Trump needlessly alienates the allies he needs

Donald Trump is facing difficulties on many fronts, with many former allies and people who worked for him distancing themselves from him, though his hard core base seems to be intact, if possibly getting smaller. In such a situation, you would think that he would try to retain as many allies as possible.

But he is so thin-skinned that even the slightest perception of a criticism of him causes him to lash out. The latest target is Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader of the US Senate. It is McConnell who blocked many of the actions taken by Congress against Trump, such as the two impeachments. Trump should be grateful to him
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Parkland killer and the M’Naghten rule

In the penalty phase trial of the person who has pleaded guilty to carrying out the massacre of 17 people in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in February 2018, the defense has argued that he should not be executed but instead serve life in prison without parole because “his brain was irretrievably broken, through no fault of his own,” by his childhood and even while in his mother’s womb because she was a drug and alcohol addict, and thus he should not be held responsible for his actions.

The prosecution meanwhile has argued that he deserves to die for the “goal-directed, planned, systematic murder – mass murder – of 14 students, an athletic director, a teacher and a coach”. Note the word ‘deserves’. This raises once again the strong retributive strain that runs through the US legal system, the backward looking view hat people should be punished harshly because of who they are and what they have done, not for any benefit the punishment might provide for society. The defense is arguing that the killer was not acting because of decisions made freely by a normally functioning brain but was following the compulsions of a brain that was ‘broken’. In other words, both prosecution and defense are using ideas of free will but the defense is arguing that in this special case, he did not have it.
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Who knew that Finns were like Americans?

Some of you may be familiar with the recent fuss in Finland about the behavior of their prime minister Sanna Marin. She became prime minister in 2019 at age 34, becoming the youngest ever chief executive of a country.. Recently a video was released on social media of her dancing at a private party and clearly having a good time.

Then questions were raised in parliament about the appropriateness of her behavior and some even suggested that she may have taken drugs other than alcohol.
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Why was the US presidential transition such a mess?

The US may possibly have the longest transition period between presidential administrations in the world between the election and the swearing in of the new president. Presidential elections are held on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, which means that it falls between November 2nd and 8th, while the inauguration is held on January 20th of the following year, which gives a transition period of about two and a half months. That should be plenty to ensure a smooth transition and in general that is what happens.

The Trump-Biden transition was chaotic to say the least. This was mainly due to Trump spending much of that time denying that he had lost and fruitlessly plotting ways to stay in office, which meant that the normal pace of packing and storing had to be compressed into a frantic few days before the 20th. The revelations of the search warrant executed by the FBI on Mar-a-Lago shows how messy the transition was from the Trump to the Biden presidency.
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The great Paul Robeson

Paul Robeson (1898-1976) was a giant of a man, not just physically but by virtue of his many talents as a professional athlete, lawyer, singer, actor, and political activist. By rights, he should be much better known than he is in the US. One should find his name on public buildings and monuments but his political activism, his steadfast support of socialism and the working class, his anti-imperialism, and his relentless denunciations of American racism made him a pariah to the ruling elites in the US who tried their best to derail his career and ruin his life and they partially succeeded.

In Howard Bryant’s excellent book The Heritage that deals with black athletes and politics that I reviewed here, he described Robeson’s testimony in 1956 to the House Un-American Activities Committee that hauled him up before Congress and tried to berate him. But he was defiant in his testimony.
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It is so hard to get good legal help if you are a rotten client

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.
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Jon Sale, a former Watergate prosecutor who is now a prominent Florida defense attorney, told the Post he turned Trump down last week.
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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.
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Pence increases his distance from Trump

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.

IRS starts process to provide free online tax filing software

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.
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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.

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Einstein on nationalism

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.

Desperate times call for desperate excuses

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.
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