I read in my Apple News feed this morning that Donald Trump's lawyers argue that Trump's speech leading up to the January 6, 2020 assault on the national Capitol was protected under Amendment 1; and Trump actually believed the election was stolen, and thus he spoke in good faith and not with illegal intent thus he did nothing illegal; and the trial should be postponed until after the 2024 presidential election, because a trial during the campaign season will interfere with Trump's ability to campaign and will contaminate the 2024 election.
This former Alabama practicing attorney, who clerked for a United States District Judge that presided over ever criminal prosecution in north Alabama, laughs over the cause of the January 6 coup arguing he is innocent because he believed the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Even as I cringe, wondering how a Trump-packed U.S Supreme Court will rule on those arguments, and pondering the odds of the January 6 Prosecutor, and Prosectors in other Federal and State prosecutions against Trump) striking a jury that doesn't have a Trump sleeper agent on it.
Last night, I "accidentally" stumbled across this blast from the past, which I had posted at afoolsworneverends.blogspot.com.
Throughout yesterday evening, I watched TV clips of the memorial service for Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who was murdered in the January 6 Capitol riot. It was heart wrenching, a long precession of police officers saluting Brian Sicknick. President Biden and his wife paid their respects. I did not see Donald Trump and his wife.
I also watched many TV clips yesterday evening of Donald
Trump inciting his white mob on January 6, and what they then did. Mass insanity, demonic possession. Many police officers at risk, trying to stop the frenzied mob. Trying, but not succeeding.
I wondered how "law and order, protect the Constitution" Republicans, generally, and in Congress, would have responded if the insurgents were black, instead of white?
I wondered why Republicans, generally, and in Congress, are not every last one of them publicly denouncing Donald Trump and his mob for killing Police Officer Brian Sicknick? I thought the Republican Party had become the Cop Killer Party. Without remorse.
I wondered if the Senate's now Republican minority leader Mitch McConnell, after saying, “The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people," will vote to convict Trump for inciting insurrection? Or, will McConnell weasel? Because, he's a weasel. Because, he's incapable of putting America ahead of his political party? Because, he's afraid Trump will kill him politically? Because, he's afraid Trump loonies will kill him, knowing that's what Trump wants them to do?
I wondered how many Republicans, generally, and in Congress, are in Mitch McConnell's predicament?
I wondered how many Republicans, generally, and in Congress, love what Trump and his white insurgents did on January 6?
I thought all of them will hear about all of that when their roll is called up yonder.
Diane
Excellent. I wonder?
Sloan Bashinsky
I think all Republicans should wonder how God views their response to January 6.
I can imagine Republicans who might read the above thinking, or blasting me, for being a commie Demorat Instead of just sitting with what actually happened, provoked by their president. That I'm not a Democrat, and never was one, nor a Republican. Won't matter to them. If I wrote something like that, I have to be a commie Demorat. They are unable to spell RepubliKlan.
I wrote this to a Republican yesterday, who keeps sending me red propaganda.
"When the Democrats are in control, I beat up on them, when the Republicans are in control, I beat up on them, going back quite a few years; what I never see is the Democrats trying to get their own house in order, nor the Republicans trying to get their own house in order. And when in transition, I give both sides attention."
When Barack Obama was president, I wrote a lot about him, and very little about Republicans.
Mark Ebenhoch
Trump never even uttered the death. Even while sitting at the oval office. He's a POS human scumbag
Sloan Bashinsky
amen
Robert
I find ironic that all the Police murdered and injured by BLM and Antifa none were lionized like this officer. I guess it makes a difference who is accused of the crime.
Sloan Bashinsky
Your president ordered the taking of the Capitol, and that made a bit of a difference.
Robert
First, he was everyone's President. He never ordered anything. He told the crowd to make there voices heard by their elected representatives. He told them to be peaceful. The incursion in the Capitol started before he finished speaking. I have never liked Trump, but I do not like injustice. This is a travesty
Sloan Bashinsky
You must not watch TV.
Robert
Sloan Bashinsky, I always tune you in. Leaves little time for TV.
Sloan Bashinsky
TV News is where I watched videos of Trump himself ordering the mob to stop the steal and take back their country, and he was going with them, but he didn't go with them, it turned out.
Lee Ann
He definitely incited that fiasco. He is also responsible for the murders of the people that died. He needs to be held accountable. I looked, once again at his astrology, and it shows a soul propped up by privilege, and truly as his chart shows, born under some mighty lucky stars. His stars meet their waterloo in a demise that is rapid and dramatic, as exhibited now. Trump, as was Napoleon and Hitler, were potentially bright lights. Let me remind you, the brighter the light the deeper the shadow.
Sloan Bashinsky
My goodness, Lee Ann, you should start a weekly astrology TV report; didn't you, as a psychic counselor, once have your own TV talk show? You could get yourself, hmmm, burned at the stake?
Lee Ann
Yes, I was in three different shows but had one of my own.
Sloan Bashinsky
Are you able to do an astrology chart on the Republican Party? Or, is its astrology crystal clear. Its sun rose and set on Donald Trump. Its moon is Marjorie Taylor Green. Its rising sign is this photo:
Topics covered: American public school children should be protected from mass shooters by the American military and National Guards and members of The National Rifle Association; Women have a God-given unalienable right to use Mother Nature's Herbs to prevent and end pregnancy, which was common practice in Colonial America and Benjamin Franklin wrote a book about it; Suffering Elder Americans should have the same right as their beloved pets to be put down; The Resistance is as crucial in America today as it was in World War II Europe, to disturb the the Left and the Right; and to people who like what I say, please spread the word on other internet platforms and with news media.
Yesterday's launch post at this culture-jamming rag attracted a Joe Biden basher, and some discussion ensued, which I don't suppose the basher bargained for?
Alex Sloan how do you like your democrat president?
Sloan Bashinsky
Joe Biden is your president, too. If he’s the best the Dems have to offer, that’s tragic. On the other side is the American version of the Third Reich. I just a bit ago told a friend who voted twice for Obama, then twice for Trump, that the only way to drain the Swamp is nuke it.
Alex
I’m not claiming him. He is dishonest to the core and hates America. With all of Trumps baggage you can’t say he doesn’t love this country. You can say that about biden because it is the truth.
Sloan
I have a very good friend in his 50s, who is a U.S. Army Special Forces combat veteran. A Republican, who voted twice for Donald Trump. After the Jan 6 coup attempt, my friend told me, and I could quote him, that the people who assaulted the US Capitol on Jan 6 all should have been shot dead. But he did not say Donald Trump should have been shot dead.
Joe Biden thinks he loves America as much as Donald Turmp thinks he loves America. It looks to me that Donald Trump loves himself above all else, and since I was raised like Trump was raised, I recognize a sorry ass rich white spoiled country club brat when I see one.
In the law is the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur - the thing speaks for itself. The photos of Trump rallies and the Jan 6, 2021 coup attempt, and the Charlottesville Confederate monument removal protest showed oceans of white faces.
Born and raised in Birmingham, and having been a white supremacist myself at one time, I figure anyone with walking around sense knew when Trump kept saying the 2020 election was stolen, he meant, stolen by blacks
I beat Joe Biden up at a Democrat forum today, over Hunter. I could have beaten Joe up over lots more.
I posted that beating in a new blog I started just this morning, The Redneck Mystic Lawyer for President, on the Unicorn Ticket. Here's a link to that post.
Whether or not this new blog is a spoof, or for real, I leave for the beholder to decide.
Meanwhile, more Leftist propaganda😎-
The Hill
Republican Group Demands 'Consequences' For Trump In Scathing Fox News Ad
Ed Mazza
Updated Fri, August 4, 2023 at 6:21 AM CDT
A Republican group opposed to Donald Trump is launching a new ad campaign on Fox News that’s a lot different from the right-wing network’s programming right now.
“Trump told them to fight,” the on-screen text states as clips of Trump urging his supporters to “fight like hell” on Jan. 6 is spliced with footage of the mob doing exactly that at the Capitol.
“Trump did this. He’ll do it again,” the text states. “Unless he faces consequences.”
The organization said the video is part of a six-figure ad campaign to run on Fox News nationally, as well as in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin over the next week, including on “Hannity” and “Fox & Friends.”
Whether or not this new blog is a spoof, or for real, I leave for the beholder to decide. Something juicy happened yesterday, which seemed about as good as anything to kick off this blog and cause me yet again to wonder if the Democrats are a branch of the mythical Fukawi tribe, which is forever getting lost and gathering in a circle and sitting down and holding hands and closing their eyes and chanting, "Where the fuck are we? Where the fuck are we?"
On the Tragedy of Hunter Biden
His father, our president, is one of the main victims of his abuse
Though I am very aware that former President Trump has been indicted for the third time — in fact, if you want to hear my views on that and more analysis of the charges, I’ll point you to the episode of Serious Trouble I recorded last night with Ken White — today I have something for you on Hunter Biden.
Hunter Biden probably will be allowed to plead guilty to two counts of misdemeanor tax crimes, after the terms of his plea agreement get straightened out a little.
Whether or not Joe handled his son’s behavior as well as he should have — a matter I’ll discuss below — one thing that’s clear here is that one of Hunter’s many sins is causing a lot of political trouble for his father.
But that’s not the only trouble Hunter has caused Joe.
One of the most depressing aspects of the Hunter Biden saga is the emotional terrorism he has wrought on his family as they have struggled to keep him alive and sober. Here is one vignette from his memoir, as described by Time magazine:
There’s a too-brief scene late in Hunter Biden’s new memoir where Dr. Jill Biden tricks the crack-addled lawyer and consultant to come for dinner at the family home in Wilmington, Del. Upon walking through the door, Hunter sees the family gathered — along with counselors from one of the countless rehab facilities that pop up throughout his new memoir.
There is screaming and there are tears. Future President Joe Biden is described as terrified and pleading with his son. One of Hunter’s daughters takes his car keys away from him. He eventually agrees to his family’s plea to try another round of rehab, just not at the one they picked. He wants to go to one in Maryland. The family, after 15 years of rounds of rehab and relapse, agrees. Frantic phone calls follow and appointments are made for that evening. Hunter’s brother’s widow (and his ex-girlfriend) Hallie ferries him to the front gates. Once she drives away, Hunter summons an Uber, checks into a hotel near BWI, smokes the crack he had hidden in his bag and flies to Los Angeles for yet another bender.
The bit about Hunter’s brother’s widow also being his ex-girlfriend — that is, about Hunter having wrecked his marriage to have an affair with his sister-in-law just after his brother’s tragic and very public death — is a key and sordid point here: Hunter obviously has a big, compelling, charismatic personality, and he manages to draw people toward his desires against all common sense and good judgment. He gets the people who are close to him to excuse his inexcusable behavior, and to expend their resources — financial, emotional, and professional — to rescue him from his own mistakes. To love Hunter Biden is to expose yourself to being used and abused.
Joe Biden’s love for his troubled son is obvious. The “terrified and pleading” characterization of Joe Biden in that private meeting matches up with the way he talks about his son in public — emphatically emphasizing that he loves his son and is proud of him; declaring that he has done “nothing wrong” even when it is obvious to everyone that he has; hosting him at a state dinner just days after he agreed to plead guilty to failing to pay his taxes. What I see here is a father who knows his son has tremendous issues, including a deep-seated need to feel useful and successful (like his late brother was) even though he fundamentally isn’t. One of the main things Joe can offer Hunter is repeated public declarations of his worth and rectitude, and he offers them readily. Joe Biden is also a father who has faced tremendous loss: many of his loved ones have died untimely deaths, and Hunter, whatever his flaws, is one of the children he has left. I find Joe’s devotion to and accommodation of Hunter to be very understandable, human, and heartbreaking. It shows the costs and the hurt that Joe Biden is willing to endure for his love.
And this is the frame I start from when thinking about a question people have been discussing this week: why did Joe Biden take those various phone calls from Hunter, as he hung out with his shady foreign business associates? More broadly, why didn’t Joe get Hunter to knock it off — to stop trading on his father’s name to make money in a way that was, if not necessarily illegal, obviously corrupt?
In 2019, the New York Times reported that a diplomat who raised concerns about Hunter’s business interests in 2015 received a message from the White House that Joe Biden lacked the “bandwidth” to seek to correct one of his sons while the other was dying of cancer:
WASHINGTON — A career State Department official told impeachment investigators this week that he raised concerns with a senior White House official in 2015 about the son of then-Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. holding a position on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.
But the warning from George P. Kent, then a State Department officer stationed in Kiev, was not acted on, according to two people familiar with Mr. Kent’s testimony. Mr. Kent, now of the State Department’s Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, said he told the official that Hunter Biden’s position could look like a conflict of interest, given his father’s role, and would complicate American efforts to encourage Ukraine to clean up corruption.
The White House official told Mr. Kent that the elder Mr. Biden did not have the “bandwidth” to address the concerns while his older son, Beau, was undergoing cancer treatment, according to the people, who were not authorized to discuss the private deposition.
I take this basically at face value. You don’t have to — you could instead think Joe put up with Hunter’s actions because he was financially in on the schemes, but I don’t think the math adds up for that: far from piling cash up for the Biden family, it sure looks to me like Hunter blew more than 100% of his corruptly earned earnings on hookers and drugs and extravagances — ending up without enough money to pay all his taxes and needing a bailout from one of his rich friends. It seems likelier to me that Joe Biden was motivated by love here rather than money: that he was not about to seek a conflict with his wayward son that he would have reasonably feared could send him into a relapse or worse.
Then-U.S. Vice President Joe Biden (R) speaks as his son, Hunter Biden, looks on at the World Food Program USA's Annual McGovern-Dole Leadership Award Ceremony at Organization of American States on April 12, 2016 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images for World Food Program USA)
Besides, even if Joe had told Hunter to knock it off with the shady foreign business, how do we know Hunter would have complied, any more than he complied with that plea to go to rehab? Should Joe have publicly repudiated Hunter’s business affairs in a way that would have made it impractical for him to obtain lucrative contracts? Should he have stopped taking phone calls from his son — abandoning an approach of showing love to his son by maintaining constant availability — out of concern that he might sometimes have shady foreign businesspeople (their presence often undisclosed) listening into the calls? Should he tell the world not to buy his son’s art? It’s quite possible the answer to those questions is yes — that Joe owed it to President Obama, or the Democratic Party, or the country, to cast out his corrupt son who was causing all this trouble — but it’s extremely easy to understand why a loving father would be unwilling to do so.
Unfortunately, Joe Biden’s obligations extend beyond his family. One of his core professional obligations is to maintain his appeal to people who have less inclination to give him the benefit of the doubt than I do.And what Hunter has done is — to at least some extent — damaging to the trust people place not just in Joe Biden, but also in the Democratic Party and the American government. I think it’s important for the country that Joe Biden be re-elected, and as such I resent Hunter for making that more difficult at the margin, and I regret that Joe did not do all he could to stop Hunter from trading corruptly on his name and damaging his political position. But Hunter isn’t my son, and it’s easy for me to feel that way.
As Vice-President and later as President, Joe Biden's duty to his office and to the American public trumped his duty to his family, whenever there was a conflict between the two duty realms. President Biden must be an idiot to keep defending Hunter. Isn't loyalty to Donald Trump above all else, Trump's trademark? I think it's way past time for both men to turn toward their own respective houses and try to get them in order, which will require them to leave the public service realm entirely, because there is no way they can can put America first when their own personal houses are so totally disarrayed.
WRD
The premises here are that Biden allowed his personal issues to trump his duty to the American public and that such action is comparable with that of Donald Trump.
Both elements are not correct. A truly notable fact about the Biden situation is the total lack of evidence of Biden abusing his office.
The less said about the Trump comparison the better.
Sloan Bashinsky
Joe Biden's duty to the American public is to be a grown up man, who deals with reality personally and nationally. There is no way Joe Biden can be a level president with a son behaving like Hunter behaves. The proof of that is Joe Biden keeps taking up for Hunter. What Biden should have done was ask his own Justice Department to investigate Hunter, and thus trump the Republicans doing it instead. Donald Trump is the sorriest piece of shit in American politics today, perhaps in American politics ever, which don't say much good about his MAGAs and any non-MAGA Republicans who don't renounce him. It's a very sad commentary that Joe Biden, when he was Barack Obama's VP, didn't have enough sense to not let Hunter rope him into the Ukraine mess. It's just as sad a commentary that Joe Biden has not woke up yet to just how idiotic he looks to people who are political independents, thus don't have to keep pledging allegiance to the left, nor to the right, but to reality and sanity and, if they are so inclined, to God, they owe their allegiance.
WRD
I agree with Barro that Biden hasn't handled the situation perfectly, but you give the game away in your second sentence. You think Hunter's behavior disqualifies Joe as President regardless of Joe's behavior ("there is no way Joe Bide can be a level president with a son behaving like Hunter behaves"). I don't think that's true, even if I wish Joe Biden was handling the situation differently.
Sloan Bashinsky
By the way Joe Biden handled his son's actions, he proved he was not big enough to be president and put his office and his country and the American people and the truth first.
JES The arguments that the President is innocent or guilty of wrongdoing, justified or unjustified in his actions, are all just a red herring. The only thing we should be discussing is whether or not this mess rises to the level of needing a Special Prosecutor. And, OF COURSE IT DOES. There is a prima facia case being made that the President of the United States was involved in a scheme to trade political favors for money. For our current government to refuse to fully investigate this matter dramatically reduces its legitimacy. If you like Democracy, you should want enough light shed on this mess to determine what actually happened.
PhillyT Except that there have been investigations into this already by the FBI andHouse Republicans are still trying to investigate if anything Hunter has done can be used to impeach Biden. From the looks of it, it's still a red herring since no political favors were traded, nor money. What Hunter has shown is that he was using "access" or the ability to get access to his father. This is very unethical, and seems that Biden was not aware of his son's schemes. That doesn't mean anything illegal was done.
Sloan Bashinsky How could Joe Biden not been aware of his son's schemes? He was the Vice-President, and then he was the President?
smilerz Being VP/President doesn't make you omniscient. Are you aware of every bad thing all of your family members have ever done?
Sloan Bashinsky Of course not, but how could an American vice-president not know what his son was up to in Ukraine?
smilerz he knew he was in Ukraine - but, especially because he was in Ukraine, how could he know any details?
Sloan Bashinsky So, Hunter is in Ukraine, and suddenly he has lots of money, and it fell on him from out of nowhere?
smilerz He knew something was going on - which is different than knowing the details. He was on the board of a Ukranian gas company - this is public knowledge.
Sloan Bashinsky
How do you suppose Hunter got on the board of directors of a Ukrainian gas company, unless it was because his father was the American Vice-President?
smilerz Do you have evidence of wrong doing - or just using supposition to justify your dislike of Biden? (and yes, I think that's totally plausible)
Sloan Bashinsky
I doesn't take more than a moron to connect the dots between Hunter getting on that Ukraine gas company board and Hunter's father being the American Vice-President. If I were Joe Biden and Hunter were my son, I'd have raised bloody hell about it, in public, unless I was in on it.
