The DeSantis wave that wasn’t

It has been quite extraordinary to see the conventional wisdom shift so rapidly, from seeing Florida governor Ron DeSantis as the potential slayer of serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) for the Republican nomination for president to being effectively roadkill, with vultures in the form of all his other rivals for the Republican nomination hovering around, ready to pick at the carcass of his dying campaign. Not a day passes without yet another analysis of where it went all wrong for him, like this recent deep dive.

I never bought into the early DeSantis hype, mainly because I thought that he would not be able to thread the needle of weaning away Trump supporters to his cause by avoiding criticizing him for all his weaknesses and claiming that with him they could have all the Trumpism with none of the other baggage that had resulted in SSAT losing the 2020 election and his candidates faring so poorly in the 2018 and 2022 mid-terms. He pointed to his sweeping victory in the Florida governor’s race in 2022 as evidence that he was a winner who could break the Republicans’ losing streak.
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Republican effort to defeat abortion rights fails spectacularly in Ohio

Yesterday saw a result in Ohio that must give the Republican party the shakes.

We know that Republicans do not represent the majority of people on a whole host of issues. As. a result they have resorted to various measures to advance their agenda even though they are a minority. One means is of course gerrymandering. Whenever they have a majority in state legislatures, they draw electoral maps to ensure that the number of seats they have in state and federal bodies are far greater than the proportion of votes for them would justify. Another is to use all manner of methods to discourage, mislead, and disenfranchise any group of voters that they think might vote Democratic. And of course, we have the two Senators per state provision in the US constitution that has resulted in Republicans having a far greater representation in that body than they deserve, because states with small rural populations tend to vote Republican and they get the same number of Senate seats as states with massively larger populations.

As a result, those who have been sidelined by these measures, knowing that they have a majority on their side on many issues, have started using ballot initiatives to thwart these anti-democratic structural impediments. This has caused alarm in Republican circles and Ohio just saw an effort to thwart these ballot initiatives.
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The man who boasts of being a winner keeps losing

After losing his defamation case against E. Jean Carroll after he sexually abused her, serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT), in his usual vindictive manner, turned around and countersued her for defamation because in her post-case interviews, she spoke of being raped by SSAT.

Yesterday the judge overseeing the case threw out SSAT’s case even without letting it go to trial. His opinion is interesting as he explains that although the jury in the defamation case brought by Carroll did not find SSAT guilty of rape, that was because of the narrow way that rape is defined in the New York Penal Code, which is different from the way that is popularly understood.

The judge further added:

Dismissing the counterclaim, a judge in New York, Lewis A Kaplan, said that when Carroll repeated her allegation that Trump raped her, her words were “substantially true”. Kaplan also set out in detail why it may be said that Trump raped Carroll.
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“As the court explained in its recent decision denying Mr Trump’s motion for a new trial on damages and other relief [in the New York case] … based on all of the evidence at trial and the jury’s verdict as a whole, the jury’s finding that Mr Trump ‘sexually abused’ Ms Carroll implicitly determined that he forcibly penetrated her digitally – in other words, that Mr Trump in fact did ‘rape’ Ms Carroll as that term commonly is used and understood in contexts outside of the New York penal law.”

The next case brought by Carroll against SSAT goes to trial on January 15th, 2024.

Trial in the federal case is scheduled for 15 January, close to the start of the Republican primary as well as other court cases in which Trump is embroiled.

Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s lawyer, said she was pleased with Judge Kaplan’s decision, and predicted the January trial “shouldn’t take very long to complete”.

Alina Habba, a lawyer for Trump, said: “We strongly disagree with the flawed decision and will be filing an appeal shortly.”

SSAT has had an unbroken streak of legal losses. When SSAT promised his followers that they would get tired of winning, he probably did not intend it to be ‘wins’ like this.

Trump showing signs of desperation

There are increasing signs of SSAT’s desperation as he feels the legal walls closing around him. For example, he still hasn’t figured out former speaker Nancy Pelosi and keeps falling into her traps. She said he look like a ‘scared puppy’ when he arrived for his arraignment in court last week to answer charges arising from the events of January 6th 2021 and his attempts to overturn the election. It was a minor dig that was picked up by a few media and would have soon disappeared but she knew that the thin-skinned SAT would never let an insult, however small, go without a response and that he would react with anger, thus making it a bigger news story than it deserved.

And sure enough, the next day he raged at her on his social media site Truth Social.

You know that irony is dead when you have SSAT accusing someone else of saying ‘mean’ things.

Since Truth Social is read mostly by his followers who likely never heard Pelosi’s comment since I doubt that rightwing media gave it much play, SSAT has now made them also aware of it.
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Trump’s free speech defense is unlikely to succeed

It seems clear that serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) lawyers are going to make a free speech defense in his trial for his role in the January 6th riot and efforts to overturn the election, arguing that all he did was talk and that others were the ones who did things. But legal experts say that that will not wash.

“The indictment very carefully ties the words of Trump and others to actions that show that Trump and others said the things they said with the intent to carry out criminal activity,” [former federal prosecutor Christine] Adams said. “Notwithstanding the First Amendment, people are charged all the time with crimes based on their statements to others for example if they’re involved with a Ponzi scheme, if the government can establish the requisite criminal intent in making those statements.”
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“This isn’t a reasonable argument, and it won’t fly in any court of law,” Anthony Michael Kreis, a Georgia State University law professor, told Salon.”The speech at the heart of the indictment informs the underlying criminal conspiracy and the indictment outlines conduct that was undertaken in furtherance of that conspiracy. The argument is without merit.”

Kreis pointed to the example of a person joking about robbing banks, which would be protected free speech since it lacks criminal intent. He added that a person can even explain why it should be lawful to rob banks or praise bank robbers, and that is protected political speech. 

“However, a person cannot walk into a bank and say, ‘stick ’em up,’ and then cling to the First Amendment’s protections nor can two people plan to rob a bank and then claim they were just engaged in constitutionally protected thought,” Kreis said. 

Adanté Pointer, an Oakland civil rights attorney, said that while everyone has a Constitutional right to express their opinions, you cross the line from “constitutionally-protected speech to criminal conduct” when your motive and intent are in furtherance of a criminal conspiracy.

“Things changed when he weaponized his baseless statements to promote lawless activity, to present false evidence to the courts, and to recruit and direct fake electors and other co-conspirators to carry out the fraud,” Pointer said. 

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How the mighty have fallen

Serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) Trump is that curious creature, an insecure narcissist. As a narcissist, he has an inflated view of himself, but because he is insecure, he needs to have his self-image constantly reinforced by others. That works for him when he is in a bubble of sycophants and adoring cult followers but that bubble gets pricked when he steps out into the real world.

Such was the case when he arrived for his arraignment in a courthouse in Washington DC on Thursday to be subjected to the little indignities that most of us would barely notice, as this article describes.

The shock of blond-grey hair was familiar. So was the blue suit, white shirt and red tie. So was the conspicuously assertive tug of the suit jacket.

But the Donald Trump who walked into courtroom 22 on Thursday was a Trump that the public never sees – meek, shrunken, stripped of bravado and any sense of control. And, quite possibly, scared.
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Great moments in policing

One of the common measures used to identify racial profiling by police is to look at the data about which drivers are more likely to be pulled over by police. Over and over again, we find that Black people are found to be far more likely to be stopped and ticketed over one pretext or another than white people.

State troopers in Connecticut found a novel way to demonstrate that they did not racially profile. What they did was to enter in a large number of fake tickets to white people into their databases to eliminate any differentials. No white people were actually ticketed.

Governor Ned Lamont said an investigation was being launched after a damning new audit found there is a “high likelihood” hundreds of Connecticut State Police troopers collectively falsified tens of thousands traffic ticket records over much of the past decade.

The findings, presented at a public meeting Wednesday, allege systemic violations of state law and that the misreporting skewed racial profiling data making it appear troopers ticketed more white drivers and fewer minority motorists than they really did.
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The report found there was a “high likelihood” at least 25,966 tickets were falsified between 2014 and 2021. Another 32,587 records over those years showed significant inaccuracies and auditors believe many of those are likely to be false as well.

The auditors emphasized their analysis was extremely conservative, and “the number of falsified records is likely larger than we confidently identified.”

The findings showed significant numbers of false and inaccurate tickets were submitted by up to nearly one quarter of the 1,301 troopers who wrote tickets for the state’s largest law enforcement agency during those years.

An inquiry has been launched.

The quiet death of the incandescent light bulb

On August 1st, the incandescent light bulb finally went away and hardly anyone noticed or said anything. Although you can still use them if you have them, it is illegal to manufacture or import or sell them. It is hard to remember that the proposal to do away with these bulbs created right wing outrage that the government was trying to eliminate people’s freedom of choice, even though its initial replacement of halogen bulbs and now LED bulbs are far more energy efficient. Neither the incandescents nor the halogens meet the strict new energy efficiency standards.

Incandescent bulbs create illumination by running an electric current through a filament that heats it until it glows. Edison’s first practical light bulb used a carbonized cotton thread for that purpose; modern bulbs use tungsten filaments in an inert gas.

But incandescents are not very efficient. Only roughly 5% of the energy used by an incandescent bulb produces light; the remaining 95% or so is lost as heat. This is why you let an incandescent bulb cool off before unscrewing it.

They also burn out frequently, requiring replacement roughly every year.

The light-emitting components in LED bulbs, by contrast, are manufactured via the same process used to make computer chips, which makes them extremely efficient. They generate almost no heat and use up to 90% less energy than incandescent bulbs while lasting up to 25 times longer, according to the Energy Department.

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The next Trump indictment drops

Special Counsel Jack Smith issued his second indictment of serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) yesterday alleging four counts: conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding; and conspiracy against rights. You can read the 45-page document here. It makes for gripping reading.

Here is a clip of Smith’s brief statement lasting less than three minutes when announcing the indictment. He did not take any questions.

The document also alleges six unnamed co-conspirators but from the descriptions of their behavior, it should not be that hard to figure out who they are, and five have already been identified in media reports as Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, John Eastman, Ken Chesebro as well as the former US justice department official Jeff Clark. It is not clear if they will be indicted separately, but it is likely that they will at some point since they were very active in supporting SSAT’s absurd claims that he won the 2020 election and formed essential components of the conspiracy. Smith said in his statement that investigations into other people are continuing.
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Good luck with that, Mitt!

As the Republican race for the nomination proceeds and serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) maintains his solid grip on the party’s voters, those Republicans who have wearied of SSAT and think that he will drag the party down again just like he did in 2018, 2020, and 2022 are starting to panic, especially as Ron DeSantis, their one-time hope to topple SSAT, seems to be floundering, There are fears within the party leadership that the crowded field of aspirants will enable SSAT to do what he did in 2016, to pick off each one until he is the last person standing. It is worse this time because he starts with a formidable lead.

This has led people like Mitt Romney to urge all the other candidates and donors to quickly coalesce around one person and for all the others to withdraw so that SSAT could be defeated. He did not specify which candidate should be the consensus one.

In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Romney, a Utah senator who was governor of Massachusetts before becoming the Republican nominee in 2012, said: “Despite Donald Trump’s apparent inevitability, a baker’s dozen [13] Republicans are hoping to become the party’s 2024 nominee for president.

“That is possible for any of them if the field narrows to a two-person race before Mr Trump has the nomination sewn up.

“For that to happen, Republican mega-donors and influencers – large and small – are going to have to do something they didn’t do in 2016: get candidates they support to agree to withdraw if and when their paths to the nomination are effectively closed.

“That decision day should be no later than, say, 26 February, the Monday following the contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.”

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