Giuliani the coward faces the reckoning

Rudy Giuliani’s trial is over. His lawyer did not call any witnesses for the defense. The jurors deliberated for about three hours yesterday before adjourning and will resume their work today.

Beryl Howell, the US district judge, had already found him liable for defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and civil conspiracy when he publicly attacked Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two Georgia election workers, accusing them of switching votes from serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) to Joe Biden. This trial was for eight members of the jury to decide how much in damages the two workers were entitled to for the hell that they went through at the hands of SSAT’s supporters because of Giuliani’s lies.

In his closing statement, the women’s lawyer Michael Gottlieb described the harrowing experiences that the two women had undergone because of Giuliani’s vicious attacks.

Attorneys for Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss are urging the panel to award the women $24 million apiece for Giuliani’s defamation against them, which they say ignited years of threats, professional and personal consequences and devastation of their mental health. Moss and Freeman are also asking for an unspecified additional amount for emotional distress, as well as a “punitive” award to deter future misconduct.
…

“He has no right to offer defenseless civil servants up to a virtual mob in order to overturn an election,” Gottlieb said during his closing argument. “The cost that has [been] imposed on Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss, on all those he has deceived, and to the public confidence in our democracy are incalculable.”

[Read more…]

Add ‘compassion’ to the ‘thoughts and prayers’ cop-out

Whenever there is a mass shooting, sadly so common in the US, the gun lobby and its servile politicians quickly repeat the ‘thoughts and prayers’ trope to avoid having to say anything about what might be done to stop the killings. Thanks to much ridicule, I notice that they are trying to avoid saying that and find different ways to say and do nothing. We are now seeing something similar with abortion.

Abortion has become a hot potato for Republican politicians who have long been stridently calling for the overthrow of Roe v. Wade but having achieved that goal, are now struggling to find ways to respond to the draconian anti-abortion laws passed by red states that are widely seen as political liabilities.

Take the case of Kate Cox who had to travel out of Texas in order to get an abortion that her physician had said was necessary because the fetus had a serious defect that made survival highly unlikely even for a few days after birth, and also risked the life of the mother and her ability to have more children. The Republican presidential candidates Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis were asked about whether they agreed with Texas attorney general Ken Paxton’s action that forced Cox to go out of state and they ducked the question and resorted to calling for ‘compassion’.
[Read more…]

Judge asks Giuliani’s lawyer: Is he mentally competent?

Rudy Giuliani, lawyer and advisor to serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT), has long been behaving erratically and provided plenty of comedic fodder to late night talk show hosts. But his recent behavior in one particular case has caused the judge overseeing it to wonder whether he was in fact losing his marbles.

The case arose from the defamation suit filed by Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, a mother and daughter who were poll workers in Atlanta, GA whom Giuliani had publicly accused of changing votes in favor of Joe Biden, and he also threw in the gratuitous implication that they were drug users, saying that they were “quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine” and that it was obvious they were “engaged in surreptitious illegal activity.” In an earlier proceeding, Giuliani conceded that the statements were false but that they were protected by the First Amendment.

But yesterday, outside the courtroom after the first day of the trial for damages, Giuliani said that he would prove that his allegations were true, which made the clearly incredulous judge ask his lawyer if Giuliani was all there, since his statements made him liable for a second defamation charge. Giuliani’s lawyer did not seem to be sure how to answer.
[Read more…]

Film review: The Duke (2022)

I recently watched this nice little comedy set in 1961 that stars Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren in which Broadbent plays a working class character who keeps losing his job and getting into trouble because of his efforts to fight for those whom he sees as being unfairly treated, such as old pensioners and disabled veterans of wars, trying to get the government to waive for them the licensing fees that the owners of every television must pay the government and which goes towards funding the BBC.

This film is based on the life of a real person Kempton Bunton and the theft of a painting of the Duke of Wellington that was stolen from the National Gallery, and the trial of Bunton for stealing it. (The link has spoilers for the film.) It is a film that gets its laughs from the behavior of the characters, not from jokes, and Broadbent and Mirren, two excellent actors, have the skills to make the most of their roles.

Here’s the trailer.

One thing I was curious about was how Bunton was able to get a high-powered barrister to represent him at his trial since he clearly would not have been able to afford one. Since this theft really happened, I looked Bunton up and found a link to the lawyer Jeremy Hutchinson who had a privileged background with an elite education that led to an illustrious career and was married at the time to the already-famous actress Peggy Ashcroft.

I do not know the British legal aid system and how this came to be. Maybe because Bunton’s case gained a great deal of notoriety at the time and he became something of a folk hero, a Robin Hood type fighting the establishment, Hutchinson provided his services pro bono.

Kate Cox leaves Texas for her abortion

After the Texas supreme court lifted the hold on the law banning abortions that a judge had imposed, Cox had a difficult decision to make: wait and if the supreme court would ultimately rule in her favor or leave the state. Since the court gave no gave no time for the decision, they may well have just run out the clock. So she opted to go to another state to have her abortion.

A pregnant Texas woman who was seeking court permission for an abortion in an unprecedented challenge to one of the most restrictive bans in the U.S. could not wait any longer and went to another state, her attorneys said Monday.

The announcement came as Kate Cox, whose fetus has a fatal condition, was waiting for the Texas Supreme Court to rule whether she could legally receive an abortion. Her baby’s diagnosis has low survival rates and her attorneys said continuing the pregnancy jeopardized both her health and ability to have more children.

“Her health is on the line. She’s been in and out of the emergency room and she couldn’t wait any longer,” said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which was representing Cox.

This likely makes her case moot. Fortunately for Cox, she appears to have the resources to carry out her decision. This still leaves in limbo other pregnant women who need to have an abortion. Meanwhile a pregnant woman in Kentucky, another anti-abortion state, has asked a court to allow an abortion and is awaiting a result.

The nightmare for Kate Cox continues

The Texas supreme court has put on hold the restraining order that a lower court judge had imposed that would have allowed Kate Cox to get an abortion, stating that her condition met the requirements for an exception to the state’s almost total ban on the procedure. The Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, a Republican anti-abortion zealot, had appealed to the supreme court for such a move. Even before the supreme. court stepped in, Paxton went even further and said that he would prosecute any doctor and hospital that allowed the procedure even if the courts rule it to be permissible. So much for the party that says that it is the upholder of law and order.
[Read more…]

Will every abortion in Texas have to be approved by a court?

The sweeping restrictions on abortion that some states have imposed in the wake of the US Supreme Court invalidating Roe v. Wade means that some women have to go to court in order to get an abortion that should have been non-controversial. A judge in Texas yesterday issued a temporary restraining order against the state, thus permitting Kate Cox to get an abortion even though she was 20 weeks pregnant and thus exceeded the six-week limit in that state. Her baby had been diagnosed with trisomy 18, a condition under which it is not expected to live more than a few days outside the womb.

Kate Cox, who is 20 weeks pregnant, filed a lawsuit this week asking the court to temporarily block the state’s abortion ban, because she has been unable to get the procedure due to concerns of violating the law. Cox’s baby was diagnosed with trisomy 18 and is not expected to live more than a few days outside the womb, according to the suit.
…

Cox has been to three different emergency rooms in the last month due to severe cramping and unidentifiable fluid leaks, according to her lawsuit. Cox has had two prior cesarean surgeries – C-sections – and, the suit said, “continuing the pregnancy puts her at high risk for severe complications threatening her life and future fertility, including uterine rupture and hysterectomy.”

[Read more…]

Trump faces even more lawsuits

Following the riot on January 6th 2021, a Democratic congressperson and two Capitol police officers brought lawsuits against serial sex offender Donald Trump (SSAT), accusing him of inciting the mob with his speech that day to the crowd.

The lawsuits seek civil damages for harms they say they endured when rioters descended on the Capitol as Congress met to certify Biden’s election victory, smashing windows, engaging in hand-to-hand combat with police officers and sending lawmakers running into hiding. One of the lawsuits, filed by Rep. Eric Swalwell, a Democrat from California, alleges that Trump directly incited the violence at the Capitol “and then watched approvingly as the building was overrun.”

Two other lawsuits were also filed, one by other House Democrats and another by officers James Blassingame and Sidney Hemby, who were both injured in the riot. Blassingame said Friday that he “couldn’t be more committed to pursuing accountability” in the case.

[Read more…]

Ohio dead-enders seek to undermine referendum on abortion

You would think that it has become abundantly clear that people do not like extremely restrictive measures on abortion. While not all of them firmly believe in a woman’s right to choose and some may not particularly like the idea of abortion or want it to be too freely available, the majority seem to realize that exceptions are necessary in the case of rape or incest or when the life of the mother is at risk or if the fetus seems to have serious problems. They also seem to want abortions to be available until viability, or until about two trimesters, which was the standard in Roe v. Wade before the US Supreme Court jettisoned it. Trying to enforce more restrictive measures results in voters coming out in force to reject those efforts, as we saw in Ohio, Kansas, Kentucky, Montana, and elsewhere.
[Read more…]

And here we go with the shutdown threats, again

We are now just one week from the deadline for yet another government shutdown on November 17 with no deal in sight, even though the last deal was meant to provide 45 days to arrive at one. Much of that time was spent selecting the new speaker and since then members of the GOP in the House of Representatives have been busy passing important bills such as reducing the salary of secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg to $1 a year because they don’t like some of the things he has done. Of course, that bill is going nowhere in the senate.

To get an idea of how dysfunctional things are, let us look at how the whole budget process should play out, something that is called ‘regular order’. It starts with the president submitting on the first Monday in February a budget for the fiscal year starting October 1. Note that 70% of the government’s expenditures, such as social security, is mandatory and outside the budget process so that only 30% of all government spending is covered by the budget. But those areas are crucial to many aspects of people’s lives.
[Read more…]