It’s been a while since the Pearls Before Swine strip had one of those puns with a convoluted set up that you know is coming from the first panel.
UPDATE: I realized that some people may not be old enough to know the song being referred to so here is a music video of the Village People doing their hit.
It seems clear that serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) lawyers are going to make a free speech defense in his trial for his role in the January 6th riot and efforts to overturn the election, arguing that all he did was talk and that others were the ones who did things. But legal experts say that that will not wash.
“The indictment very carefully ties the words of Trump and others to actions that show that Trump and others said the things they said with the intent to carry out criminal activity,” [former federal prosecutor Christine] Adams said. “Notwithstanding the First Amendment, people are charged all the time with crimes based on their statements to others for example if they’re involved with a Ponzi scheme, if the government can establish the requisite criminal intent in making those statements.”
…“This isn’t a reasonable argument, and it won’t fly in any court of law,” Anthony Michael Kreis, a Georgia State University law professor, told Salon.”The speech at the heart of the indictment informs the underlying criminal conspiracy and the indictment outlines conduct that was undertaken in furtherance of that conspiracy. The argument is without merit.”
Kreis pointed to the example of a person joking about robbing banks, which would be protected free speech since it lacks criminal intent. He added that a person can even explain why it should be lawful to rob banks or praise bank robbers, and that is protected political speech.
“However, a person cannot walk into a bank and say, ‘stick ’em up,’ and then cling to the First Amendment’s protections nor can two people plan to rob a bank and then claim they were just engaged in constitutionally protected thought,” Kreis said.
Adanté Pointer, an Oakland civil rights attorney, said that while everyone has a Constitutional right to express their opinions, you cross the line from “constitutionally-protected speech to criminal conduct” when your motive and intent are in furtherance of a criminal conspiracy.
“Things changed when he weaponized his baseless statements to promote lawless activity, to present false evidence to the courts, and to recruit and direct fake electors and other co-conspirators to carry out the fraud,” Pointer said.
Serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) Trump is that curious creature, an insecure narcissist. As a narcissist, he has an inflated view of himself, but because he is insecure, he needs to have his self-image constantly reinforced by others. That works for him when he is in a bubble of sycophants and adoring cult followers but that bubble gets pricked when he steps out into the real world.
Such was the case when he arrived for his arraignment in a courthouse in Washington DC on Thursday to be subjected to the little indignities that most of us would barely notice, as this article describes.
The shock of blond-grey hair was familiar. So was the blue suit, white shirt and red tie. So was the conspicuously assertive tug of the suit jacket.
But the Donald Trump who walked into courtroom 22 on Thursday was a Trump that the public never sees – meek, shrunken, stripped of bravado and any sense of control. And, quite possibly, scared.
[Read more…]
One of the common measures used to identify racial profiling by police is to look at the data about which drivers are more likely to be pulled over by police. Over and over again, we find that Black people are found to be far more likely to be stopped and ticketed over one pretext or another than white people.
State troopers in Connecticut found a novel way to demonstrate that they did not racially profile. What they did was to enter in a large number of fake tickets to white people into their databases to eliminate any differentials. No white people were actually ticketed.
Governor Ned Lamont said an investigation was being launched after a damning new audit found there is a “high likelihood” hundreds of Connecticut State Police troopers collectively falsified tens of thousands traffic ticket records over much of the past decade.
The findings, presented at a public meeting Wednesday, allege systemic violations of state law and that the misreporting skewed racial profiling data making it appear troopers ticketed more white drivers and fewer minority motorists than they really did.
…The report found there was a “high likelihood” at least 25,966 tickets were falsified between 2014 and 2021. Another 32,587 records over those years showed significant inaccuracies and auditors believe many of those are likely to be false as well.
The auditors emphasized their analysis was extremely conservative, and “the number of falsified records is likely larger than we confidently identified.”
The findings showed significant numbers of false and inaccurate tickets were submitted by up to nearly one quarter of the 1,301 troopers who wrote tickets for the state’s largest law enforcement agency during those years.
An inquiry has been launched.
On August 1st, the incandescent light bulb finally went away and hardly anyone noticed or said anything. Although you can still use them if you have them, it is illegal to manufacture or import or sell them. It is hard to remember that the proposal to do away with these bulbs created right wing outrage that the government was trying to eliminate people’s freedom of choice, even though its initial replacement of halogen bulbs and now LED bulbs are far more energy efficient. Neither the incandescents nor the halogens meet the strict new energy efficiency standards.
Incandescent bulbs create illumination by running an electric current through a filament that heats it until it glows. Edison’s first practical light bulb used a carbonized cotton thread for that purpose; modern bulbs use tungsten filaments in an inert gas.
But incandescents are not very efficient. Only roughly 5% of the energy used by an incandescent bulb produces light; the remaining 95% or so is lost as heat. This is why you let an incandescent bulb cool off before unscrewing it.
They also burn out frequently, requiring replacement roughly every year.
The light-emitting components in LED bulbs, by contrast, are manufactured via the same process used to make computer chips, which makes them extremely efficient. They generate almost no heat and use up to 90% less energy than incandescent bulbs while lasting up to 25 times longer, according to the Energy Department.
There seems to be an insatiable appetite for advice on how to improve one’s health and longevity, so it is not surprising that news items that claim to purport scientific research on the benefits of this or that diet or exercise or lifestyle choices appear regularly. The advice can sometimes be contradictory and thus can be confusing and lead people to tune out altogether, which is unfortunate. Since my personal motto is to act in moderation in all things, I tend to ignore recommendations that require taking extreme steps,
This article suggests eight lifestyle choices that can prolong life by as much as 20 years. Many of the recommendations seem like common sense, which appealed to me.
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Special Counsel Jack Smith issued his second indictment of serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) yesterday alleging four counts: conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding; and conspiracy against rights. You can read the 45-page document here. It makes for gripping reading.
Here is a clip of Smith’s brief statement lasting less than three minutes when announcing the indictment. He did not take any questions.
The document also alleges six unnamed co-conspirators but from the descriptions of their behavior, it should not be that hard to figure out who they are, and five have already been identified in media reports as Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, John Eastman, Ken Chesebro as well as the former US justice department official Jeff Clark. It is not clear if they will be indicted separately, but it is likely that they will at some point since they were very active in supporting SSAT’s absurd claims that he won the 2020 election and formed essential components of the conspiracy. Smith said in his statement that investigations into other people are continuing.
[Read more…]
As the Republican race for the nomination proceeds and serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) maintains his solid grip on the party’s voters, those Republicans who have wearied of SSAT and think that he will drag the party down again just like he did in 2018, 2020, and 2022 are starting to panic, especially as Ron DeSantis, their one-time hope to topple SSAT, seems to be floundering, There are fears within the party leadership that the crowded field of aspirants will enable SSAT to do what he did in 2016, to pick off each one until he is the last person standing. It is worse this time because he starts with a formidable lead.
This has led people like Mitt Romney to urge all the other candidates and donors to quickly coalesce around one person and for all the others to withdraw so that SSAT could be defeated. He did not specify which candidate should be the consensus one.
In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Romney, a Utah senator who was governor of Massachusetts before becoming the Republican nominee in 2012, said: “Despite Donald Trump’s apparent inevitability, a baker’s dozen [13] Republicans are hoping to become the party’s 2024 nominee for president.
“That is possible for any of them if the field narrows to a two-person race before Mr Trump has the nomination sewn up.
“For that to happen, Republican mega-donors and influencers – large and small – are going to have to do something they didn’t do in 2016: get candidates they support to agree to withdraw if and when their paths to the nomination are effectively closed.
“That decision day should be no later than, say, 26 February, the Monday following the contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.”
A new survey finds that nearly 70% of Americans believe in the existence of angels, more than believe in the devil or hell.
American’s belief in angels (69%) is about on par with belief in heaven and the power of prayer, but bested by belief in God or a higher power (79%). Fewer U.S. adults believe in the devil or Satan (56%), astrology (34%), reincarnation (34%), and that physical things can have spiritual energies, such as plants, rivers or crystals (42%).
…The large number of U.S. adults who say they believe in angels includes 84% of those with a religious affiliation — 94% of evangelical Protestants, 81% of mainline Protestants and 82% of Catholics — and 33% of those without one. And of those angel-believing religiously unaffiliated, that includes 2% of atheists, 25% of agnostics and 50% of those identified as “nothing in particular.”
Why are angels so appealing?
“People are yearning for something greater than themselves — beyond their own understanding,” said Jack Grogger, a chaplain for the Los Angeles Angels and a longtime Southern California fire captain who has aided many people in their gravest moments.
…“For a lot of people, angels are a lot safer to worship,” said Grogger, who also pastors a nondenominational church in Orange, California, and is a chaplain for the NHL’s Anaheim Ducks.
When people have some kind of lucky escape, the idea that their ‘guardian angel’ was looking out for them makes sense, especially if the angel had some relationship with them while alive.
Jennifer Goodwin of Oviedo, Florida, also is among the roughly seven in 10 U.S. adults who say they believe in angels. She isn’t sure if God exists and rejects the afterlife dichotomy of heaven and hell, but the recent deaths of her parents solidified her views on these celestial beings.
Goodwin believes her parents are still keeping an eye on the family — not in any physical way or as a supernatural apparition, but that they manifest in those moments when she feels a general sense of comfort.
“I think that they are around us, but it’s in a way that we can’t understand,” Goodwin said. “I don’t know what else to call it except an angel.”
I kind of get it. God and the devil are formidable figures, like the CEOs of major corporations whom one may find it hard to relate to. Angels, on the other hand, are more like a hotel concierge, someone whose job it is to help you and thus one can feel a personal relationship with them.
As we await what seems to be the inevitable new indictment of serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT), this time on concerning involvement in the January 6, 2021 riot, another major development is that Special Counsel Jack Smith has filed an update to the indictment filed earlier on SSAT’s treatment of confidential documents at Mar-a-Lago. One additional charge is that they now seem to have the Top Secret document that SSAT was waving around in front of people who did not have the security clearance to read it.
“Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this,” Trump says at one point, according to the transcript. “This was done by the military and given to me.” …
“Well, with Milley – uh, let me see that, I’ll show you an example. He said that I wanted to attack Iran. Isn’t that amazing? I have a big pile of papers, this thing just came up. Look. This was him,” Trump says, according to the transcript. “They presented me this – this is off the record, but – they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him. We looked at some. This was him. This wasn’t done by me, this was him.”
Trump continues: “All sorts of stuff – pages long, look. Wait a minute, let’s see here. I just found, isn’t that amazing? This totally wins my case, you know. Except it is like, highly confidential. Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this.”