Not the greatest idea in counter-programming

Serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) seems to take great pleasure in tormenting the Republican party, the very organization that he seeks to become the presidential nominee of. He refuses to commit to attending the first Republican National Committee (RNC) debate debate among the primary contenders to he held this coming Wednesday the 23rd from 9:00pm-11:00pm Eastern time on Fox News or whether, if he does decide to take part, whether he will sign the pledge to support the eventual nominee, whoever that is. At present, eight people have met the donor and polls threshold (Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Doug Burgum, SSAT, Mike Pence, and Chris Christie) and only the first five have signed the pledge. Late news has businessman Perry Johnson (who?) also qualifying for the debate.

It is clear that SSAT has nothing but contempt for the GOP as am independent political entity and thinks that he, as an individual, is the only one that matters and that the GOP’s role is to merely support him. He may well be right in that judgment.

There has been speculation that he will skip the debate but since he is loath to give up the spotlight, yesterday comes reports that he may agree to an interview with Tucker Carlson at the same time as the debate, as a form of counter-programming. Typically, he just drops this as a possibility, not really committing to it, and is likely to be ambivalent right up until almost the last moment, thus keeping everyone off-balance.
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The violence to come

As serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) becomes increasingly embroiled in legal troubles, he is lashing out more and more at the prosecutors who have brought indictments against him, the witnesses who have testified or will testify in the cases, and the judges overseeing the cases. It is therefore not surprising that some of his cult followers will see his rants as a call to take up arms on his behalf, such as this woman.

A Texas woman has been arrested and charged with threatening to kill the federal judge overseeing the criminal case against the former US president Donald Trump in Washington DC, and a member of Congress.

Abigail Jo Shry of Alvin, Texas, called the federal courthouse in Washington DC and left the threatening message, using a racist term for the US district judge Tanya Chutkan, on 5 August, court records allege. Investigators traced her phone number and she later admitted to making the threatening call, according to a criminal complaint.

In the call, Shry told told the judge, who is overseeing the election conspiracy case against Trump: “You are in our sights, we want to kill you,” according to the documents. Prosecutors allege Shry also said: “If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you.” She also threatened to kill Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat representative running for mayor of Houston, according to court documents.

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Coincidences happen all the time

I had been trying for a couple of days to remember the first name of someone I knew but had not met for a while and it had slipped my mind. I find it frustrating when something is on the periphery of my brain but I cannot quite haul it in. The name I was seeking was Shira, which is not a common one. Then I got an email from one of the many advocacy mailing lists that send me stuff and the first name of the sender was Shira. If I were one of those people who think that there is some grand cosmic plan at work and that there are messages revealing its secret workings that could be decoded, I might have thought that this coincidence had some secret meaning, though the only one I could come with was that the universe felt it was important for me to recall the name.

Of course, I dismissed this as just a coincidence but some people tend to be impressed when, for example, they dream about someone they had not been in contact with for a long time and then they hear from them or learned that they had died. There is a tendency to give enormous weightage to events of this sort, seeing them as premonitions.
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Georgia on his mind?

Keeping score of all the criminal charges against serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) is not easy because there are so many of them. As of now, he has been indicted in four different jurisdictions (Washington DC, Manhattan, Miami, and Atlanta) by three different prosecutors (Jack Smith, Alvin Bragg, and Fani Willis) for a total of 91 criminal counts. SSAT has managed to evade consequences for his actions for all his life, mainly by lying, not putting down anything is writing, using verbal commands to get other people to do his bidding, and then buying their silence or threatening them.

But it seems unlikely that SSAT can sweep the board and be acquitted on all the 91 charges and he faces the real threat of going to prison. His best bet is to try and win back the presidency. If he does so, he can use the presidential pardon process to try to pardon himself. Whether he can do so is an untested issue and will surely be challenged in the courts. But even if it is found that he can, that can only be done for the federal offenses that have been brought by Smith. What he is more likely to do if he becomes president is to order his attorney general to drop the federal cases and you can be sure that he will only appoint an AG who will agree in advance to do that. That and any self-pardon should be impeachable offenses but the unprincipled Republicans in congress will do no such thing.
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Camping

In the comic strip Pearls Before Swine, Rat is the most unpleasant character, someone who is rude, self-centered, and cynical. So it is disturbing how often I find myself agreeing with him.

(Pearls Before Swine)

Actually, I did go camping once. Just after we completed college, a group of a dozen friends spent a week on a beautiful, isolated stretch of beach in Sri Lanka. I had a lot of fun but part of the enjoyment for me was the novelty. Now it is a case of ‘been there, done that’ with no desire to repeat that experience, though some of my friends on that trip continued to enjoy going camping all their lives.

Trump and 18 others indicted in Georgia

Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton county Georgia, has released the indictments issued by a grand jury against serial sexual abuser Donald Trump (SSAT). While the indictments had been long expected, I was startled by how wide and sweeping they were. In addition to SSAT, 18 others were indicted on 41 felony counts and Willis said that they would be tried together and were expected to voluntarily turn themselves in by Friday, August 25th at noon. She would like to hold the trial within six months. You can read the indictment here.

The named defendants are: SSAT, Rudolph Giuliani, John Eastman, Mark Meadows, Kenneth Chesebro, Jeffrey Clark, Jenna Ellis, Ray Stallings Smith III, Robert Cheeley, Michael a. Roman, David Shafer, Shawn Still, Stephen Lee, Harrison Floyd, Trevian c. Kutti, Sidney Powell, Cathleen Latham, Scott Hall, and Misty Hampton.

While eight of the names (SSAT, Giuliani, Eastman, Meadows, Chesebro, Clark, Ellis, Powell) are familiar to me, the rest are not. I suspect that they are members of the Georgia GOP. [UPDATE: This article has more on the people indicted.]

Every one of the defendants will be charged with one count of violating Georgia’s RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act that is usually used to go after organizied crime.

The act essentially allows prosecutors to link together different crimes committed by different people and bring criminal charges against a larger criminal enterprise. The law requires prosecutors to show the existence of a criminal enterprise that has committed at least two underlying crimes.

Prosecutors have long used the federal Rico act to go after the mafia. But Georgia’s version is even more expansive than the federal statute. It allows prosecutors in the state to bring racketeering charges if a defendant attempts or solicits a crime, even if they don’t bring charges for those crimes itself.

I expect that SSAT will be seething that he will be tried together with all the rest, including people who are relatively unknown, since he likely sees himself as special even when being charged with crimes. You can expect SSAT to go on a major rant in the coming days.

UPDATE:

This article has more on the people indicted as well as the others who are somehow involved.

DeSantis’s unforced errors

One of the notable things about the faltering campaign of Florida governor Ron DeSantis is that many of his problems have been self-inflicted, showing a lack of political skills.

It can be said to have started with him picking a fight with the Disney company that has resulted in them backing away from massive new investments in the state. DeSantis has shown himself willing to use the power of the state and a pliant legislature to attack a company for daring to criticize him, a move that has has alarmed the natural constituency of the Republican party which is big business.

The consequences of DeSantis’s actions are not limited to the Disney dispute. Florida’s political climate, characterized by controversial policies concerning LGBTQ rights and race, has led to a growing number of conventions and conferences avoiding the state altogether. At least five groups have canceled or moved their events out of Orange County and Fort Lauderdale over concerns about the state’s policies.

Florida’s tourism industry is displaying broader signs of decline, particularly in the Orlando area. The Orange County comptroller’s office reported a 6.7% decrease in tourist development tax collections for May compared to the previous year, marking the second consecutive decrease since February 2021.

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The book banning craze

We are now going through a period where right wingers are demanding that any books that might ‘disturb’ the sensitivities of children (i.e., introduce them to any ideas that they will not encounter in their homes) be removed from public and school libraries and are threatening to cut their budgets and even violence against librarians and library board members that do not immediately accede to their demands, accusing them of being pedophiles and groomers. The target of their ire is mainly books that have any LGBTQ+ themes, although. some have extended their scope to deal with books that deal with racism. They are aided in their quest by some conservative state governments who seek to pander to extremist religious constituents.
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The rise and fall of neoliberalism

The term ‘neoliberal’ is used quite a lot these days (including by me), usually in a pejorative sense but like all umbrella political and economic labels, its boundaries that determine what falls under the umbrella and what does not, are a little fuzzy. In a review of the new book The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Louis Menand traces the history of the neoliberal ideology and movement, in an essay that has the same title as this post.

What’s “neo” about neoliberalism is really what’s retro about it. It’s confusing, because in the nineteen-thirties the term “liberal” was appropriated by politicians such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and came to stand for policy packages like the New Deal and, later on, the Great Society. Liberals were people who believed in using government to regulate business and to provide public goods—education, housing, dams and highways, retirement pensions, medical care, welfare, and so on. And they thought collective bargaining would insure that workers could afford the goods the economy was producing.

Those mid-century liberals were not opposed to capitalism and private enterprise. On the contrary, they thought that government programs and strong labor unions made capitalist economies more productive and more equitable. They wanted to save capitalism from its own failures and excesses. Today, we call these people progressives. (Those on the right call them Communists.)

Neoliberalism, in the American context, can be understood as a reaction against mid-century liberalism. Neoliberals think that the state should play a smaller role in managing the economy and meeting public needs, and they oppose obstacles to the free exchange of goods and labor. Their liberalism is, sometimes self-consciously, a throwback to the “classical liberalism” that they associate with Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill: laissez-faire capitalism and individual liberties. Hence, retro-liberalism.
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