morrison had lived songs like "Hardwood Floor" and "It Slipped My Mind" would have been darker and rueful and oh so good on the radio.

Epic song(s): none
Great song(s): Good Rockin'
Good song(s): Verdilac, Hardwood Floor, The Mosquito, It Slipped My Mind

Title: American Prayers

Reasons: Essentially an excuse by the surviving bandmates to provide a soundtrack to unearthed poetry readings and interviews that Morrison gave. The good news is that the band is made up of talented musicians who knew what they were doing and created a solid mix of back beats and melodies to fit (most) of what the poems and observations offered.

There isn't anything here - other than snippets from existing songs like "Peace Frog" and "Texas Radio" - that would be considered single or stand-alone hits. Some are not poems, just Jim acting out scenes from lyrics formed elsewhere. You kind of need to listen to the whole album and get through each poem as is, and appreciate if you can how Morrison mixed the innocent with the obscene. Some of this would be considered pornographic - and racist - even for its day, so do be aware this isn't a family-friendly listen.

Epic poem(s): Angels and Sailors, Stoned Immaculate, The Movie, The Hitchhiker
Great poem(s): Awake, Ghost Song, Dawn's Highway, Newborn Awakening
Good poem(s): To Come of Age, Black Polished Chrome, Latino Chrome

Title: Waiting for the Sun

Reasons: This is a rather schizoid album. On the one hand, this contains some of the most critical anti-war songs the band would ever produce. On the other, this contains most of the love songs the band would ever put to one album.

Bouncing between the giddy eagerness of the opening hit "Hello I Love You" and more somber works like "Love Street" and "Wintertime Love" (styled as a moody waltz), along with the utterly dark "Unknown Soldier" (live performances would have Morrison stand and fall as a soldier getting executed) and "Five to One" (an ode to street fighting with memetic lyrics like "No one here gets out alive" and "they got the guns but we got the numbers"), this is not an album to listen through in one sitting.

Accompanying the album was a long-form poem "Celebration of the Lizard" - which makes up the lyrics to a number of songs here - invoking the chaos and violence of the late 1960s, including direct references to JFK's assassination. The poem itself is a rambling mess, which probably explains how the band decided to break it up into more digestible segments.

This is almost on par with the best albums, and I end up ranking this near Morrison Hotel. It's a question which one is better than the other. so...

Epic song(s): Hello I Love You, Unknown Soldier, Five to One
Great song(s): Not to Touch the Earth, Spanish Caravan
Good song(s): Love Street, Wintertime Love, My Wild Love, We Could Be So Good Together

Title: Morrison Hotel

Reasons: Coming after the critical backlash of Soft Parade, and after the disastrous Miami concert that summarily ended their US tour, the band went back to the studio for a stripped-down, back to basics approach. Gone from this album are any poetic aspirations tying everything together, instead focusing on stand-along songs.

The result was obviously a return to form, but also greater improvement in the quality of songs produced. There's no long, eight-minute or ten-minute song on here: Everything is tight, focused, and hard rocking. The opening song "Roadhouse Blues" sets the tone, and in my opinion is the best song the band ever recorded: I would argue it's the best "play this in a bar even though I normally don't hang around bars" song. That song is the reason why I rank this album higher than the previous one.

This tends to be a popular album among fans, myself included. You might notice the phrase "Blood in the streets" in the song "Peace Frog" shows up whenever I blog about gun violence in any of our communities, yeah this is where I get that from.

Epic song(s): Roadhouse Blues, Peace Frog, Queen of the Highway
Great song(s): Waiting for the Sun, Land Ho!, Maggie M'gill
Good song(s): You Make Me Real, Blue Sunday

Title: Strange Days

Reasons: I once noted that second albums from bands tend to not do well. Either suffering from the expectations of the first big hit album, or dealing with leftovers from the first album's recording sessions, or the band making the mistake of going for a New Sound too early.

Strange Days doesn't suffer the sophomore jinx even though it does show some holdover from the first album. What happened was a change in technology - the studio just added an 8-track recording system allowing for more overdubs - that gave the band a chance to experiment. One of the results was the nightmarish "Horse Latitudes," which you can appreciate for the effort but ye gods is a hard listen.

While not a New Sound, this album ended up with tracks that fell well into the psychedelic sound of the late 60s, as a result not as enjoyable or as straight-forward as works like Morrison Hotel. The Doors did create on this album some decent songs still playable today. However, the overt attempts at poetry - such as the overlong "When The Music's Over" - trying to replicate the success of "The End" comes across as forced.

Epic song(s): Love Me Two Times, Moonlight Drive, People Are Strange
Great song(s): Strange Days, You're Lost Little Girl
Good song(s): Horse Latitudes, My Eyes Have Seen You, When the Music's Over

Title: L.A. Woman

Reasons: As Morrison's legal woes piled up, and as his mental condition deteriorated, the band decided to stick to the stripped-down effort of the previous Morrison Hotel. Going with a new producer, and with Morrison doing his best to stay sober, the sessions for this album went smoothly and everything about its release pointed to good things ahead.

The critics and fans raved about it being their best one since the first, the single release of "Love Her Madly" going up the charts, just as word got back from Paris about Morrison's death. As a result, this album carries with it to this day a lot of historic and symbolic weight.

The most noticeable element is how deep and scarred Morrison's voice had gotten by this album: the toll of alcohol and cigarettes and drugs were adding up. This does give the songs a darker, bluesy edge and a more cynical tone on an otherwise upbeat song like "Love Her Madly".

What puts this album at the top of the list are the epic songs here, especially the title track "L.A. Woman," a song close to 8 minutes but shockingly never feels like it's playing that long. The lyrics comparing the city to a woman - no, that the city IS a woman - is arguably one of the greatest odes to L.A. ever recorded, and the band's performance - Krieger's opening guitar growl mimicking a car engine above all - a soundtrack to blast from the car speakers when you find yourself on an open freeway across the city.

Throw in how "The WASP" - a thread of free verse poetry full of mythological imagery - and "Riders on the Storm" are Morrison's lyrics at his quotable best and you have an album that deserves great acclaim.

Epic song(s): Love Her Madly, L.A. Woman, The WASP (Texas Radio & the Big Beat), Riders on the Storm

Great song(s): The Changling, Been Down So Long, Cars Hiss By My Window
Good song(s): L'America

Title: The Doors

Reasons: I have noticed I rank a lot of bands' first album releases as their best, and there's often a good reason (or three) for that. One, it's made up of songs that the band played, practiced, enhanced over and over until they were good enough to win over live audiences and get a recording deal signed. So these songs are well-vetted. Two, these are also the songs that set the band's lyric and tonal styles, playing to the strengths of one of the bandmates - say, a great guitarist or a great drummer - that ends up getting replicated to later albums that don't sound as fresh or inventive. Three, some of the longer-lasting bands will go through an experimental New Sound phase that becomes an ill-advised mess, or they're trying to keep up with trends that shift over the decades to where their later work just can't match up what made them so go in the first place.

That said, the Doors' self-titled debut was one hell of a breakout for a big year - 1967 - in music, which introduced their signature styles - Manzarek's complex organ keyboards, Krieger's fluid guitar work, Densmore's jazz drums, Morrison's then-soft baritone growl - and set the tone for how electric blues should sound in night bars and garages across America. Opening with the energetic "Break on Through" - a fast-moving song that doesn't give listeners a chance to pause - the rest of the album slows down a bit to let the lyrics and beats seduce. The languid, moody "Crystal Ship" is a personal favorite.

Anchored on Side One with the band's biggest hit "Light My Fire," Side Two ends with their darkest and most epic song "The End," a near-operatic nightmare trip through Morrison's Id that would make Freud and Jung run away in fear. Noticeably long (over 11 minutes!) and chaotic, the mixture of shifting lyrical imagery to varying tempos and intensity just seems to work on this song where it didn't in follow-up attempts.

I also want to note as a product of the time, a number of these songs - hell, a lot of songs across the Doors' playlist - describe rather shocking (misogynistic) behavior towards women when heard today. While I list a couple of those songs here, I do want to say I don't agree with the lyrics to them. It's just... they are good songs.

Epic song(s): Break On Through (To the Other Side), The Crystal Ship, Twentieth Century Fox, The End
Great song(s): Soul Kitchen, Light My Fire, Take It As It Comes
Good song(s): Alabama Song (Whisky Bar), Backdoor Man

--

Just to let you know, it was doing a "Hark!" either for the Doors or Led Zeppelin, and because it's the 4th of July I went with the American guys. Led Zep is next, peeps.

I'll tell you this
No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn
-- from "The WASP (Texas Radio & The Big Beat)," Jim Morrison

Four for the Fourth 2024: A Lament

A lament.

None of this - the loss of abortion rights, the culture war attacks at gays and trans people, the collapse of functioning government - would be happening if Hillary had won in 2016.

None of this would be happening if enough left-leaning voters - progressives, liberals, moderates - had turned up to vote for Hillary in the battleground states that flipped their Electoral counts to trump.

None of this would be happening if the goddamned Beltway Media looked past their own personal vitriol for Hillary to report more on donald trump's ethical and criminal and sexually offensive actions. "But her emails" on the front page of the New York Times while trump's "grab them by the pussy" bragging goes unreported.

The Supreme Court would definitely look differently - and acting more moderate or at least holding to stare decisis as a foundation - than the one we have thanks to trump and that goddamned Mitch McConnell. While the GOP-controlled Senate in 2016 was promising not to grant a President Hillary any appointments to fill the vacancy left by Scalia's death, odds were sooner or later a deal would be brokered to fill that seat. It wouldn't have been a firebrand liberal but it wouldn't have been the likes of Gorsuch or Kavanaugh or Barrett or any other Federalist Society wingnut.

We wouldn't have a Supreme Court willing to undo decades of federal regulatory practices set by the Chevron ruling, and we wouldn't have a Court that undid Casey or Roe.

And we wouldn't have had a Court that would grant imperial powers to a corrupt Presidency. For two reasons: One, Hillary was never as corrupt as her haters kept imagining and would have never gotten to a point of insisting on immunity for "official acts;" Two, even a liberal-leaning Court favoring Hillary would never betray or undo the Constitution like that.

If Hillary had won in 2016, we'd have never given trump even a chance of claiming such legal immunities for the moment when his crimes would have caught up to him. trump's tax evasions and constant grifting would have finally gotten the attention of state and federal prosecutors, and even his delay tactics wouldn't have gotten him past 2020 before finding himself fleeing the nation to avoid jail time.

A trump loss would have diminished the Far Right wingnut MAGA cult, proving their extremism couldn't get past a national popular vote that still favors Democrats (and the center-left). Given all the grifting that the wingnut leadership indulges, they'd have gone for each other's throats by now to claim the scraps trump would have left behind.

We wouldn't be in this darkest timeline. There'd still be political sniping, and derogatory insults aimed at Hillary (and anyone following in her path) as "communist threats to a Christian America" and there'd still be culture war bullshit at the state level, but not with the official seal of approval that trump's offensive regime created.

And this is all a lament is good for. Regret.

It doesn't help to wallow in the past. What Ifs are only good for fiction, and for awareness of how BAD things CAN get if you let the sons of bitches win.

This 2024 is a chance to let go of all regrets of the past. This 2024 is a chance to do what is truly best for the United States and for a citizenry that begs for sanity to reign instead of King trump. 

This 4th of July, we have a chance to stand with the current President Joe Biden as he runs for a second term, a term focused on bringing back abortion and health care rights to women, bringing back good jobs at good wages, bringing back affordable housing across all communities. A second Biden term will defend our allies abroad and stand firm against the corrupt powers (Putin) trying to undermine Western democracies.

The lament is over. The fight for American virtues and American rights and American democracy begins again today.

 

No Punishment to Which trump Can Be Subjected By a Wingnut SCOTUS

The President of the United States would be liable to be impeached, tried, and, upon conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes or misdemeanors, removed from office; and would afterwards be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law. The person of the King of Great Britain is sacred and inviolable; there is no constitutional tribunal to which he is amenable; no punishment to which he can be subjected without involving the crisis of a National revolution...
-- The Federalist 68, by Alexander Hamilton 

I really hate being in this darkest timeline. 

As I dreaded earlier, this Far Right controlled Supreme Court ruled on donald trump's plea for legal immunity to save him from the federal charges he is - maybe was now - facing over the stolen classified documents at Mar-A-Lago and his role in the January 6th Insurrection. They basically gave him everything trump asked for and destroyed any pretense at accountability in the process (via Amy Howe at SCOTUSBlog):

In a historic decision, a divided Supreme Court on Monday ruled that former presidents can never be prosecuted for actions relating to the core powers of their office, and that there is at least a presumption that they have immunity for their official acts more broadly.

The decision left open the possibility that the charges brought against former President Donald Trump by Special Counsel Jack Smith – alleging that Trump conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 election – can still go forward to the extent that the charges are based on his private conduct, rather than his official acts.

The case now returns to the lower courts for them to determine whether the conduct at the center of the charges against Trump was official or unofficial – an inquiry that, even if it leads to the conclusion that the charges can proceed, will almost certainly further delay any trial in the case, which had originally been scheduled to begin on March 4, 2024 but is currently on hold.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts emphasized that the president “is not above the law.” But Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, countered that if a future president “misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop...”

Sotomayor is rightly pointing out that a corrupt President will ignore the meaningless assurances Roberts is offering, because that corrupt SOB will figure out how to drag everything under that "official acts" umbrella and nobody - not even future Courts - will be able to argue otherwise.

This ruling goes against what was considered settled law with Nixon v United States, which stated clearly "no one is above the law." This Roberts Court is now saying that a sitting President is above the law, and can inflict acts of retribution and cruelty on everyone else.

This is the power of kings: To rule with impunity and injustice. This is something our nation's Founders fought against. We're due to celebrate the holiday honoring their Declaration against the tyranny of a British king, and these wingnut Justices just undid everything the Founders stood for.

When they created the Executive branch, when they settled on a President of the United States, the Founders insisted on establishing checks and balances to ensure political power never rested with a tyrant. By creating the idea of even limited immunity related to the "duties of the office", this Court just upended those balances, ended those checks.

A crooked man in the White House - someone like trump - can now do anything he wants.

Consider what trump wants to do in a second term in office should he lie, bully, and steal his way back into the Presidency. he's openly planning revenge against the New York officers and judges who held him accountable for his acts of fraud and sexual assault. trump and his anti-immigrant handlers are drawing up plans to seize up to 20 million people they'll claim are illegal immigrants and hold them in "camps" (note: there aren't that many illegals in America. They'll likely be seizing real citizens - mostly kids unable to produce ID - and making them suffer) in clear violation of civil rights. And he's planning to gut the Executive branch of civil service employees in violation of workers rights and the needs of the public. 

We are now facing the serious threat of an uncontrolled donald trump sitting in the Oval Office with a literal license to kill.

The entire nation needs to recognize the threat donald trump and his Far Right Republican allies represent. No one is going to be safe if he gets back in the White House.

To the 81 million Americans who voted for Joe Biden in 2020, you need to come back to the ballot box and support him - as Biden respects the rule of law and denounced today's ruling - again. To every Independent voter out there, you need to pick a side now and vote for the Democrats who won't subvert the Constitution and its protections we've lived with our whole lives. To any Republican voters who still respect the rule of law and understand how dangerous trump is, you need to get over any hesitancy to vote Democrat and for the LOVE OF GOD AND COUNTRY vote Biden.

The entire nation as we know it is now at the edge of the cliff. trump and his cronies are eager to drive us over that edge.

Time to stand up. Time to vote. Time to deny these corrupt trumpian powers any dominion over us.

The Death of Expertise

One of the things dreaded about this ultraconservative Supreme Court was how - at some point - the Far Right Republican justices were going to nuke federal regulations from orbit in order to appease their uber-rich corporate buddies. Well, this weekend that finally happened, and apparently nuked the checks and balances of the Constitution with it (via Amy Howe at SCOTUSBlog): 

In a major ruling, the Supreme Court on Friday cut back sharply on the power of federal agencies to interpret the laws they administer and ruled that courts should rely on their own interpretion of ambiguous laws. The decision will likely have far-reaching effects across the country, from environmental regulation to healthcare costs.

By a vote of 6-3, the justices overruled their landmark 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, which gave rise to the doctrine known as the Chevron doctrine. Under that doctrine, if Congress has not directly addressed the question at the center of a dispute, a court was required to uphold the agency’s interpretation of the statute as long as it was reasonable. But in a 35-page ruling by Chief Justice John Roberts, the justices rejected that doctrine, calling it “fundamentally misguided.”

Justice Elena Kagan dissented, in an opinion joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Kagan predicted that Friday’s ruling “will cause a massive shock to the legal system...”

The justices took up their appeals, agreeing to address only the Chevron question in Relentless v. Department of Commerce and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. (Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented in the Relentless case but was recused from the Loper-Bright case, presumably because she had heard oral argument in the case while she was still a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.)

Chevron deference, Roberts explained in his opinion for the court on Friday, is inconsistent with the Administrative Procedure Act, a federal law that sets out the procedures that federal agencies must follow as well as instructions for courts to review actions by those agencies. The APA, Roberts noted, directs courts to “decide legal questions by applying their own judgment” and therefore “makes clear that agency interpretations of statutes — like agency interpretations of the Constitution — are not entitled to deference. Under the APA,” Roberts concluded, “it thus remains the responsibility of the court to decide whether the law means what the agency says.”

Instead of the Executive Branch making these decisions, Roberts is saying, it should be the Judiciary. And by the sound of it, the Legislative Branch passing the regulatory laws can't say anything about it either. 

Roberts rejected any suggestion that agencies, rather than courts, are better suited to determine what ambiguities in a federal law might mean. Even when those ambiguities involve technical or scientific questions that fall within an agency’s area of expertise, Roberts emphasized, “Congress expects courts to handle technical statutory questions” – and courts also have the benefit of briefing from the parties and “friends of the court.”

The problem with this position is that judges really aren't the experts they think they are. On matters of law, yes. On matters of what construes as toxic waste, or the effectiveness of safety gear in hazardous work areas, or the type of materials that Boeing should use to build planes that are falling apart as I blog this, no they are not.

This Court is effectively kneecapping every civil servant in every regulatory office at the federal - and likely state - level, forcing them to cope with filing requests to judges for every safety / health regulation challenge that the major corporations handling dangerous or costly products - the energy companies, the chemical manufacturers, pharmaceuticals, car makers, building constructors, anything listed in the Thomas Register - are now likely to file.

Everything regarding clean water and clean air are now out the window, which you'll need to keep closed if you suffer from allergies and asthma and anything else pollution can affect. Remember what happened to Flint, Michigan? Start multiplying that by 100 as poor communities find themselves dumping grounds for toxic waste that companies no longer have to regulate.

Anyone arguing "self-regulation" will take place because corporations won't profit from hazardous business practices should remember all the times corporations STILL failed to hold themselves to standards while spilling pollution everywhere. If a company can cut corners and save spending even a small sum of money on something in order to report bigger profits, they will.

Government regulation was the only thing keeping the massive corporations in line when it came to cleaning up the pollution that threatened our nation back in the 1970s. People today can't remember how bad it got during the post World War II era of mass industrialization and failures to keep things clean. Lead poisoning was a serious problem with the breathable air, something that the clean air laws reduced to a point where scientists made legitimate claims that it's lessened the crime rate and extended lifespans.

But we're not going to have that scientific expertise making the decisions that can affect regional health or workplace safety anymore. Now we're going to rely on judges who are going to act on their partisan agendas instead of the facts. We're going to have justices deciding on the difference between "nitrous" and "nitrogen", something they are clearly not prepared for.

And that's just the environment we're talking about. In terms of financial safety, Roberts' Court kneecapped the Securities and Exchange Commission in a separate ruling that makes it harder to stop the fraudsters and grifters looking to inflict their greed on the rest of us.

This is where the Club For Greed's deregulatory crusade has led us: A conservative court rigging the system to answer to THEIR authority and no one else's. Not the Congress, not the Presidency.

Gods help us.

Why Bother Your Evening?

There is a Presidential debate tonight on CNN and none of us are obligated to watch. 

Considering what happened during the previous election cycle - involving the same two candidates - when donald trump attempted to violate every norm and civility in the most crass manner, I'm not about to expect him to improve his behavior. Even with the supposed safeguards in place for this televised spectacle - the moderator can cut off microphones this time - we're going to get trump gaslighting - there are no fact-checkers at this debate - and bullying his way through another night of pandering towards his own base.

It's not helping any that trump's Republican allies and spokespeople have been running around the last week or so accusing President Biden of being drugged up on "smart" or "debate enhancement drugs" and demanding drug tests on Biden as a means to embarrass him (and provide cover for trump if he underwhelms/collapses during the event).

After all, if there were such a "performance enhancing drug" to improve your mental acuity, trump's own people would be injecting it into trump the last six months or so to hide the growing public signs that he's suffering dementia and cognitive failure.

This is all performative circus, designed to stir up fervor for the mainstream media outlets to cover the horserace nature of campaigns and fill their own narratives. The partisan landscape dividing the Republican and Democratic voting bases are already decided (since 2020!): the Undecided voters at this point tend to be tuned out anyway, and won't pay attention until the last month or so (hence the constant attempts at October Surprises to undermine each other).

At best, we're going to see Biden pitch to the media that he's built back a strong economy generating more jobs at better wages, and punching at trump for being a convicted felon. trump's narrative is going to be that things were better under him, that the border security is in shambles, and making none-too-subtle threats for his Proud Boy supporters to "prep for another uprising".

The only thing worth watching for is if trump physically collapses from his own inability to stand upright as his neurology short circuits.

Me? I'm trying to get into this Martha Wells' Murderbot book series. Wish me luck.

Dreading a Decision

With the Supreme Court winding down for the summer, there are still a number of key legal decisions they have to issue. The big one being the decision on donald trump's claims of Absolute Immunity from facing criminal prosecution for acts he committed while President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice).

The Far Right on the Court have already done trump a solid favor by taking up this matter, forcing delays on two of the federal cases trump is facing: One for his mishandling/theft of classified documents at Mar-A-Lago; the other related to his actions - and inactions - during the January 6th Insurrection. Even if the Court comes out with a ruling that says trump still has to stand trial on those charges, the likelihood is that both won't finish - or even start - before the general election this November. While the 34 guilty verdicts trump received in New York court already paints trump as a felon, these federal cases directly focused on trump's unfitness as President, and could have convinced a larger majority of American voters to deny him a second - more corrupt - term.

For all of how this affects the electoral matters, there is still a serious danger regarding the Supreme Court's pending decision on this.

One of the worst possible outcomes would be if a simple majority - five of the Republican-appointed conservatives - approved trump's stance of having Absolute Immunity. It would immediately destroy any check and balance within the Constitution: the Executive branch will become untouchable to the Judicial and Legislative branch. It would give Presidents full power to be tyrants. And it would be insane even for Justices like Alito and Thomas - who've openly supported such Unitary Executive arguments for years - to approve that.

The only thing stopping such a ruling is that it would immediately grant the current President - Democratic Joe Biden - the same immunity, which he could then abuse to his own devices. Considering real-world issues - such as Russian interference supporting a corrupt felon like trump this election cycle, Far Right obstructionism in Congress, and a Supreme Court dominated by unethical Republican-nominated Justices (hello again, Clarence Thomas) - Biden could well argue the need for his administration to cross legal boundaries to perform his duties, and arrest every single one of them without regard to legal niceties. Granted, it would trigger secession from the Red states and open civil war, but an Absolutely Immune President like Biden could ignore things like Posse Comitatus and send a mostly-loyal federal military to overwhelm them all. I doubt the Far Right judges will risk that.

Which could lead to an even worse possibility: The conservative Justices decide to carve out Absolute Immunity but in such a way it covers trump and no one else. Trying to make sure Biden or any future President - unless it's trump again (shudder) - won't use such powers to disrupt or upend any Far Right hold on American politics, those Justices could twist the entire legal system into knots granting an individual certain powers they would deny to others in the same position. Such a ruling would make a mockery of centuries of legal history; ignoring the practice of following and creating precedence, or the idea that persons are equal before the law.

That result would undermine the already crumbling reputation of a partisan Supreme Court. Legal experts who aren't already pandering to trump would cry foul. There would be the likelihood that Biden's Attorney General would argue that ruling "unenforceable" and ignore it, creating a massive crisis dragging in a divided Congress that would have House Republicans impeaching AG Garland and President Biden while the Senate Democrats refuse to vote on the matter. It could still lead to Biden claiming such powers of immunity anyway, since any constitutional norms are clearly out the window.

A more likely scenario is that the Far Right Justices would carve out Selective - not Absolute - immunity, granting that trump while in office was able to perform certain criminal acts "if it fell within the scope of his duties." They would try to align such "criminal acts" to the ones trump is facing charges - a tidy little coincidence - so that Biden and future Presidents can't unleash themselves. But it staggers the mind that the Justices would grant immunity over such high-priority matters as refusing to send in help to subdue a violent riot incited by a President - like in January 6th - or trying to take all those classified documents - like in the Mar-A-Lago matter - that are clear violations of that President's duties.

The best possible decision would be for a majority of the Justices - the Democratic-appointed ones alongside at least two Republican ones - to agree a President doesn't have Absolute Immunity. They could stick to the precedence set by US v Nixon that "no one is above the law" and that Presidents should consider their criminal liability for acts they commit even while in office. It would mean trump is exposed to whatever fate he faces with the federal criminal trials... depending on if the South Florida judge Aileen Cannon will stop her own screw-ups in the Mar-A-Lago case.

In this timeline, Special Prosecutor Jack Smith could arguably speed up the DC trial regarding trump's involvement in January 6th and get that trial going as soon as possible (maybe late July). The classified documents one will clearly not be ready this year, and the Fulton County matter has been delayed until October, so the DC case would be in the clear. Thing is, most legal experts argue that the amount of evidence and witness testimony could take months, making it unlikely the trial would end before November.

That all said, the Far Right Supreme Court could make a ruling not to decide. They could delay the whole argument by sending the matter back down and demanding "clarification" from the lower courts which Presidential acts could be protected by immunity and which shouldn't. That would definitely freeze up the DC trial for now, and put everything on hold until the Court reopens for business in October.

Waiting for justice from this broken Supreme Court has turned into a joke.

It's been clear for some time that the legal system is not going to save us from a corrupt trump or a sadistic self-serving Republican Party. We're going to have to do it at the ballot box.

In spite of all the threats from the Republicans that they're going to suppress the votes, they can't stop or deny us all. If we can get the 81 million who voted for Biden in 2020 - and if we can get the Independent voters and Rational Republicans who refuse to vote for a convicted felon like trump - we can overcome the GOP's plan to steal this election.

Get the vote out, America. Only WE can stop trump from committing more crimes.

Burning Poe's Books Without Really Reading Them

Update 6/24/24: I would like to thank Steve in Manhattan for including this article at the Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-up... except that, uh, um... he made the link there to a Clippy YouTube video instead. Sigh. It's been that kind of a Monday already.

Irony in America lost its humor a long time ago. That is what makes this current round of book banning across the nation both pathetic and horrifying. Even at the point that the literacy haters in Florida are going after the books about book bans (via Erum Salam at the Guardian (US)):

Ban This Book, a children’s book written by Alan Gratz, will no longer be available in the Indian River county school district since the school board voted to remove the book last month.

Gratz’s book, which came out in 2017, follows fourth-grader Amy Anne Ollinger as she tries to check out her favorite book. Ollinger is told by the librarian she cannot, because it was banned after a classmate’s parent thought it was inappropriate. She then creates a secret banned-books library, entering into “an unexpected battle over book banning, censorship, and who has the right to decide what she and her fellow students can read”, according to the book’s description on Gratz’s website...

So of course a parent objected.

Pippin’s opposition is what prompted the school board to vote 3-2 in favor of removing it from shelves. The vote happened despite the district’s book-review committee vetting the work and deciding to keep it in schools.

Indian River county school board members disagreed with how Gratz’s book referred to other works that had been taken out of school, and accused it of “teaching rebellion of school-board authority”, according to the Tallahassee Democrat.

Pippin is also the chair of the local Moms for Liberty chapter, a far-right organization that has been behind many of the book bans that have swept across the US in recent years. According to a 2023 PEN America report, 81% of school districts that banned books between July 2022 and June 2023 were within or adjoined a county with a local chapter of a group such as Moms for Liberty...

There is nothing liberating about what this Far Right organization is doing. It's restricting. It's limiting. It's taking away from other families their rights to choose what their kids can read. It's taking away from those children the ability to recognize when free thought and free speech - some of the most essential human rights - are denied.

In a statement to the Tallahassee Democrat, Gratz noted the irony of his book being banned.

“They banned the book because it talks about the books that they have banned and because it talks about book banning,” he said. “It feels like they know exactly what they’re doing and they’re somewhat ashamed of what they’re doing and they don’t want a book on the shelves that calls them out.”

Reading as a skill gives us comprehension. Reading from diverse points of view, reading about different cultures, reading about the thrills and dangers of the real world. We read about what's fiction and we read about what's nonfiction and we read about what's human. 

These are things that the book banners would take away, to narrow and limit our skill to comprehend. They want to take away the skill to think, to interpret, to question, to decide in favor of worldviews that the book banners fear and hate.

We've already got problems in the United States when it comes to adult comprehension and decision-making skills, things that a strong literary education could have solved. And now we're dealing with factions in our nation happily denying literacy to our children, to guarantee that freedom of thought and freedom of speech can be easily taken away.

If you don't want your kid to read a book, tell your kid not to read it, and find something else that the kid could enjoy reading without denying that right to thousands of other families.

Defend your libraries, America.

I read Ray Bradbury growing up. I remember his short stories, masterpieces of horror, and recall a story from the Martian Chronicles titled "Usher II" (it was a separate magazine short story from 1950 but reworked to be part of the novel):

“Garrett?” called Stendahl softly. Garrett silenced himself. “Garrett,” said Stendahl, “do you know why I’ve done this to you? Because you burned Mr. Poe’s books without really reading them. You took other people’s advice that they needed burning. Otherwise you’d have realized what I was going to do to you when we came down here a moment ago. Ignorance is fatal, Mr. Garrett.”

And if you've read Edgar Allan Poe in school (or if the book banners would let you), you'd know what Stendahl was doing to Garrett.

Yes, for the love of God!

The Bullets Count the Cost

Don't you shoot him down/
He's about to leave here/
Don't you shoot him down/
He's got to stay here/
He ain't going nowhere/
He's been shot down to the ground/
Oh where he can't survive no no...
-- "Machine Gun," Jimi Hendrix

The latest ruling out of this extremist, archconservative Supreme Court pretty much guarantees an increase in the national body count when it comes to gun violence. Via Amy Howe at SCOTUSblog:

The Supreme Court on Friday struck down a rule that banned bump stocks, issued by the Trump administration after a 2017 mass shooting at a concert in Las Vegas. By a vote of 6-3, the justices rejected the federal government’s argument that rifles equipped with bump stocks are machine guns, which are generally prohibited under federal law. In an opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s conservative justices emphasized that Congress could have enacted a law that banned all weapons capable of high rates of fire, but it did not – and so the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives was wrong to interpret the federal ban on machine guns to extend to bump stocks.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, in an opinion joined by the court’s other more liberal justices, Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. She warned that the majority’s decision “will have deadly consequences.”

The bump stock is an attachment that transforms a semiautomatic rifle into a weapon that can discharge at a rate of hundreds of rounds per minute. The Trump administration issued the rule at the center of the case in 2018. It followed a mass shooting at a music festival in Las Vegas in which the gunman used semi-automatic rifles equipped with a bump-stock device to kill 60 people and injure over 500 more. The rule, which concluded that bump stocks are machine guns, was an about-face from the ATF’s previous position, which until 2018 had indicated that only some kinds of bump stocks are machine guns. Under the 2018 rule, anyone who owned a bump stock was required to destroy it or drop it at a nearby ATF office to avoid criminal penalties...

Rather than leave it up to the federal agency to determine that bump stocks turned semi-auto guns into full-auto, Thomas and the other Republican Justices decided "fuck public safety, let the gun nuts have their firepower."

Because that's what was at stake here. Not a Second Amendment matter, but a public safety matter. And the goddamn Far Right don't give a rat's ass as long as they're not the targets (you will notice that a lot of the Far Right public gatherings are "Gun Free Zones").

If you want an idea of what a bump stock can do for an assault rifle, there's a YouTube clip going around that demonstrates (try to get to the 4:42 mark):

With a bump stock, you're shooting enough bullets to wipe out an entire room of people within seconds, not minutes. The Las Vegas concert mass shooting that convinced the ATF (and even a gun-happy trump administration) to ban bump stocks? The gunman was able to get off 1,000 rounds, killing 60 and wounding over 400 people (more people were also injured during the panicked fleeing).

Goddamn this. A solid majority of Americans want assault rifles banned, and yet our legal system - and far too many politicians bought out by the goddamned NRA - refuses to consider that need.

Gun violence is already a serious epidemic in our nation. Mass shootings are now so common that we don't even notice them unless the body count goes into double digits. By giving these gunmen the ability to do that, we are guaranteeing that the blood in our streets will not stop flowing. Not until every gun-loving politicians (mostly Republicans) are voted out of office, not until every gun-loving judges are forced to retire, not until we can do something about the twisted side of the American debate on guns that turned the Second Amendment from granting states the power to well-regulate their militias into a mindless license for gun nuts to shoot anybody they want.

The violence is going to get worse. Especially when the Far Right gun nuts get convinced the upcoming election isn't going their way...

One Sentence Summary on the Significance of Hunter Biden's Guilty Verdict As It Relates to the 2024 Presidential Election

Hunter Biden is not on the national ballot for the Presidency of the United States, unlike donald trump; to where the entire Republican Party still has to justify why they are supporting a convicted felon and confirmed sex offender for the highest office in the land. 

Old Hero Greeting The Next Hero at Normandy Anniversary

I wrote last year a comparison between the importance of D-Day as a key turning point in World War II and the importance of Ukraine standing up against Russian invasion: 

Those landings were 79 years ago, but they remain fresh in our memories. The realization of the horrors of war, the sacrifices made, the honors gained and lives lost. 

They remain fresh because those struggles are repeating in Europe today, as Ukraine is now the battlefront against a Russian horde seeking to rebuild an empire under Putin at the expense of European stability...

This won't be an easy fight for Ukraine. Wars never are.

But Eisenhower said it best in 1944 when he extorted Allied troops to victory:

Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!

You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hope and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world...

Just switch out Germans for Russians, and the gist is the same.

I'm not the only one who thinks that. One of the few surviving veterans of World War II that appeared this week in Normandy France to honor the 80th anniversary of D-Day had a moment meeting Ukrainian President Zelensky (via Guardian News YouTube):

The veteran kissed Zelensky's hand - or tried to, Zelensky was too humble to take it - and told him "You're the savior of the people." 

"You saved Europe," Zelenksy replied.

Game recognizes game. Hero recognizes hero.

That veteran understands that Ukraine is fighting to save Europe now. The rest of Europe needs to do more to aid Ukraine against Russia and help them stop Putin's warmongering fantasies.

D-Day Anniversary: The Few Remaining

The Normandy landings happened 80 years ago this day, and so this D-Day remembrance in France has been honoring the few aging veterans who are still alive: 

We are always moving forward in time, to where the persons who lived through these historic events are passing away. In a few more years, there will be no one left alive who can tell us what it was like storming the beaches and parachuting out of the night sky to fight these battles to end the fascist rule of Nazis who had taken over much of Europe and threatened the rest of the world.

Tiananmen Square 35 Years Later

I continue to say this: China should be free.

 To the Tank Man, if you're still out there: I owe you a tea lunch.

The Tick Tock of a Justice Clock

So with donald trump now convicted on 34 felonies, what happens next?

The simplest answer is that the legal system in New York moves forward on the punishment phase (via Michael R. Sisak, Jill Colvin, Michelle L. Price, and Alanna Durkin Richer at AP News):

The big question now is whether Trump could go to prison. The answer is uncertain. Judge Juan M. Merchan set sentencing for July 11, just days before Republicans are formally set to nominate Trump for president.

The charge of falsifying business records is a Class E felony in New York, the lowest tier of felony charges in the state. It is punishable by up to four years in prison, though the punishment would ultimately be up to the judge, and there’s no guarantee he would give Trump time behind bars. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg declined to say whether prosecutors would seek prison time.

It’s unclear to what extent the judge may factor in the political and logistical complexities of jailing a former president who is running to reclaim the White House. Other punishments could include a fine or probation. And it’s possible the judge would allow Trump to avoid serving any punishment until after he exhausts his appeals...

If there's any factor that should determine if trump faces time in jail is his own behavior before, during, and after the trial. The level of contempt trump displayed throughout led to Judge Merchan leveling fines and threatening him with sitting in a jail cell. Considering how trump continues to attack the entire proceeding as a rigged witch hunt, letting trump off with simple fines or probation would be a joke. While maxxing out the jail time to four years (48 months) would seem excessive for - believe it or not - a first-time felon like trump, settling on a set of months to make it hurt for him - say, 34 months one for each Guilty count - would be IMHO a fair punishment.

trump - and his MAGA voting base - of course would freak out. But we kinda knew that going in.

The ramifications of the guilty verdict are still roiling the political arena:

The conviction doesn’t bar Trump from continuing his campaign or becoming president. And he can still vote for himself in his home state of Florida as long as he stays out of prison in New York state.

Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump, who serves as co-chair of the Republican National Committee, said in a Fox News Channel interview on Thursday that Trump would do virtual rallies and campaign events if he’s convicted and sentenced to home confinement.

In a deeply divided America, it’s unclear whether Trump’s once-unimaginable criminal conviction will have any impact at all on the election...

In the short term, at least, there were immediate signs that the guilty verdict was helping to unify the Republican Party’s disparate factions as GOP officials across the political spectrum rallied behind their embattled presumptive presidential nominee and his campaign reported a flood of fundraising dollars within hours of the verdict.

There has been some polling conducted on the prospect of a guilty verdict, although such hypothetical scenarios are notoriously difficult to predict. A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll found that only 4% of Trump’s supporters said they would withdraw their backing if he’s convicted of a felony, though another 16% said they would reconsider it...

What would help, if pollsters interviewed Democratic-leaning voters to see how many will vote for Biden to ensure a convicted felon never gets (back) into the White House. /headdesk

We are entering uncharted waters in our nation's history. While we've had convicted felons run for the presidency - Eugene Debs the most well-known - we've never had one at the head of a major party with a guaranteed voter turnout in the millions. When the Founders created the Constitution, they never dreamed that the political elites of that era would allow such a person to run: Their own virtues of personal honor and good faith towards the system blinded them to the possibility a demagogue like trump would ever rise up to break all social norms and civility.

When the political parties formed (and reformed) in the years following, those parties were expected to use a vetting system of nominating only the best - or least corrupt - among them. But trump has subverted all that, bullying and dominating the Republican ranks to where he literally owns the national organization overseeing the party. Whatever is left of the GOP leadership is stuck with kissing trump's ring orange ass to stay in his good graces, turning a blind eye to trump's criminality and going along with trump's twisted accusations of a "rigged" trial.

Whatever issues are still up for debate - protecting abortion rights, stopping the bloodshed in Gaza, supporting Ukraine against Russia, defending our educational system, resolving the immigration crisis - this is a serious matter to consider: We now have a convicted felon as the presidential nominee for the Republican Party, with no sign trump will step aside or get pushed aside for a more honorable candidate. There is no "both sides are bad" argument here. For all of the Republican Party's efforts to paint President Biden as a corrupt figure, they've never found any evidence of that: The best they've done is bring charges to his son Hunter, but never found any financial ties between them.

This is now down to two Presidential candidates. trump is a convicted felon with an established history of criminal behavior - trump's company criminally guilty, trump found liable for sexual assault, trump found liable for tax evasion and fraud to the tune of $364 million, trump's non-profit forced to shut down for fraud - proven in court. Biden is not a felon.

This ought to be an easy choice, America. Don't fucking vote for the felon.

Nobody's Fault But trump's

Update: Thank ye again to Batocchio for including this blog in the Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please stick around and view the other articles I've got, and good luck this summer!

When you consider today's criminal conviction of donald trump, a lot of this is his own damn fault.

He didn't have to run for President in the first place. trump could have literally stayed in his lane as a corrupt businessman, living off of the inflated values of his properties, feeding off celebrity tributes, plastering his name on questionable products, buying up more resorts to mismanage, and none of this would have happened. It's rare anymore for the legal system to chase after white collar crime like fraud, especially on so brazen a scale that trump was doing. he'd been doing this - remember "trump University"? - for so long over the decades it's likely the state attorneys would have never gone after him, and trump would have gone to his grave convinced he was a genius business negotiator feared by his enemies, worshipped by women, and envied by all.

trump's corporation would never have gone under the financial scrutiny that the State Attorney Letitia James eventually deployed, leading to massive liabilities and fines that can well doom trump's entire financial empire (whatever's left of it).

trump didn't have to go out of his way to accuse Barack Obama over Obama's birth certificate. trump could have tamped down his racism and not gotten involved in any of that false conspiracy drivel. But he did, and received the public putdown at that Correspondents' Dinner that apparently triggered trump's urge for political revenge. Now trump's the one facing imprisonment while Obama enjoys a post-presidency as a beloved figure.

If trump hadn't run for President, he'd have never panicked over the possibility of the women he'd had affairs with going public with their stories. he'd have never arranged for the "capture and kill" scheme with the publisher of the National Enquirer to silence those reports, which were part of the charges he'd just gotten convicted. trump would have never paid hush money to Stormy Daniels through his bagman lawyer Michael Cohen, who both testified to what happened during this trial and whose credibility were confirmed by this jury.

If trump hadn't been President, making himself a public nuisance shooting down other allegations of sexual misconduct, it would have been likely one of his victims - E. Jean Carroll - would have remained silent. Instead she spoke up, leading to his defaming her, and leading to civil trials where trump was officially held liable for sexual assault. It is a matter of record that trump is a sex offender.

Even the legal defenses in each of the trials trump faced are his fault. If it were any other defendant with political ambitions, that person and their lawyers would have worked out plea deals. Instead of felonies, there'd be misdemeanors paid off by fines and probation, and the media furor would die down to where a political career was still within reach.

If things had gone to trial, that defendant would have behaved in court, worked to impress and win over the jury. There would have been contrition, admission of lesser unethical behavior, means of convincing the courtroom that mistakes were made but didn't rise to the level of a guilty verdict.

But trump can never do that, can he. In trump's mind, admitting to anything would be admitting he was wrong even in the slightest thing, and he can never admit to that. In his mind, there are Winners and Suckers and himself - a Winner - can never do any wrong. This is why he claims the acts he's done - the bullying phone calls, the attacks on those he views as his inferiors - are "perfect" and shouldn't even be investigated. This is why he cannot act contrite to a judge or jury. This is why he'd rather attack the trials as "witch hunts" and undermine the entire legal system: his narcissistic self-worth can't accept any other option.

This is why his lawyers in every trial kept employing odd legal tactics that outside observers noted couldn't work... and those tactics didn't work. Half the time, trump's lawyers were too busy pandering to their client instead of winning over juries. It was an oddity that in the middle of attacking Stormy Daniels' credibility that trump's lawyer tried to get her to admit under oath that "trump was a good golfer" as though that had any relevance to the trial.

trump's defiance in the face of legal facts made it next to impossible to adequately give trump effective legal counsel. It exposed him time and again as a bullying egotist, making it difficult for any jury to accept him and for any judge to tolerate him.

And so here we are, still in the Darkest Timeline, coping with the reality that the Republican Party - that proudly declares itself "The Party of Law And Order" - has as their standard bearer a convicted felon, a certified sex offender, a known liar and bully. This is who the GOP voters accept as their leader. There is no sign they will be pushing him aside as their Presidential nominee for the 2024 elections.

Gods help us.

Elections matter, America. For all the yelling and screaming by Republicans about how corrupt Democrats are, the fact is clear that the Republicans - led by donald trump - are the truly corrupt party. For the LOVE of God and the Rule of Law and everything America SHOULD stand for, do not vote for trump or for any Republican lackey still kissing trump's convicted orange ass.

As of May 30 2024 at 5:15 PM EDT

It is official now. donald trump is a convicted felon. The jury returned the verdict with all 34 counts as Guilty.

THAT'S GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY!

I'm at work at the moment so I'll add some comments later.

Getting To The Week Where It Could Finally Happen

I haven't written much more about the Manhattan criminal trial facing donald trump since late April, as much of it had been the day-to-day witness testimony and presentation of evidence... alongside trump's efforts to skirt around the judge's contempt warnings about trump's social media attacks.

If you want some details, Josh Kovensky over at Talking Points Memo (TPM) provided decent coverage.

Thing is, last week both sides wrapped up their cases before the jury, so Judge Merchan set this coming Tuesday May 28th - he did not want to ruin Memorial Day weekend for the jurors - for closing arguments and to give instructions to the jury for deliberation. This - as they say - is it.

Whether trump wins acquittal or DA Bragg wins at least one "guilty" conviction remains with how Merchan instructs the jury, what limits he imposes, and what decisions - if any - that jury returns.

I don't want to get my hopes up (again). There could be straight acquittal across all 34 charges, or at least one juror holding out to where it ends up a mistrial. The jury could vote guilty on just a handful of counts and not others if they have reasonable doubts, or convict on every one.

This is, in my opinion, the closest we as a nation have ever gotten to holding trump accountable for all the unethical and brazen acts he's committed over the decades he's been in the spotlight. While trump has been held liable in civil court for his sexual assault and for his tax/financial frauds, this is criminal court now; and the potential to hold him in jail - where his gaslighting and denials will not save him - can happen.

Some of this depends on how quickly the jury goes through each indictment before them: There are 34 felony charges, and they could well deliberate on each one at a time. They could also finish this as quickly as the civil jury decided on Carroll's sexual assault charges, which took one afternoon.

A lot of this will boil down to which side presented the stronger case, and by most accounts trump's defense was shoddy and questionable at best. The highlights were the testimonies by the prosecutors' star witnesses Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen, where trump's lawyers did their best to discredit both. Court observers don't think that happened, especially against Cohen (via Kovensky at TPM):

Michael Cohen, the arch-nemesis of Donald Trump, would finally face withering cross-examination on the stand. He would come face to face with attorneys for the former and potentially future President.

The entire case would hinge on this. Cohen alone, the thinking went, could confirm a central element of the business records falsification case: that Trump approved the fraudulent reimbursement scheme for Cohen making the hush money payment to Stormy Daniels. And Cohen did confirm it.

But on Tuesday, in the first hours of cross-examination, something else happened. What was anticipated to be fireworks instead turned to a fizzle in a stuffy Manhattan courtroom on a warm May afternoon.

Trump defense attorney Todd Blanche spent much of his initial day of cross-examination meandering in questioning with Cohen. He landed a few blows on Cohen, assailing his credibility in various ways...

Blanche then followed up with the obvious and effective hit: how could Cohen claim to remember phone calls with Trump from 2016 in detail when he said he did not recall interactions with prosecutors on the case in which he was testifying from 2023?

That line of questioning had additional impact: it portrayed Cohen as uncontrollable by prosecutors. It came after Cohen and the DA spent more than a day on direct examination establishing that all of his lies and bullying during his time with Trump occurred at Trump’s direction, his behest, to please him. Instead, if further pursued, Cohen ignoring requests from the DA’s office to stop speaking to the press could develop into an argument that he was going rogue from Trump when he paid the hush money to Stormy Daniels in 2016.

But on Tuesday, Blanche did not pursue that.

Instead, he wound up mired in often confusing details about the various Trump investigations in which Cohen had testified. At one point, Blanche asked Cohen about his first interview with prosecutors in the Mueller investigation — an instance in which he has admitted to have lied...

That arguably wasn't a good avenue to go down, because Cohen can counter that he lied back then on trump's behest (even on his orders).

The relative softballs came as a surprise in part because of Cohen’s performance under cross-examination during New York Attorney General Letitia James (D)’s civil trial of the former president. Then, he erupted with his own objections, telling defense attorneys in that case that some questions had been “asked and answered.”

That set a low bar for Cohen’s testimony in this case. But he managed to parry some of Blanche’s questions in part by embracing the negative implications that the Trump attorney seemed to be trying to elicit by trickery or force...

It didn't help trump's defense that they presented too few of their own witnesses to rebut the DA's case. Their big witness turned in a performance more detrimental than Cohen's hostile testimony (going this time to Charles R. Davis over at Salon):

One reason Donald Trump’s lawyers probably are telling him not to testify in his own defense is because they — and everyone else in a certain Manhattan courtroom on Monday — have now seen what happens when a defiant witness takes the stand and has a tantrum in front of the jury.

Robert Costello, an attorney who briefly advised Michael Cohen after the FBI raided his home in 2018, is the first person the defense team has called to provide substantive testimony. Firmly on Team MAGA, Costello was asked to counter the former president’s ex-fixer, who had told the court that Trump called him after the raid and told him to “stay tough.”

According to Costello, Cohen was distraught after the raid — but adamant, at the time, that he had no dirt on his boss that he could share with law enforcement in hopes of softer treatment. “He said, ‘I swear to God, Bob, I don’t have anything on Donald Trump,’” Costello said, purportedly quoting his former client.

But that was far from the highlight. What drew the most attention from Costello’s brief time on the stand was the way he acted toward Judge Juan Merchan, who had sustained multiple prosecutions objections to the apparent annoyance of the defense witness. “Jeez,” Costello muttered in response to one such ruling, whose sarcasm extended to his body language – and prompted the judge to clear out the jury to remind the witness how to behave in a courtroom.

“I want to discuss proper decorum in my courtroom,” Merchan said. “You don’t give me a side eye and you don’t roll your eyes,” he continued. “If you don’t like my ruling, you don’t say, ‘jeez.’”

Costello responded with what CNN described as a “long glare,” further setting off the judge.

“Are you staring me down?” a visibly upset Merchan asked Costello. The scene ended with the judge threatening to strike Costello’s testimony altogether if he didn’t learn how to control himself. “Your conduct is contemptuous right now,” he said. “If you stare me down one more time, I will remove you from the stand.”

As Davis noted, if you want an idea how trump would have behaved on the stand - and he didn't, because even his lawyers were terrified how trump wouldn't keep track of which gaslighting lie to stick with - Costello was the proxy. For a lawyer himself, Costello forgot one of the biggest rules taught in school: NEVER antagonize a judge. While the jury was dismissed for the part where Merchan read Costello the riot act, court attendees noted several jurors seemed stunned by Costello's behavior, arguably didn't impress them, and they had to know what was going on while they were out:

As attorney and Brookings Institution senior fellow Norm Eisen commented, Costello’s performance was what might call an “own goal”: he added nothing that jurors would not have already gathered from Cohen himself — the former president’s ex-fixer told jurors he repeatedly lied to protect his boss — while needlessly antagonizing the judge. Even if the jury had left the room for the talking down, jurors could likely figure out the reason they had to get up and go: “ill manners of a kind we have not seen from any witness yet across the 19 days of trial, even on the most contentious cross-examinations...”

From where I'm sitting, trump didn't put up a convincing defense. Every prosecuting witness didn't flinch on the stand, and corroborated both the paper trail and what it was all for.

This should be the week justice finally comes for donald trump.

We'll see how it goes from there for the rule of law and the fate of the nation.