Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
The conventional political wisdom seems to have gelled as far as the 2024 presidential elections are concerned. It says that serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) will win the Republican nomination but lose to Joe Biden in the general election. If by some chance SSAT drops out of the race (and the only thing that I think of that might cause that to happen is if he dies or is otherwise incapacitated), then whoever takes the nomination has a better chance of defeating Biden. The problem is that if one looks at past elections, conventional wisdom this far out from the election has proven to be extremely unreliable as a predictor of winners and losers.
But what the election is going to be about in terms of policies is a little easier to predict. SSAT seems to be running on a platform of personal grievance, that he is an utterly wronged man who deserves to be elected as president so that he can wreak vengeance on everyone who has worked against him, which by now is a pretty comprehensive list of federal and state governments, the justice system, and those within and outside the Republican party who have had the temerity to criticize him.
His recent speeches following his arraignment on federal charges painted a very dark picture of the state of the country and warned that if he loses in 2024, the country will be destroyed and taken over by evil forces. He paints himself as a messiah, the only one who can save the country. His competitors for the nomination have had no choice but to echo his alarmism but distinguish themselves from him by claiming that he is going to lose and that they have a better chance of winning and saving the country.
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While I am generally optimistic about humanity’s capacity to do the right thing in general and over long time scales, one thing that I have been disillusioned by over shorter time scales is how people who have been subjected to discrimination and persecution when they are are in the minority, discriminate against other minorities when they gain political power. You would think that their own experience of being treated badly would make them feel empathy for other discriminated minority groups. But not so. One sees this switching from being the victim of discrimination to the perpetrators in many different contexts, be it religion, ethnicity, or nationality.
One recent example is that of the city of Hamtramck, Michigan where Muslims, who are often discriminated against in the US, became the dominant group in the city council. Now they have turned against the LGBTQ+ community, banning the pride flag on city properties.
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Boris Johnson resigned from the UK parliament before the release of a report that would say that he had violated norms by lying to the House of Commons. Such an action would trigger a 90-day suspension and Johnson clearly did not want to face that ignominy so he quit.
Boris Johnson deliberately misled parliament over Partygate and was part of a campaign to abuse and intimidate MPs investigating him, a long-awaited report by the privileges committee has found.
In an unprecedented move, the cross-party group said he “closed his mind to the truth” and would have faced a 90-day suspension from the Commons had he not quit in rage at its conclusions last week.
Johnson was also found to have knowingly misled the committee itself, breached Commons rules by partially leaking its findings last Friday, and undermined the democratic processes of parliament.
As a result, it was recommended Johnson be banned from getting the pass granted to ex-MPs that allows them privileged access to the Westminster estate.
Johnson was originally set to face a suspension from parliament of 20 days – enough to trigger a recall petition that would have probably led to a byelection. But the committee said his blistering attempts to intimidate it last Friday would have increased the punishment to 90 days.
Two MPs on the committee – one Labour and the other from the SNP – had pushed for Johnson to be expelled from parliament. But the final report and punishment was signed off unanimously by all seven members.
That wonderful actor has died. She had a striking presence on screen and was a consistent voice for progressive causes, and served as a member of the British parliament from 1992 until 2015, after which she went back to the stage to appear as King Lear in 2016.
Sir Michael Caine has described actress and former MP Glenda Jackson as “one of our greatest movie actresses” following her death aged 87.
Jackson won two Oscars, three Emmys, two Baftas and an Tony in an acting career which spanned six decades.
Sir Jonathan Pryce said he believed she was “the greatest actor that this country has ever produced”.
Back in 2018, I posted a clip of her delivering a blistering attack in parliament on Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism when Thatcher died. Not for her the bogus pieties that people feel obliged to give to awful people when they die. A conservative lawmaker tried to get her censured for attacking Thatcher instead of paying a tribute but the Speaker shot that down.
Serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) was arraigned yesterday in Miami and pleaded not guilty on all counts. His valet Waltine Nauta was present but did not have a local attorney and so did not enter a plea and will do so June 27. While SSAT sat and scowled during the proceedings, Nauta apparently looked confused. No tentative date was set for SSAT’s trial, maybe because his codefendant Nauta could not enter a plea.
In federal criminal cases, the defendant has a right to a speedy trial within 70 days of entering a plea. But the defendant can waive that right and the trial can be much later. It is expected that SSAT and his lawyers will try and drag this out as long as they can with all manner of procedural motions so that it does not occur before the elections. If SSAT wins the presidency, he can order the justice department to drop the case and even pardon himself. This would be an incredible misuse of presidential power but when has that stopped SSAT? While his devoted supporters keep saying that the justice department has been weaponized against him and that what is happening to him is making the US look like a banana republic, it has always been the case that SSAT is the one who had made a mockery of many of the institutions that constitute a functioning democracy.
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Boris Johnson, who was forced resign as prime minister in July 2022, has now also resigned from his position as a member of parliament, ahead of the release of what was expected to be a critical report from a parliamentary committee that he violated his own government’s covid-19 protocols by attending parties and then misled parliament about it, something that come to be called, inevitably, ‘partygate’.
His resignation statement was long and angry and very Trump-like, loudly proclaiming his innocence and claiming that he was wronged by his enemies and the target of a witch hunt by those opposed to his vision for the UK and angry about his role in championing Brexit.
Since leaving the prime minister’s office, he has been at best a lackluster backbencher, voting just four times since then, choosing instead to spend his time giving lucrative speeches.
Along with his resignation, two close allies of his also resigned as MPs. One was Nadine Dorries, seemingly over some inside-baseball stuff about her being nominated for a peerage by Johnson and then having it withdrawn, and Nigel Adams. This means that there will be three by-elections in Conservative-held districts within a short time, giving the first major test of how the government of Rishi Sunak is viewed by the public. Currently they are behind Labour in the polls. General elections have to be held by January 28, 2025 at the latest.
If the Conservatives take a beating at the next general election, Johnson might try to make a comeback as party leader and prime minister, using the fact that he lead the party to a huge 80-seat majority at the last general election in 2019.
I think it is safe to say that before yesterday, very few people apart from his immediate circle had heard the name Waltine Nauta. Then he was named alongside serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) in the 38-count federal criminal indictment that special prosecutor Jack Smith unsealed yesterday and now faces a raft of serious charges for essentially being an accomplice in SSAT’s mishandling of classified documents.
The 40-year old Nauta is described as a personal aide or valet to SSAT, a sort of Jeeves to SSAT’s Bertie Wooster. This brief biography says that he is from Guam and served in the navy and worked as a cook at the White House before he became an aide to SSAT when he was president and then stayed with hm when SSAT returned to private life.
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The indictment against serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) and his personal aide Waltine Nauta have been unsealed and can be read here. It is far more wide-ranging than I anticipated. The indictment describes how sloppy SSAT was with the documents, including for a time having boxes of them on the stage of one of the ballrooms at Mar-a-Lago, in a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room, and showing documents to others who had no security clearance, and moving some of them to the Bedminster golf club in New Jersey when he went there.
The indictment consists of 37 felony counts but 31 of them are the same charge but related to different individual documents, leaving just seven distinct categories.
31 of those counts are for “Willful Retention of National Defense Information” and each relate to individual documents that are at issue. (p. 28-33)
#32 is for “Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice” and deals with a conspiracy by SSAT and Nauta to obstruct justice by keeping “classified he had taken with him from the White House and to hide and conceal them from a federal grand jury (p. 34)
#33 is for “Withholding a Document or Record” and describes how the two of them misled one of their attorneys by hiding documents from him so that he would make false statements to the grand jury. (p. 36)
#34 is for “Corruptly Concealing a Document or Record” by hiding boxes from the attorney so that he would not find them and give them to a grand jury. (p. 37)
#35 is for “Concealing a Document in a Federal Investigation”. (p. 38)
#36 is a “Scheme to Conceal”. (p. 39)
#37 is for “False Statement and Representations” with SSAT hiding information. from his own attorney causing his attorney to make false statements to the grand jury that all requests for documents had been complied with. (p. 40)
#38 is against Nauta for lying to the FBI about his knowledge about the boxes and what had been done with them.
It is clear from the indictment that this was not a case of SSAT haphazardly packing up boxes of stuff at the last minute when he was forced to leave the White House on January 20, 2021 and possibly accidentally taking classified documents among them. It is clear that he really wanted these documents and was willing to go to great lengths, even lying to the authorities and hiding them from his own lawyers, to hang on to some of them. The indictment did not speculate on the motives for doing so.
What a stupid, stupid, man.
Serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) has now been indicted on criminal charges for the second time. The first time was a few months ago in Manhattan on state charges related to his paying hush money to porn stars. This time it is on federal charges in Florida relating to his withholding of classified documents after he left the presidency. He is expected to turn himself in in a Miami federal courthouse on Tuesday where the indictment will be unsealed and he will be formally charged. SSAT’s lawyer has said there are seven criminal counts including violations of the Espionage Act, obstruction of justice and conspiracy. He will of course plead not guilty but by all accounts the case against him this time is stronger than the earlier one.
The main danger for SSAT in this case is the charge that he willfully withheld classified documents even when asked for them, thus triggering prosecution under the Espionage Act, which is pretty serious. If he had readily handed them over when they were found (as Mike Pence and Joe Biden did), then he would likely not have been charged. There is evidence that he knew that he had classified documents in his possession and yet did not hand them over when asked to do so. For some reason that I still cannot fathom, SSAT wanted to keep these documents even after leaving office. SSAT’s motivations are mostly grifting and narcissism but it is not clear where those fit in in this case.
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