I say YES. YOU say NO....Numero Tre! Enjoy!
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If only all the media would behave this way and I think CNN did something similar part way into the Loon at Bedminster.
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Thank you Rachel Maddow for being one of the few honest and professional journalists. If they would only stop giving him free PR coverage imagine how the news might actually bear more truth. If all stations took this stance he and his base would not have fodder for their fires. Imagine journalism returning to being truthful, factually accurate and professional. Rachel Maddow gives me hope that others will follow suit.
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“DONALD TRUMP UNDER ARREST, IN FEDERAL CUSTODY.”
It was quite a chyron from CNN, marking the first time in the history of the United States that a former president has been charged with federal crimes. And in this case, what crimes they are: the willful retention, sharing, and hiding of classified documents that compromise our national security. Trump’s own national security advisor John Bolton said, “This is material that in the hands of America’s adversaries would do incalculable damage to the United States. This is a very serious case and it’s not financial fraud, it’s not hush money to porn stars, this is the national security of the United States at stake. I think we’ve got to take the politics out of this business when national security is at stake.”
Cameras were barred in the courtroom as Trump pleaded not guilty to the 37 charges in Miami today. Presiding magistrate judge Jonathan Goodman ordered Trump not to communicate with witnesses about the case, including co-defendant Waltine Nauta, then released him on his own recognizance, that is, without needing to post bail. Special prosecutor Jack Smith was in the courtroom; ABC’s senior congressional correspondent Rachel Scott reported that Trump did not look at Smith.
Then Trump went back to his residence in Bedminster, New Jersey, where he gave a speech that New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who is close to the Trump camp, described as low energy, focusing on his insistence that he had a right to keep the classified documents (which experts agree is nonsense and amounts to a confession) and that the indictment was “the most evil and heinous abuse of power.” Right-wing Newsmax and the Fox News Channel (FNC) carried the speech; CNN and MSNBC did not.
FNC has been hemorrhaging viewers since it fired Tucker Carlson, a threat to its bottom line that might have been behind its chyron tonight attacking Biden by claiming “WANNABE DICTATOR SPEAKS AT THE WHITE HOUSE AFTER HAVING HIS POLITICAL RIVAL ARRESTED.”
In statements similar to the one from FNC, right-wing pundits spent the day flooding Twitter and other social media with furious insistence that Trump is being unfairly prosecuted, followed by attacks on former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, and with allegations that there are tapes of President Biden accepting bribes—allegations that Biden openly laughed at this evening.
But that performative outrage among leaders did not translate into support on the ground in Miami. Law enforcement had been prepared for as many as 50,000 protesters, but only a few hundred to a thousand turned out (one wearing a shirt made of an American flag and carrying the head of a pig on a pole).
The lack of supporters on the ground was significant. Since the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, much of Trump’s power has rested on his ability to call out his base to silence opponents by threatening violence. That power was in full force on January 6, 2021, when his loyalists set out to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Democrat Joe Biden president, believing they were operating under the orders of then-president Trump.
Since then, though, more than 1,000 people who participated in the events of January 6 have been charged with crimes, and many have been sentenced to prison, while Trump, who many defendants say called them to arms, has skated. That discrepancy is likely dampening the enthusiasm of Trump’s supporters for protest.
Today Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo pointed out that the audacity of Nevada’s militia-related Bundy family simply grew as family members launched successive stands against the federal government without significant legal repercussions. Republican politicians cheered on their attacks on federal officials for political gain, while Democratic politicians didn’t push to go after them out of concern that a show of federal power would alienate Nevada voters.
Trump’s threats and determination to stir up his base seem to reflect a similar consideration: if he can just rally enough support, he might imagine, the federal government will back off.
Federal officials permitting politics to trump the rule of law in our past have brought us to this moment.
After the Civil War, officials charged Confederate president Jefferson Davis and 38 other leading secessionists with treason but decided not to prosecute when the cases finally came to trial in 1869. They wanted to avoid the anger a trial would provoke because they hoped to reconcile the North and South. They also worried they would not get convictions in the southern states where the trials were assigned.
In the end, between President Andrew Johnson’s pardons and Congress’s granting of amnesty to Confederates, no one was convicted for their participation in the attempt to destroy the country. This generosity did not create the good feeling men like General Ulysses S. Grant hoped it would. Instead, as Civil War scholar Elizabeth Varon established in her book on the surrender at Appomattox, it helped to create the myth that the southern cause had been so noble that even the conquering northern armies had been forced to recognize it. The ideology of the Confederacy never became odious, and it has lived on.
The same quest for reconciliation drove President Gerald R. Ford to grant a pardon to former president Richard M. Nixon for possible “offenses against the United States” in his quest to win the 1972 election by bugging the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Washington, D.C., Watergate Hotel.
Ford explained that the “tranquility” the nation had found after Nixon’s resignation “could be irreparably lost by the prospects of bringing to trial a former President of the United States.” The threat of a trial would “cause prolonged and divisive debate over the propriety of exposing to further punishment and degradation a man who has already paid the unprecedented penalty of relinquishing the highest elective office of the United States.”
In an echo of 100 years before, Ford’s generosity did not bring Nixon or his supporters back into the fold. Instead, they doubled down on the idea that Nixon had done nothing wrong and had been hounded from office by his “liberal” enemies. Nixon himself never admitted wrongdoing, telling the American people he was resigning because he no longer had enough support in Congress to advance the national interest. Although his support had collapsed because even members of his own party believed he was guilty of obstructing justice, violated constitutional rights of citizens, and abused his power, Nixon blamed the press, whose members had destroyed him with “leaks and accusations and innuendo.”
The willingness of government officials to ignore the rule of law in order to buy peace gave us enduring reverence for the principles of the Confederacy, along with countless dead Unionists, mostly Black people, killed as former Confederates reclaimed supremacy in the South. It also gave us the idea that presidents cannot be held accountable for crimes, a belief that likely made some of the presidents who followed Nixon less careful about following the law than they might have been if they had seen Nixon indicted.
Holding a former president accountable for an alleged profound attack on the United States is indeed unprecedented, as his supporters insist. But far from being a bad thing to stand firm on the rule of law at the upper levels of government, it seems to fall into the category of “high time.”0 -
The feeling that "I am enough" does not mean that I have nothing to learn, nothing further to achieve, and nowhere to grow to. It means that I accept myself, that I am not on trial in my own eyes, that I value and respect myself. This is not an act of indulgence but of courage.
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Miami residents == peers
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Every time I've heard the Loon and his extreme amt. of mention of the Presidential Papers Act I've wondered where he got his idea about the Act.
CBS News did a piece on June 13th. about what the Presidential Act says —- about Presidential papers as opposed or in addition to personal papers.
What I'm putting in since anyone here has gone over the Presidential Papers Act I'm sure, is what relates to the Loon's weird interpretation.
Washington — Since the indictment charging him with 37 federal felony counts was unsealed last week, former President Donald Trump and some of his allies have repeatedly mischaracterized a law known as the Presidential Records Act, according to legal experts and the federal agency charged with preserving White House records.
"Under the Presidential Records Act, I'm allowed to do all this," he wrote on Truth Social after the indictment was revealed, referring to his decision to retain dozens of boxes of documents and other material from his time in the White House. He repeated that claim in a speech in Georgia over the weekend, calling the charges a "fake indictment."
Former Trump attorney Tim Parlatore also misconstrued the law last week, telling CNN that outgoing presidents are "supposed to take the next two years after they leave office to go through all these documents to figure out what's personal and what's presidential."
Those assertions prompted a public rebuke from the National Archives and Records Administration, or NARA. The agency released a statement detailing how presidential records are meant to be handled.
"The PRA requires that all records created by Presidents (and Vice-Presidents) be turned over to [NARA] at the end of their administrations," the Archives said.
NARA also refuted Parlatore's assertion, saying that there is "no history, practice, or provision in law for presidents to take official records with them when they leave office to sort through, such as for a two-year period as described in some reports."
A federal grand jury in Florida charged Trump with 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information and six other counts alleging he illegally concealed documents and obstructed the Justice Department's investigation. The former president pleaded not guilty during his first court appearance on Tuesday.
Trump is not charged with violating the Presidential Records Act, which has no enforcement mechanism. But his repeated invocation of the law has renewed questions about what it says and how it applies to government documents.
Interesting to wonder just when the Loon got his errant information about presidential papers and why he steadfastly refused, even with NARA giving him correct information and a number of chances to return the papers that he didn't.
I'm sure he wanted them for nefarious monetary purposes, so I understand that part, but I'm amazed I guess that he continues to try and hide behind information that he has known for a long time is false. It is hard for me to feel that he wasn't concerned with so many of his behaviors after losing the Carroll decision while being indicted already from AG Bragg. I guess that is real insanity at work. He just can't really get into a belief that he is going to be ask for and actually made to atone for wrongs he has done.
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Some of the most important people in my life would be shocked
to learn that they were role models. They weren't celebrities,
or even particularly accomplished. But they had some quality
that I admired, that made me want to be like them.
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Fair warning: This is from Palmer's Report.
I used to put in something from here almost daily, but I can't remember the last time I did a C & P here from Palmer. I would not be doing it now other than this piece really struck a nerve with me so I am going to leave it here for anyone who might wish to check out if they have a nerve that can be struck as well.
The man in redBocha Blue | 6:00 pm EDT June 13, 2023
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Have you ever heard the term Rageaholic? If you haven’t, you’re hearing it now. You see, I believe among Donald Trump‘s many psychological ailments lies the fact that he may be a Rageaholic.
Where does this anger come from? It seems like it’s always been inside of him. The anger of Donald Trump is something that he passed on to his drooling group of brain dead fans And we know where many of their anger comes from Many of Donald Trump’s fans feel victims of a system that they think failed them.
Many of them have, perhaps not had easy lives, built up years of resentment toward the government, to authority, to anybody different than them. Donald Trump has led a life of privilege from the beginning. He is an unlikely vehicle for such rage.
And yet we saw it, did we not from the beginning? Donald Trump cannot be happy. He cannot be happy about anything. Many people talk about how they’ve never seen Trump laugh, and I’m not talking about a chuckle.
I’m talking about the kind of airy laughter that comes from deep within. The type of laughter where we become liquid, the laughter seems to come out effortlessly from a place deep inside, a place of joy. We’ve all laughed like that haven’t we, at one time?
The heart’s ability to expand, and to feel joy and let it seep in is possibly the most glorious human emotion one can ever feel. It is a beautiful experience, and I honestly feel sad for anyone who has never experienced it
I don’t believe that Donald Trump has experienced it. The color of his night is red. It is a bright and crazed cherry red. I never see soft colors near Donald Trump. I never see the effortless beauty of letting love and light in.
Donald Trump’s inability to laugh at himself is legendary, but he seems to have an inability to laugh at anything.
Even on inauguration day Donald Trump seemed angry, always had a hint of violence percolating inside of him. I saw it. I’m sure you saw it. That anger within him came years before he was ever president. Where did this come from? And isn’t it tragic that this person has thrown away their life in such a morbid way?
If someone would’ve painted a portrait of Donald Trump, the only color within, would be red. It would be as red as the juiciest, most poisonous apple. He doesn’t have any other color in his palette, no blues or greens or blacks or silvers or gold.
He has no ability. no imagination to just look around him, and breathe in the air and laugh. He doesn’t even know that he’s living in a limitless world, a gorgeous great big, colorful crazy world of amazing possibilities. And there he sits, the man in red. Slathered from head to toe in biting venomous anger.
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What a non-patriot who thinks this is perfection.
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