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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Trump did not learn the lessons of Watergate

As we await what seems to be the inevitable new indictment of serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT), this time on concerning involvement in the January 6, 2021 riot, another major development is that Special Counsel Jack Smith has filed an update to the indictment filed earlier on SSAT’s treatment of confidential documents at Mar-a-Lago. One additional charge is that they now seem to have the Top Secret document that SSAT was waving around in front of people who did not have the security clearance to read it.

“Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this,” Trump says at one point, according to the transcript. “This was done by the military and given to me.” …

“Well, with Milley – uh, let me see that, I’ll show you an example. He said that I wanted to attack Iran. Isn’t that amazing? I have a big pile of papers, this thing just came up. Look. This was him,” Trump says, according to the transcript. “They presented me this – this is off the record, but – they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him. We looked at some. This was him. This wasn’t done by me, this was him.”

Trump continues: “All sorts of stuff – pages long, look. Wait a minute, let’s see here. I just found, isn’t that amazing? This totally wins my case, you know. Except it is like, highly confidential. Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this.”

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Burning religious books

Over in Sweden, a storm has been brewing over the public burnings of the Koran and the Torah.

Sweden is once again caught in the political crosshairs over its decision to greenlight burnings of the Quran and Torah in Stockholm. Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said this week that far-right figures have filed more requests for Quran-burning protests with the police, and he is “extremely worried” about what could happen as a result.

Sweden, as well as neighboring Denmark, have allowed the protests to take place in recent months, sparking criticism, counterprotests, and diplomatic blowback from several majority-Muslim nations. We’ve curated reporting and insights about the latest developments.

The reason the protests have been allowed to proceed: Sweden “has one of the world’s strongest legal protections for freedom of expression” and cannot ban protests unless they are a threat to public safety, Marten Schultz, law professor at Stockholm University, told the BBC. Experts determined that the burnings targeted a text instead of individuals. The freedom of speech right dates back to 1766 and is seen as a “fundamental value” in Swedish culture, Schultz said.

Swedish officials have condemned the Quran burnings, and said this week that the country is the target of a disinformation campaign led by “Russia-backed actors” trying to imply that Sweden is behind the protests. Sweden’s national security service said the incidents have changed the world’s view of Sweden, “from a tolerant country to a country hostile to Islam and Muslims.” — The Guardian
Sweden also recently approved a request for a 50-year-old woman to burn a copy of the Torah, the sacred Jewish text, outside the Israeli embassy in Stockholm. Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said he warned his Swedish counterpart that the demonstration could worsen the two countries’ relationship. Jewish community leaders in Israel said the burning shouldn’t qualify for freedom of expression protections. — The Times of Israel

One wonders if there is going to be an escalation of this, with the sacred texts of many religions going up in smoke as each side retaliates..

I am not a fan of burning any book, religious or otherwise, but would not be up in arms over it. since such gestures are usually futile and have only a transient effect. But for some religious people, defense of their texts is seen as a duty that can only be satisfied with violence.

I always wonder why such people do not leave it up to their gods to take appropriate retaliatory action. If the gods are deeply offended by the burning of the books they supposedly gave to their followers, surely they would not just stand by hoping that some of their worshippers would rise up on their behalf. The fact that they never do anything seems to me that they do not care either.

Or maybe they do not exist.

Extra-terrestrials are obviously English speakers

Given all the depressing news in the world right now, it is refreshing to read about things that are really silly but taken seriously by people who should know better, like the members of Congress. I am referring of course to the hearings on so-called Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). On the surface is nothing remarkable about things in the sky that we have not as yet identified. But they have become identified in the minds of true believers with visitations by extra-terrestrials. Furthermore these people are convinced that the US government knows about these things but is hiding it from us.
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Weird Musk’s weird obsession with X

Twitter owner Elon Musk has abruptly renamed the company as simply X. He had earlier named his first company X.com. Jill Lepore writes that Musk has long had a fascination with this particular letter, that can be traced back to his father and grandfather who were leaders of a so-called Technocracy movement and called themselves Technocrats and “believed that only engineers and scientists could save the world from a looming catastrophe.”

Technocrats objected to politicians and economists, democracy, and socialism. They wanted an end to all banks. In the future that Technocrats including Musk’s grandfather were planning for,“There will be no place for Politics or Politicians, Finance or Financiers, Rackets or Racketeers. There would also be no place for personal names. One technocrat, for instance, renamed himself 1x1809x56. Musk named one of his sons X Æ A-12—X, for short.

Why name a baby X Æ A-12, something that is going to result in the child being tormented by their peers and likely require years of therapy as an adult? This whole business of parents trying to give their children weird names to make some ideological point seems to be sheer vanity, seeing the child as a vehicle for their own obsessions and ignoring their needs. I am really glad that my parents gave me an utterly common name. As least it is common in Sri Lanka though, because it is simple enough, it is only a little exotic now that I am in the US.

But Musk has big plans for the company that he now has renamed X, seeing it as the precursor to an ‘everything app’, whatever the hell that is.

X, Musk promises, will be the “everything app.” X is the Technocrats’ dream deferred, a way to engineer society, the economy, and politics. Extreme capitalism—Muskism—as the answer to existential risk. With any luck, it will be a disaster.

I hope so too.