Donald Trump is in the courtroom again, accused of 34 counts of falsifying business records.

“The People of the State of New York allege that Donald J. Trump repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal crimes that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election,” Bragg said in an announcement at the time. “Manhattan is home to the country’s most significant business market. We cannot allow New York businesses to manipulate their records to cover up criminal conduct. As the Statement of Facts describes, the trail of money and lies exposes a pattern that, the People allege, violates one of New York’s basic and fundamental business laws. As this office has done time and time again, we today uphold our solemn responsibility to ensure that everyone stands equal before the law.”

He’s guilty, guilty, guilty. Everyone knows it, but all it will take is one Trumpian idiot to get on the jury to get him off, and even if he is convicted, he’ll most likely get nothing worse than probation. Go ahead, talk about violations of basic and fundamental business laws — we know that the only real fundamental law is that if you’re rich enough, you’ll get away with it.

I’m not going to pay any attention to this trial. I don’t see the point.

Read this little story.

A New Hampshire county chair for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign lost his job as a police officer in 2006 after he threatened to kill his colleagues and rape the police chief’s wife in retaliation for his suspension for having a relationship with an underage high school girl, according to an internal report released last week upon orders from the New Hampshire Supreme Court. The findings regarding former Claremont police officer Jonathan Stone, which came to light due to a right-to-know lawsuit filed by InDepthNH.org, appeared to catch Trump’s New Hampshire campaign chair, Stephen Stepanek, by surprise. “I just found out about it this morning,” he told Huffington Post Wednesday. “He’s been a Trump supporter for a long time, and he’s been a state representative, and he had, as far as we were concerned, what looked like a great background.” Stone, who won a seat in the New Hampshire House of Representatives in 2022, was terminated from the Claremont Police Department after making the threats. He would go on to work as a Vermont prison guard and would open a gun store, according to InDepthNH, and gave Trump an AR-15 during his 2016 campaign. Neither Stone nor the Trump campaign’s co-managers, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, responded to queries from Huffington Post. Stepanek said a decision on Stone’s future with the campaign was pending: “I think it will be handled by Mar-a-Lago, in consultation with me.”

Now tell me how surprised you are by every sentence about Jonathan Stone.

Remember Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman? It’s been a few years, so you’re forgiven if you’ve completely forgotten them — they were a sleazy pair of not-very-bright Republican weirdos who ginned up various schemes that they hoped would derail elections.

Well, now their careers have been temporarily derailed.

Notorious conspiracy theorists Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman will pay up to $1.25 million for perpetuating a bogus robocall campaign in the runup to the 2020 presidential election, aimed at scaring Black voters from casting mail-in ballots, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced Tuesday.

The right-wing hucksters, who have faced numerous other lawsuits and court actions for their MAGA-adjacent activities, were found liable in March 2023 for “transmitting false and threatening messages intended to discourage voting” by Black New Yorkers, James’ announcement said.“[I]n written communications, Defendants referred to the call ‘as the ‘black robo’…and used terms like…‘HIJACK’ the election to refer to their operation,” according to a consent decree filed Monday.

You may now resume ignoring them.

In case you’re wondering why Joe Biden’s poll numbers aren’t the best, consider the fact that it’s becoming increasingly hard to believe him. For instance, here’s his official statement on 2 April.

Outraged. Heartbroken. Tragedy. That’s what he needs to say.

But does he mean it? Here’s a headline from the next day.

You can only rely so much on the fact that your political opponent is a corrupt, incompetent boob to win an election. Biden might win anyway, but think of the legacy he’s leaving the Democratic party…what will the Democrats do if the Republicans nominate a war-mongering, racist scumbag in the future, who isn’t quite as deplorable as Trump? I’m not exactly seeing the Democrats as a benign alternative.

Can’t he even look at the polls and see that his constituents despise the genocide we’re enabling?

Among my earliest complaints was about their editor, Jodi Wilgoren (now Rudoren), who was always waffling over ‘both sides’ in the creation/evolution debate. Those complaints are so old, back 20 years and more, that they were posted when this blog was just a little personal endeavor posted on an old Macintosh in my lab, and you can’t get to them anymore. Wilgoren infuriated me with comments like this one, after she’d dedicated a huge amount of time ‘reporting’ creationist claims about the Grand Canyon.

I don’t consider myself a creationist. I don’t have any interest in sharing my personal views on how the canyon was carved, mostly because I’ve spent almost no time pondering my personal views — it takes all my energy as a reporter and writer to understand and explain my subjects’ views fairly and thoroughly.

So what was she doing writing science articles for the NYT, if she’d never thought about the science?

Anyway, I was reminded of that by this recent comic.

This has always been the way of the NYT. All through the Bush years, the Iraq War, every political issue, the New York Times always been the banner carrier for the passive voice and both-siderism. It’s just the worst.

Wilgoren/Rudoren is now the editor of The Forward, where she has won awards from, among others, the Religious News Association, which is no surprise. It is not clear if she has yet started thinking.

Let’s get this out of the way: Biden is old. He’s slow and halting in his speech, he sounds like an old man. I’d rather we had a younger candidate running, but he’ll get the job done.

His opponent, on the other hands, sounds like he’s damaged mentally. He has a fucked up brain, and it’s obvious that there’s something more going on than just an age-related slow-down. Here’s a diagnosis by Dr. Elizabeth Zoffman, a forensic psychiatrist and an Associate Clinical Professor of Forensic and General Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia.

• Changes in speech patterns with many fewer and simpler words (decline in vocabulary) with fewer adjectives and adverbs.
• A decline in cognitive focus on speech subjects with incomplete sentences and an inability to focus on a topic long enough to complete a sentence when not reading from a teleprompter.
• Difficulty pronouncing words, word substitution and nonsense words – known as paraphasia
• Tangential thinking where the topic switches mid-sentence to some unrelated topic.
• Frequent repetition of words and phrases as if his mind is stuck in a loop.
• Disinhibition and an inability to control verbal outbursts.
• Socially inappropriate behavior – mocking a man with muscular dystrophy, disrespecting fallen soldiers as losers.
• Lack of self-awareness in that he apparently cannot see how inappropriate his behavior has become and use his judgment to stop himself.
• Changes in movement and gait. His walk appears wide-based and he has developed a swing of his right leg. He appears glued to the floor when he “dances” for his audience. If caught on camera standing still, he appears unnaturally immobile.
• The changes in judgment and impulse control have uncovered and perhaps worsened underlying personality traits that others have characterized as narcissistic and antisocial. The changes have led some experts to suggest a diagnosis of “malignant narcissism.”

All of that is apparent. This isn’t just picking a biased doctor to invent a diagnosis — that’s all stuff we can see and hear with our own eyes and ears. His fanatical voters don’t care, the media doesn’t care, he plans to shamble into office like a rot-brained zombie.

I thought this was one of the worst fathers ever: remember the Canadian farmer who moved his whole family to Russia? Arend and Anneesa Feenstra, who dragged their ten kids to an uncertain future, are being told to leave because who knew, they were expected to learn the Russian language, and Arend didn’t have time. Why he didn’t have time is a mystery, since his wife, by his own admission, was doing all the childcare and housework and editing the YouTube videos that were their sole source of income.

That’s a deeply stupid dad who is letting his ideology destroy his whole family.

But then there’s a dad that’s even worse. Stewart Rhodes founded the Oath Keepers and is now serving an 18-year federal sentence for conspiring to overthrow the government. You might suspect he didn’t have the happiest home life. Now we know how bad it was: his son has come out and told all.

In a recent interview with the Associated Press, Adams revealed his abusive upbringing at the hands of Stewart Rhodes, and the new path that he seeks to chart.

He said living with Rhodes was a constant process of moving around and starting over, as the Yale-educated militant convinced his family the government was spying on them and the end of days was imminent.

“We lived in extreme isolation in one particular cultural bubble in increasingly paranoid and militant right-wing political spheres everywhere we moved in the country, until eventually we ended up in Montana,” Adams said.

When his mother divorced Rhodes in 2018, Adams was able to move out of the shadow he cast on their family. Rhodes severely undercut Adams’ and his seven siblings’ schooling and barred them from publicly talking about their home lives. Adams couldn’t complete a times table until he was 19 and has spent the last several years trying to catch up on his education—recently enrolling in several college courses.

Yikes. Dakota Adams has his revenge, though. He’s running for the Montana state house…as a Democrat!

“It served as a sobering wake-up call in terms of how much danger we are truly in and how the Republican Party enabled a president to become an active danger to this republic,” he said. “I was forced to reevaluate a lot of beliefs and face hard questions about what I really stood for.”

He has plans to sell the body armor and guns he once wore to protest the government alongside his father, and he had some strong thoughts on guns and gun culture.

“American gun culture needs to be rehabilitated from an egotistical and vanity-based, hyper-individualist ego trip culture to civil service and solemn responsibility to the community,” he said. He still opposes total bans on firearms—he believed they could be necessary for the self-defense of vulnerable groups.

Many of his direct policy concerns are about making Montana livable for middle- and lower-income people. Most of the voters in his area are strongly conservative, and Adams tries to avoid sweeping cultural and social issues. He would rather focus on the challenges directly facing Montana residents.

I’d vote for him.

It’s something I’ve always felt, so this is an interesting illustrative example. I’ve thought that the only way to cultivate empathetic, thoughtful, open-minded children is to give them an empathetic, thoughtful, open-minded upbringing. The authoritarian parents, like Rhodes and Feenstra not only make their kids’ lives a living hell, it drives them away from their ideology. I suspect some of the commenters here have similar stories, of being brought up in an oppressive environment and now rebounding towards a more progressive approach to life. That’s one of the strengths of the Left.

It’s an ever-retreating target. I’ve been worried about the loss of income and the sudden increase in health care costs, so I’ve been deferring it, which is no favor to my students given how ancient I am (or, alternatively, it’s a benefit because if I were to leave, the administration wouldn’t replace me for years, if at all.) I might as well give up on the fantasy, if the Republicans get their way.

Note that Trump recently threatened social security and medicare.

The Trump campaign was in full damage control last week after the former president called in to CNBC and suggested making cuts from Medicare and Social Security, which offer financial care to retired Americans or those with a disability.

But, you say, that was just Trump, who is insane, and his campaign is backpedaling fast.

Except that the Republican party is pushing for the same thing!

A new budget by a large and influential group of House Republicans calls for raising the Social Security retirement age for future retirees and restructuring Medicare.

The proposals, which are unlikely to become law this year, reflect how many Republicans will seek to govern if they win the 2024 elections. And they play into a fight President Joe Biden is seeking to have with former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party as he runs for re-election.

I’m eligible to retire right now, but maybe in a few years I won’t be old enough. It won’t be because I’m getting younger — time doesn’t work that way.