I am reposting something that I originally published over a decade ago for the benefit of those who did not see it, because it is one of those things that makes me feel good whenever I see it.
The video is undoubtedly enhanced by the music by the Greek composer Vangelis that begins around the one minute mark. It was the soundtrack for the film 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992). He also won an Academy Award for his equally memorable score for Chariots of Fire (1981).
It appears that Trump is finding it hard to get top-notch lawyers to work on his many legal fights, ending up with second-tier advocates.
Former President Donald Trump and his team have spent days since the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago trying to assemble a “team of respected lawyers” but keep getting rejected, according to The Washington Post.
“Everyone is saying no,” a prominent Republican lawyer told the outlet.
…Jon Sale, a former Watergate prosecutor who is now a prominent Florida defense attorney, told the Post he turned Trump down last week.
…While Corcoran and Trusty submitted filings in the case, Trump’s other attorneys have been tasked with making his case to the public in media appearances.
[Read more…]
Mike Pence, Trump’s vice-president, has condemned the attacks on the FBI for their execution of a search warrant on Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago, further signaling that at least some members of the Republican party want to distance themselves from Trump’s hysterical reaction that triggered anger among his supporters who threatened violence against the fbi and the department of justice.
“I … want to remind my fellow Republicans we can hold the attorney general accountable for the decision that he made without attacking the rank-and-file law enforcement personnel at the FBI,” Pence said on Wednesday at New Hampshire’s Saint Anselm College.
“The Republican party is the party of law and order. Our party stands with the men and women who serve on the thin blue line at the federal, state and local level. And these attacks on the FBI must stop,” he said.
But what was even more interesting was that he seemed to be inviting the January 6th committee to ask him to testify before the panel.
“If there was an invitation to participate, I would consider it…I would have to reflect on the unique role that I was serving as vice-president… “It would be unprecedented in history for the vice-president to be summoned to testify on Capitol Hill. But, as I said, I don’t want to prejudge ever any formal invitation rendered to us.”
Trump has been lashing out furiously at the committee and all those who have testified, since those hearings have really damaged him. He must be apoplectic that even his once-loyal lapdog seems to offering to cooperate with it.
The current tax filing system in the US is absurdly complex. Part of the reason is that the tax code is used to achieve various economic and social goals by making them have economic consequences. Another reason is that special interest groups lobby hard to get favorable items put into the code to benefit their own interests.
One of the less-publicized items in the big bill that was passed recently known as the Inflation Reduction Act is a provision to allow the IRS to study the creation software that people can use to file their taxes online.
The sweeping domestic policy bill passed by the House and Senate last week mandates that the IRS study options to provide a free tax filing option for Americans. That study represents a threat to the for-profit tax prep industry dominated by TurboTax, a product of the Silicon Valley company Intuit.
…Unlike many developed countries, the U.S. does not offer free tax filing services for taxpayers, who instead pay billions of dollars every year to highly profitable private tax prep companies.
In the wide-ranging interview that he gave to George Sylvester Viereck that was published in 1929 in the Saturday Evening Post, Albert Einstein was asked his views about nationalism. In response to the question, “Do you look upon yourself as a German or as a Jew”, he replied, “It is quite possible to be both. I look upon myself as a man. Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.”
He thought that Americans were less nationalistic than the nations of Europe, saying:
“Americans undoubtedly owe much to the the melting pot it is possible that this mixture of races makes their nationalism less objectionable than the nationalism of Europe nationalism in the United States does not assume such disagreeable forms as in Europe this may be due partly to the fact that your country is so immense that you do not think in terms of metal borders it may be due to the fact that you do not suffer from the heritage of hatred.”
If he were alive today, I think that he would be saddened by what America has become, a nation in which Christian nationalism seems to be gaining ground and in which xenophobia and anti-immigration sentiment are promoted and at least tacitly supported by a significant segment of one of the main political parties.
Zimbabwe has reported an outbreak of measles in a part of the country in which 157 children have died. They were not vaccinated. Why? Because they are members of a Christian sect that opposes vaccinations for religious reasons.
A measles outbreak in Zimbabwe has killed 157 children with the death toll nearly doubling in just under a week, the information minister said on Tuesday.
The government last week blamed apostolic church sects for the surge in infections, saying measles was largely prevalent among those who had not received vaccinations.
…Most reported cases are among children aged between six months and 15 from religious sects who do not believe in vaccination.
“It has been noted that most cases have not received vaccination to protect against measles. Government has invoked the Civil Protection Unit Act to deal with this emergency,” Mutsvangwa said.
I think it is beginning to dawn on Trump and his supporters that the execution of a search warrant by the FBI on his Mar-a-Lago home is more serious than they initially thought and that the legal net is closing around him. They initially reacted as if the department of justice had handed him a gift by providing evidence that he was being harassed by the Deep State and used that claim to fundraise from his supporters. Republican congresspeople also echoed those statements and inflamed feelings against the FBI and the department of justice. In fact, it was Trump himself who first broadcast the search in sensational terms, as if the FBI had stormed into his property and ransacked the place, they way they sometimes do with ordinary people. In fact, it was done quite discreetly. The FBI had executed a properly authorized search with the cooperation of people on the premises. The news of the search would have come out eventually but Trump was the one who sensationalized it.
Now that it has been revealed that the FBI had recovered documents that had some of the highest levels of secrecy classification, some of the early and vociferous people who had condemned the search are trying to walk things back. Whether the documents recovered deserve such a high degree of classification or not (the government is notorious for over-classifying things) is not really relevant since it is a crime to have them if they were not supposed to be there.
[Read more…]
I mentioned recently my puzzlement that Trump’s MAGA followers still talk to Jordan Klepper even though his clips make them look ridiculous. In an interview, he answers that question, saying it it is not hard at all to find people willing to talk, even if they know of him and his work.
But at a Donald Trump rally in June, he looked genuinely flabbergasted when a couple of young women seemingly had no knowledge of what happened on January 6, 2021 (see clip below).
“There’s definitely a surprise to be found at every Trump event,” Klepper tells Deadline. “I wish I could say that we went to these places, and we were fishing for people, but that’s not the case, we only talk to anybody who would like to talk to us. More often than not, people want to come in and talk to us. But the fact that they had never heard of January 6, even the terminology around insurrection was new to them was frankly shocking to me. I knew there was a rock a lot of people lived underneath, I just had no idea it was so encompassing.”
…One of the more curious elements of Klepper’s segments is why so many right-wing folk are willing to talk with him, given that he is essentially making fun of them. But he likens it to being a heel in wrestling, that Trump supporters see this as entertainment.
“I probably took 50 or 60 selfies with people who were excited to just see somebody involved in the narrative surrounding this Trump World,” he says. “There are even politicians at CPAC who would come up and ask if they could set up a time [to talk]. You become like a villain in the Trump universe. It’s always that the rallies are like a sporting event. There’s ideology, there’s pomp and circumstance, it is fun, it’s entertainment and that also speaks to why people talk to me.”
Still seems a bit strange to me. Maybe it is because I at least try not to look like an idiot, even if I do not always succeed.
Last week, the first trial began in a case that, back in 2016 when I was living in Ohio, exploded into the news headlines, involving a set of horrific murders. In a rural part of the state, eight members of a single family known as the Rhodens that lived in different homes in the region were found murdered, killed while they slept.
The murders were discovered on the morning of 22 April 2016, when Bobby Jo Manley stopped by the Rhodens’ cluster of trailer homes to see her ex-brother-in-law, Chris Rhoden Sr. Entering his trailer, she found the bloody bodies of Chris and his cousin, Gary. Chris’s ex-wife, Dana, was dead nearby, as were their children – Hanna, Chris Jr and Clarence, known as “Frankie” – and Frankie’s fiancee, Hannah Gilley.
The same day, Chris Sr’s brother Kenneth Rhoden, who lived about 15 minutes away, was also found murdered.
The killer or killers had spared Frankie’s three-year-old son; Frankie and Hannah Gilley’s baby, who was found covered in blood, trying to nurse at his mother; and Hanna Rhoden’s newborn. (Hanna and Jake’s two-year-old daughter, the subject of the custody dispute, was staying elsewhere.)
