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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This would be obvious to anyone but SSAT

I am, of course, not a lawyer nor am I familiar with how criminal trials are scheduled by courts but I would be surprised if judges feel obliged to schedule them around the convenience of the defendant. Hence the ruling by judge Tanya Chutkan that she will not take into account the serial sex abuser Donald Trump’s (SSAT) political calendar when scheduling his trial that special counsel Jack Smith has requested for January 2, 2024 was to be expected. She also issued restrictions on what he can say about the case.

The federal judge presiding over Donald Trump’s 2020 election subversion case on Friday warned inflammatory remarks from the former president would push her to schedule the trial sooner, saying she would take every step to safeguard the integrity of proceedings and to avoid tainting the potential jury pool.
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Broadly speaking, Chutkan ruled that Trump was free to share “non-sensitive materials” as designated by prosecutors, but narrowed the scope so closely that it could ultimately amount to only a pyrrhic victory. Chutkan also ended up rejecting the majority of Trump’s other requests.

The judge repeatedly emphasized that she would not take into account Trump’s presidential campaign, telling Trump’s lead lawyer John Lauro that the former president’s free speech rights were not absolute and that they came second to the fact that he is now a criminal defendant.

“What the effects of my order are on a political campaign are not going to influence my decision. This is a criminal trial,” Chutkan said. “The defendant’s desire to conduct a campaign, to respond to political opponents, has to yield.”

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Some good news about the Sackler bankruptcy case

The Sackler family are a really odious bunch, making enormous amounts of money by having their company Purdue Pharmaceuticals aggressively push the opioid OxyContin that their company made and providing all manner of inducements to doctors to overprescribe them, resulting in the massive opioid drug addiction problem that exists right now in the US. They then posed as philanthropists, giving money to various institutions and having their names plastered all over various buildings in universities and museums and galleries. I have written about the actions of this disgusting family many, many times.

The law finally caught up with them and they were sued and the company subjected to massive fines. But even then, they exploited the bankruptcy laws to shift the burden to the company after siphoning off money to them personally while not having to admit guilt, and getting total immunity from future lawsuits that will leave their personal fortunes intact. They did this by making sure that their bankruptcy case was heard by a bankruptcy judge who is notorious for letting wealthy people off easily.
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SSAT puts RNC in an embarrassing position

The first Republican debate between the candidates vying for the party’s presidential nomination is on August 23rd, less than two weeks away. The Republican National Committee (RNC) that is sponsoring the debates has laid down certain conditions that prospective participants must meet in terms of polling numbers, fundraising, and number of donors. It appears that in addition to serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT), Chris Christie, Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott, Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy and Doug Burgum have already met the threshold.

SSAT has been playing coy about whether he would take part in the debate at all, seeing no upside in allowing those who are polling much lower than him a chance to look like his equal on the debate stage.

Although Trump — who remains the Republican frontrunner by a wide margin — has repeatedly suggested that he might not attend the primary debate, he said Wednesday that he had not “totally ruled it out.”

“I’d like to do it,” Trump said. “I’ve actually gotten very good marks on debating talents. But you want to be, you know, they want a smart president. They want somebody that’s going to be smart. So we have to do the smart thing.”

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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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