Please let this be a signal that a case will be heard before the election.
Not that any of this means he will be found guilty.
Or that if he is found guilty, that independents won't fudge on saying they would never vote for a convicted cunt.
But, even if it ends up being bad, this case has to happen. This can't be left as a 'what if'?

And, while we are on the topic, fuck people who have to wait for a verdict to decide this guy isn't fit for Taco Bell, let alone the fucking presidency.
 

If only we could go back in time and conscript Glenn Close to murder baby JD Vance in his sleep. This was the ending of Hillbilly Elegy I've always hoped for, and now maybe people will come to understand how good a script doctor I could truly be.

Trump has gone full "What Would Kanye Do?"
 

It hasn't been quite a month since the last post commemorating Trump's nailing the coffin shut on the modern GOP, with his takeover of the leadership of the RNC - essentially giving him control of the purse of the party and the any future candidates for national office - and what can only be called the forced abdication of Mitch McConnell from congressional leadership.

And in the past month since, you did see some Republicans who wisely attempted to pre-emptively prevent Trump from exercizing this new authority over the purse, because, again, it's quite obvious for a man with a half-billion dollar bond hanging over his head, in addition to tens of millions of dollars in annual legal fees stacking up, that Trump would naturally feel the temptation to stick his fat little fingers in that RNC cookie jar, which is donor money intended to be doled out to support individual candidates' campaigns.  Well, guess what?

Donald Trump’s new joint fundraising agreement with the Republican National Committee directs donations to his campaign and a political action committee that pays the former president’s legal bills before the RNC gets a cut, according to a fundraising invitation obtained by The Associated Press.

The unorthodox diversion of funds to the Save America PAC makes it more likely that Republican donors could see their money go to Trump’s lawyers, who have received at least $76 million over the last two years to defend him against four felony indictments and multiple civil cases.

And note that this may likely be completely legal, because the rules for this kind of allocation are generally rested entirely with the party.  Basically, for now, armed with this knowledge, it remains to be seen whether some of the big dollar Republican donors will accept this arrangement and continue donating directly through the RNC or will decide to start putting their money directly to individual candidates' campaigns and PACs.  And lastly it's worth noting that the RNC was already "cash-strapped" before this recent diversion of funds was announced.
 

Once again, Jon Stewart finds himself in the unenviable position of being one of the only people on television reporting the news.

I assume once he gets this season of once-a-week episodes under his belt, he'll retreat back to his farm and leave us to contend with another Trump presidency without any nuanced commentary or appropriately aimed push back.


 

They're airing Bill Maher's show on CNN now?  Funny how both he and Joe Rogan got lucrative promotions for their continued Covid misinformation.

Speaking of which, Maher had RFK Jr on this week.  Maher did push back slightly on the misinformation ("vaccines aren't all bad"), but just having him on allowed RFK Jr to throw all kinds of wild stuff out there, like citing some study that showed just shy of a quarter of vaccine recipients dying from them.  More appropriately, he also cited a poll which showed that 52% believed that vaccines could be harmful.  That's exactly the kind of poll that should be met with the strongest skepticism - irrelevant to facts, just measuring predetermined perceptions.

So why is this here?  Because the news now is that RFK Jr is looking more likely to be more of a spoiler against Trump to Biden's benefit, and not the other way around as the Washington pundits have been trying to lead us to believe.  That makes sense, because RFK Jr has been spending much more time with alt-right podcasts and media figures than liberal Democratic ones.  Who's his biggest endorsement?  Elon Musk?  So maybe that's why Bill wanted to give him a hand.

Not sure how much this story caught traction with most Americans, but about a month ago, one of RFK Jr's campaign "consultants", a woman named Rita Palma, gave away the game when she was speaking to an audience of New York Republicans.  Her message was pretty clear: "The Kennedy voter and the Trump voter....our mutual enemy is Biden.  Whether you support Bobby or Trump, we all oppose Biden."  RFK Jr. is not really concerned about winning the election.  That should be useful information for anyone thinking about spending their vote on him.  And if Trump happens to win instead?  Per Rita Palma: "So we're rid of Biden either way."  I see.  I seem to remember some Republican going to jail in Florida for propping up fake candidates to shave the opposition's votes, but for some reason no one is calling this out for what it is.  Either way, Bill Maher most certainly did not mention this during their "chat".

But we can take some solace in the fact that RFK Jr is so terribly bad at all of this that his scheme is so much worse than ineffectual that it might just backfire and cost Trump votes instead.  And probably the most telling thing that did come out of the interview with Maher was when offered the opportunity to criticize Trump, RFK Jr replied "You're not going to try to put me in the position of defending Donald Trump, are you?"  Nooo?  He was actually asking you to condemn the fake elector scheme to overturn an election.  Why would you assume from that that Trump needed defending?  It's just interesting that you were willing to "make the argument" on CNN about how Biden is a worse president, that maybe you might be able to find the time to do the same for Trump?  If it was, you know, as hypothetical as you claimed?  But, no, the reality is that RFK Jr is just as scared shitless of getting on Trump's bad side as any other Republican asshat.  Maybe he's still hoping for that VP nod.  But of course none of this cowardice helped and Trump very quickly began berating RFK anyway.

So nothing too new.  Both RFK Jr and Bill Maher are sniviling little dicklickers as always.  But now they get to dicklick on CNN!!!
 

The most significant part of this clip isn't really about Trump's crimes (which, as Stewart points out, are obvious), but more about the media critique surrounding it.

Courts are the last remaining guardrail that has a standard of evidentiary presentation and the last place where you have to prove what you say...

The problem is that most of the time in this country our political leaders are not in court, they are here on TV, where the news media has decided that there's really no such thing as reality...

We are all living in one reality and it can be the job of the news media to litigate the parameters of said reality.  What the courts do really well is to look backwards and reconstruct the reality of what happened.  The news media could do the same, but what they do instead is to look forward and wildly speculate on the future.

Using, of course, narratively reinforcing polls, which guide perception rather than clarify facts.

The Court should be the option of last resort for our defined reality, not the only option of our defined reality.

All of this extends from the abdication of editorial responsibility that we've seen - well - ever since Jon Stewart accurately predicted the model on Crossfire to Tucker Carlson's face 20 years ago.  The news media has decided to construct this bifurcated reality, the us v. them, the red and the blue, and this has been the principal engine of conflict/engagement which the since-emerged social media algorithms have been trained to maximize.  Cable news is less interested in factual settlements than in projecting the next season's dramatic twists.  Isn't this exciting?  Are we not entertained?!?
 

Well, that was excruciating. 

These skeetpigs.

One of the things we've learned this week is that it is now more unconstitutional for a President to direct his EPA to tailor a regulation around a broad piece of environmental legislation than it is for the same President to direct his DoJ to halt statewide election certifications, under unsubstantiated pretenses, while pressuring his Vice-President with thinly-veiled violence to fraudulently accept a fake set of electors instead.

Some may see a contradiction there, considering how one rule appears to severely restrict Executive power while the latter appears to profoundly expand it.  This would be to misunderstand the Project 2025 view of the Unitary Executive Theory, where the former actually represents the "administrative state", which they view as different from the President, even though they do both fall under the same branch.  These folks - whether Heritage Foundation or Federalist Society, etc - aren't interested in supporting the kind of Executive who would give a shit about corporate regulation.

Instead, the more important goal is the latter, which effectively places the DoJ more completely under the President's control.  Let me take a couple of reaction quotes to highlight the absurd hypocrisy here:

Speaker Mike Johnson: "Today’s ruling by the Court is a victory for former President Trump and all future presidents, and another defeat for President Biden’s weaponized Department of Justice and Jack Smith."

Rep. Steve Scalise: "While it’s becoming increasingly clear Democrats believe their only path to victory in November is through prosecuting their political opponent, today’s decision makes it clear this is not allowed in our constitutional system."

Sen, Joe Barrasso: "Joe Biden and the Democrats are weaponizing the justice system because they know President Trump will beat them in November."

The kindest thing would be to suggest that these men didn't bother to read the SCOTUS decision, but the reality is likely less honest than that.  The fact is that not only does this SCOTUS decision not rebuke the willful weaponization of the Justice Department by a President, it explicitly allows it.  The decision officially ends the long-standing principle of separation between the President and his Justice Department.  In explaing why Trump is absolutely immune for his communications of plotting illegal acts with DoJ officials, the ruling is pretty fucking clear, that the President - one, only and singular - has "exclusive authority and absolute discretion to decide which crimes to investigate and prosecute."  So not only does that mean that Trump cannot be prosecuted for falsely trying to launch a DoJ investigation in certain Georgian counties to shut down vote certifications, he can also very well launch prosecutions against whomever he damn well pleases, and he hasn't been exactly shy about naming which ones.  (Just yesterday, after this decision, he reiterated prosecuting Liz Cheney for "treason".)  Whatever "norms" prevented Trump from this activity in his first term has now been axed with the blessing of the highest court in the land.  This is a major headline from this decision that I have not seen yet in any mainstream news.


In addition to giving the president the absolute singular power to investigate and prosecute to his heart's content without any possibility of accountabilty - as if that wasn't enough - the SCOTUS threw in an extra "fuck you" with a completely inexplicable instruction, that "courts may not inquire into the President’s motives".  This is some truly insidious shit.  Sotomayor pointed this out: "It is one thing to say that motive is irrelevant to questions regarding the scope of civil liability, but it is quite another to make it irrelevant to questions regarding criminal liability.  Under that rule, any use of official power for any purpose, even the most corrupt purpose indicated by objective evidence of the most corrupt motives and intent, remains official and immune."  Indeed, "criminal intent" (motive) is paramount to most criminal investigations.  ON WHAT GROUNDS would a President require his motive be inadmissible in a court of law!?!  Probably when the motive is corrupt as fuck.

The designations don't add up to much.  There's people trying to pump the brakes by pointing out that SCOTUS did, mercifully, rule that "unofficial acts" can still be prosecuted, but this isn't helpful as Trump can (and will) claim that every act he undertook as President was by default an official act even if it had nothing to do with the poorly defined authorities and responsibilties of the office.  For one example, SCOTUS seems inclined to view Trump's pressuring of Mike Pence to accept fraudulent electors as an "official act", because, hey!, he was in the Oval Office at the time!  A more sane assessment would be to say that the Executive Branch (to which this entire SCOTUS judgment in directed) has absolutely no authority or responsibility regarding election certification at all.  That is solely the purview of the Legislative Brance, and Pence only acting in capacity as the Presiding Officer of the Senate, not as an Executive officer.  But unfortunately, even if we can get the common sense through, we're unable to to use this incident as evidence because SCOTUS also barred any and all use of evidence that Trump may have produced in an "official" capacity, even if that evidence bears significance on an unofficial act.  Even Amy Comey Barrett had to call bullshit on this: "The President has no authority over state legislatures or their leadership, so it is hard to see how prosecuting him for crimes committed when dealing with the Arizona House Speaker would unconstitutionally intrude on executive power."  Right, the President does not have any official responsibility or authority to remain in office so his efforts to do so should not fall under his official acts.  But it's all for show anyway because - pfffft - his motives are inadmissible in court.

Of course the biggest scandal of this all is exactly in what is never said.  Throughout this SCOTUS decision, none of these judges seem to have any interest or curiosity about that whole "fake elector" thing.  All of these pious pricks with their legally-steeped scrotes never think to themselves that maybe that scheme at the middle of all of this, maybe that might be the bigger constitutional issue here?  But nope, they're far more concerned with protecting a persecuted president than in protected the election integrity of our democracy.  That's the big takeaway.  And it isn't accidental.  The conservative SCOTES all said as much at the hearing back in April, letting us know that whatever they decide it was going to be absolutely free from the relevance of the facts of the case.

When Alito raised concerns about politicized prosecutors, Michael Dreeben, a lawyer on special counsel Jack Smith’s team, began to bring up the facts of Trump’s case. Alito pulled him back, insisting they keep their discussion in the “abstract.”

Neil Gorsuch: "Nobody knows what ‘corrupt intent’ means, we’ve been around that tree.  Maybe we’ll find out sometime soon.."

Samuel Alito: "I don’t want to dispute the particular application of that, of [Section] 371, conspiracy to defraud the United States, to the particular facts here, but would you not agree that that is a peculiarly open-ended statutory prohibition?"  "...as I said, I'm not discussing the particular facts of this case..."

Neil Gorsuch: "I'm not concerned about this case so much as future ones...I'm not concerned about this case, but I am concerned about future uses of the criminal law to target political opponents based on accusations about their motives."

Brett Kavanaugh: "I'm not focused on the here and now of this case. I'm very concerned about the future....I do not mean to suggest anything of the sort in the present case. I'm not talking about the present case. So I'm talking about the future."

Ostensibly, these justices were trying to make a ruling on the hypothetical of the vindictive and arbitrary prosecution of a president by his successor, rather than make a ruling directly relevant to the actual case before them, which could only possibly apply to their hypothetical if they ignore the actual facts of "this case" and just assume, for their own purposes, that this case was indeed a vindictive and arbitrary prosecution.  (And I assume at least two or three of them might sincerely believe that.)  But in so doing, by ignoring the "here and now" case before them, and its tangible merits, they've in fact prejudiced the case and turned it into exactly what they claimed to have been trying to prevent.  And I don't think this was some kind of an accident, I think they're deliberately trying to obfuscate their tracks for what they've actually accomplished.

Samuel Alito: If an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?

By granting the President exclusive authority and absolute discretion to decide which crimes to investigate and prosecute at the Department of Justice, SCOTUS has all but guaranteed this cycle of legal vengence.  The question I have to ask is, "Do they believe that it'll stop after Trump?"  If so, it'll probably because there won't be another election.




 

I'm officially freaked out. This has me pacing and doomscrolling. Where is the follow–up? We wait for the lower court to clarify official duties? That seems like a murky errand by design. So now it's this lower court's discretion to outline the details of a president's job description? 
I'm not ok.