Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a petition for Writ of Certiorari with the Supreme Court today, asking the court to hear Donald Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from prosecution before it is taken up by the District Court for Washington D.C. Trump had made the claim of immunity in the criminal case against him brought by the Special Prosecutor for attempting to overturn the election of 2024. Judge Tanya Chutkan ruled against Trump’s claim, and his lawyers announced they would appeal her decision. That move was widely seen as an attempt to delay Trump’s trial in Washington which has been scheduled to start on March 4 of next year.
First sentence should read that Smith "filed a petition for a Writ of Certiorari", not that he filed a writ. Only the court can issue the writ. Correction thanks to reader Chandra Bozelko.
The Trump argument that Smith is engaging in gamesmanship by avoiding and intermediary appeal is such a joke. If Trump felt his legal argument had merit, he would want his immunity proclaimed ASAP. Instead he wanted a lengthy appeals process guaranteed to delay the trial so he could avoid conviction by somehow being reelected.
SC Team moves way too fast for Team Trump. Team Trump had a window to file an appeal knowing it was highly likely the District Court Judge would find as she did.
Once again, time is an ally of those who think ahead and the enemy of those who fail to. Most teevee legal eagles still don't understand delay has known countermeasures. By getting this in front of SCOTUS so early it forces their hand as well, not just Team Trump's. And in an indirect way puts more pressure on Judge Cannon down in FL.
Thank you for highlighting that intentional error in the traitors post. The reader of that post has to be stupid to think anyone but the traitor wrote it.
According to Lawerence Tribe and Andrew Weissman on the Last Word tonight, (wow was that ever good), the court already has 5 votes to hear the case because they gave it 4 just to consider and they wouldn’t have done that if they weren’t going to hear it. Additionally they have never heard a case about presidential criminal immunity, which is what this is about, and they are going to want to place their mark on history, all judges do, look for it to not even be close. Too Fucking Cheeee! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👍👍😎
Sorry, Judith, I should have specified 5-4 in favor of Jack Smith's petition. I mean, how could at least 5 justices not rule in favor on something so clear cut?
Dobbs was very different and full of religious implications the hard Right Catholics on the Court claim to have religious objections on a very personal level (the extent to which they might be full of shit is beyond my purview).
in THIS case, there's a clear, never-before-challenged precedent. and it's a precedent they badly want to stand because if it doesn't stand, SCOTUS becomes largely irrelevant and Congress loses any teeth it might still have. I also can't see Roberts ruling for TFF. remember that he considers himself "The Institutionalist."
Depends on how big a bonus the justices are seeking from Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo, who already have Amy, Brett, Neil, Clarence and Sammy on the payroll. That’s a majority to make Trump an immune uber-citizen. But if the Fungible Five are holding out and seeking a bonus in addition to their usual payoffs in order to crown Trump, Crow & Leonard Inc. will have to dip into the cash reserves in the Caymans and Deutsche Bank.
The conman criminal who's spent his entire adult life manipulating the legal system to subvert justice and crush those less wealthly than himself cries "no fair!". Boo frickin Hoo.
“That’s where we are again, folks. Our future is once again in the hands of the Supreme Court.”
Except that now there are five ultra right wing ideologues on the court who have demonstrated that in their view, stare decisis is for thee, but not for them...
Let's find out if they're ready to plunge further into the Trumpian maelstrom, with their own immediate future's credibility - meaning, all opinions issued in June 2024 and perhaps earlier - being up for grabs, an even more routine subject for stunned, outraged mockery.
You might think the horrific example currently on offer from the Texas Supreme Court - not just some onery Justice of the Peace in the wastelands beyond Amarillo, mind you, but the Head Honchos y Abogados de Tejas! - spurring the flight to a safe abortion by a desperate pregnant woman, caught in a heart-breaking biological crisis about her prospects for both the potentially stillborn child, ongoing serious threats to her own physical and psychological health, as well as the capacity for any future pregnancies, would get their full attention!
Well, we are going to learn in the next weeks how far the Federalist Society Five are willing to go.
Upvoted for a concise summary of what authoritarians want, must state severe reservations for the implication a bloated buffoonish self-destructive nitwit like Trump won't inherently generate a counter-balancing set of movements that not only thwart that goal , but "clean out the Augean stables"!
Well, if it's taken to its ultimate result, P01135890 would eliminate the supreme court, too in a new administration. Hope they take that into CONsideration!
he wouldn't be the first president to ignore them...that'd be Jackson (who, I maintain, was a sociopath). if he did that, the legislature would be next.
I'm wondering how many of his people who actually KNEW what his stated plans were would still be supporting him. to them (at least at rallies), the one-day fascist thing sounds cool, I'm inclined to think. if they knew the actual implications, it's possible a lot of them would consider that their "bridge too far."
this in no way implies that, prior to being elected, TFF had any idea who or what Jackson was, other than the guy on a twenty-dollar bill.
and why isn't he GONE?
I want a twenty-dollar bill with Duke Ellington. Louis Armstrong on the ten (fuck Hamilton, he's been there long enough; besides, he's got his own hit show).
None of us are a Perfect Seven, like t-rump is: powerful, old, rich, white, gentile, heterosexual and male. So we don't get away with much of anything.
You can't also think of any counter-examples, really?
Where all sorts of much younger, much less wealthy, non-white, non-gentile, non-hetero, men or women "got away" with frauds, crimes, scandalous and egregious snubbing of the rule of law, including inventing crooked scams, schemes, even murder-for-hire plots, and even committing that sort of thing while in a prominent business, or academia?
It's true the scope for "getting away with it" (for awhile, even decades as in the case of Trump, excepting large financial punishments through fines for some of his frauds) is much amplified by being in the categories you list - but that hardly means other crooks and fraudsters don't do their damndest to give them competition in corruption.
And it's a fraction of the some 340 million US citizens in any case, remember that as well.
Thanks again Lucian Truscott for putting on your coat of shining armour called Truth and wading into the thickets of incredibly complicated information to bring us the essential kernel of fact that we can understand. Or this could be like Hercule's 11th task, struggling his way to his goal, fighting impossible odds (and monsters), plucking the golden apples of the Hesperides to bring home?
One way or another, love your cogent analyses of the hideous existential threats facing your democracy (and mine, too, probably.)
Brilliant. First, Drebeen’s name on that petition means Trump's chances of conviction went WAY up. Plus it will allow him to take SCOTUS’ temperature. All these cases are headed to SCOTUS.
Indeed, the Court's taking the cert for the case is incredibly fast, and it's also an indicator that they're going to rule on it as they have in the past-because they have a previous case not only with Nixon but with Trump as well-in Trump v. Vance, the court ruled that he was not immune from investigation by a Grand Jury, nor immune from charges stemming from that jury:
I have in the past derided this court, (as most of us have) but this one I think is going to be a slam dunk for Smith. The court does not take their powers lightly and they're going to make a statement that nobody, even them, is above the law, and that Trump had better shut up while he can.
It might be a different time, a different court, but if rule of law means anything to this country and this legal system they will rule for Smith.
Donald Trump can't throw out 200 years worth of Constitution just because he's a crook, and neither could Richard Nixon.
I'm just wondering how long it will take after the 20th that the court makes their decision.
I think you are right Mary, mid January, this is a slam dunk, with the most experienced Solicitor in the nation arguing for us. This is a chance for the Roberts court to set a mark they won’t be ashamed of, in front of everybody, they are not going to want to screw it up.
Because he thinks like a mafia don, that 'offer that they can't refuse' is a real thing. The Supreme Court justices know that they will be on the bench long after any case involving Donald Trump is presented, and they can afford to tell him off.
They don't owe him the time of day, because in the paraphrased words of Chevy Chase, "We're the Supreme Court and you're not."
I trust Smith, but the corruption of the SC is frightening. He is seriously gambling on them doing the right thing when Dobbs showed them to be bald face liars, and Thomas has made clear how easily they can be bought.
Wonderfully informative column; thank you. I love (make that **love**) Nixon's lawyer having the sense or instinct for self-preservation to argue that he was being ordered by Nixon to make the claim that Nixon had equivalent legal authority as Louis XIV. Trump obviously thinks that he, too, stands above all the rest of us commoners. How about feeding AI the Mark Twain novel and then have AI give us "A Queens Bridge-and-Tunnel Poseur in King Louis' Court." Politics aside, the famous painting of Louis XIV shows a monarch whose clothes fit him. Is there any record in all of human history of an authoritarian who dressed, as does Trump, like such a schlepper?
When Louis XIV was born, France celebrated as there would no fighting over the succession to the throne, but when Louis died, France was too tired and worn out from supporting his lavish lifestyle and endless wars all over Europe to care. If anything, the commoners were glad he was gone, but then came 1789…
Well, sure, but that took about 70 years. We don't have that long! (And that revolution spawned a whole new series of atrocities and amoral opportunists, so "meet the new boss, same as the old boss.")
well, if we leave the realm of politics, the schlumpy guys start to proliferate. right off the bat I get John Ford...major authoritarian in Hollywood. and, having promised a nice-sized list, I find myself defeated.
I also have to say that, as a Bridge-and-Tunnel guy myself, that cliche feels both a little old and even a tiny bit offensive.
and, looking at the place NYC (especially Manhattan) has become, I'd say it's time to retire that cliche. I wouldn't want to live anywhere but here, and I've lived in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
I should have been clearer about the bridge-and-tunnel sneer, which I remember from the '60s and '70s being used by owners, doormen, and first patrons of "hip" establishments to describe the shnooks who invariably followed those whose very presence made place 'hip" for a while. What I now read is that much of Manhattan residential real estate has been taken over by mostly-absentee condo owners, which brings to mind Gertrude Stein's famous lament that the Oakland in which she grew up no longer existed: "There's no there, there."
I get it. actually, the folks I was really objecting to were the assholes who originally decided that the Bridge-and-Tunnel crowd was somehow lesser than native Manhattanites. I confess to having a similar sense myself, once upon a time, when I'd meet these private school kids who seemed much hipper and smarter than I was. of course, the fact of their having gone to private school might have had something to do with it.
however, it still burns my ass a little every time someone uses "Queens" as the punchline for jokes. and they do.
As much as Martin Scorsese, Don Rickles, and Tony Bennett gave a good name to the Borough in which they grew up, Bernard Madoff, Andrew Cuomo, and especially Deranged Defendant Donald Trump (DDDT) besmirch its reputation. However, easily outshining even as loathsome a creature as DDDT, there's 34-56 107th Street in Queens, the home of Louis Armstrong and his wife Lucille Wilson from 1943 until Satchmo's death in 1971. Long after DDDT's bray has faded from the world's aural memory, people will be listening to Armstrong singing with Ella Fitzgerald and ripping solos like the ones on his 1928 "West End Blues."
LOL, you give the external world an awful lot of power with that hyperbolic metaphor.
And Ukrainians who are battered and mass murdered by the genocidal Russian invaders must be stunned by the fragility of Americans by comparison with their plight, for instance, or Israelis dealing with terrorist armies on several borders, literally a few tens of miles away.
Brave Ukrainians are now fighting for their freedom, democracy, and the fundamental values and principles of the sovereign nation for which they stand.
Millions of families are suffering terrible misery as a result of the current state of affairs which has shocked much of the world.
REVIVED SOLDIERS Ukraine is a well-established 501(c)(3) U.S. charity that has been providing medical and humanitarian help to Ukraine for many years
We are now working around the clock to deliver medical equipment and supplies, arrange humanitarian aid, and provide medical treatment to injured Ukrainians.
***** Warning - the photos are gut-wrenching, showing the terrible cost of a real kind of Hell unleashed by the aggressive war of Putin against both civilians and of course the soldiers.
I was searching for a way to donate in a way to help Ukraine, but that wouldn't also subsidize heavy-handed Christian (or any other religious groups) exploiting Ukraine's misery to engage in frightening people with threats of "Eternal damnation in a Hell after death," found this!
"Feed the Hungry" was soliciting me via USPS mail and sounded good - until I read their bible-thumping spiel, that is.
Razom is one charity recommended by Timothy Snyder, Ukraine expert who writes a Substack called Thinking About. There are others, and I haven’t received any direct mail solicitations from any of them even after donating.
I’ve been giving there thanks to Timothy’s recommendation, I’ve heard from the president himself thanking me, sure I know it’s probably auto generated, but they know who their friends are and I want to be counted as one.
I have read several books by Prof. Snyder, one in particular I highly recommend to everyone interested in "how we got here," Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010) - Here's the Kirkus Review --- A difficult book to read in terms of the sheer scale of the atrocities, atrocities consciously deployed as "strategy and tactics of genocide and/or simple revenge, setting feuds, etc."
BLOODLANDS
EUROPE BETWEEN HITLER AND STALIN
by Timothy Snyder ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 12, 2010
A significant work of staggering figures and scholarship.
A chillingly systematic study of the mass murder mutually perpetrated by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
From 1933 to 1945, 14 million people were murdered between the two regimes, as Stalin and Hitler consolidated power, jointly occupied Poland and waged war against each other. The region of mass slaughter was largely contained between the two, from central Poland to western Russia and including Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states—a region Snyder (History/Yale Univ.; The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Duke, 2008, etc.) terms the “bloodlands.” The author asserts that the fuzzy understanding of the death camps has skewed the truth about the mass killing, only hinting at their terrifying extent. “The horror of the twentieth century is thought to be located in the camps,” he writes. “But the concentration camps are not where most of the victims of National Socialism and Stalinism died.” Half of the killings within this period were caused by starvation, as a result of Stalin’s starvation policy of the early ’30s (a five-year plan of “industrial development at the price of popular misery”) and Hitler’s deliberate starvation of Soviet prisoners of war. Snyder traces how Stalin’s focus on collectivization and famine “had unwittingly performed much of the ideological work that helped Hitler come to power.” Stalin had already been secretly practicing mass murder on the Polish population during the Great Terror, well before the “large open pogrom” of Kristallnacht. Hitler recognized their joint “common desire to get rid of the old equilibrium” and neatly divide and destroy Poland at the Molotov-Ribbentrop line. His Hunger Plan was followed by massive depopulation in the forms of deportation, shooting, forced labor and, eventually, the death factories. Snyder devotes ample space to the partisan efforts, the incineration of Warsaw and Stalin’s eager postwar ethnic-cleansing sweep. In the concluding chapter, “Humanity,” the author urges readers to join him in a clear-eyed reexamination of this comparative history of mass murder and widespread suffering.
Hmm, I should check Alterman's book out, especially as I finally figured out how to reconfigure
E-books from Hennepin County Library's truly massive store (thank the Cosmos, the Renaissance humanists, bibliophiles, the plain damn common sense PEOPLE who realize education / literacy is essential for every possible reason imaginable, so they pressure for a larger budget, volunteer, donate $$, the works) so it's actually copacetic to read that way...
And mainly because no matter where anyone locates themselves on the I/P farrago of false trails and frenzied fakery very occasionally lit up by sincere peace plans and progress - very good thing to listen to dedicated scholars who can provide context. I remain willing to be persuaded I am mistaken, it's valuable!
Yeah, but the fact of the matter is that Biden wouldn't do any of that stuff, so it's a moot point. Unfortunately, maybe, in that I'd like to see him lock up Drumpf in a dungeon so deep and dark he can never escape to again threaten the life of the country.
No matter how this turns out we all know there is no rule of law. Wealthy and well connected people are treated with maximum deference while non wealthy and non well connected people get thrown in jail immediately or worse.
You speak with cynicism that isn't proper in this context.
The court will uphold their end of the bargain.
If they don't, they'll have Donald Trump as the only person in the US and in our country's history to evade justice by being too good to prosecute.
It's not happening that way. They would not dare, because if they do, the Senate will begin official impeachment hearings of every single justice that voted to throw out the rule of law by allowing Trump to become king.
As for wealthy people not getting put in prison: Bernie Madoff ring a bell? Martha Stewart?
First sentence should read that Smith "filed a petition for a Writ of Certiorari", not that he filed a writ. Only the court can issue the writ. Correction thanks to reader Chandra Bozelko.
The Trump argument that Smith is engaging in gamesmanship by avoiding and intermediary appeal is such a joke. If Trump felt his legal argument had merit, he would want his immunity proclaimed ASAP. Instead he wanted a lengthy appeals process guaranteed to delay the trial so he could avoid conviction by somehow being reelected.
SC Team moves way too fast for Team Trump. Team Trump had a window to file an appeal knowing it was highly likely the District Court Judge would find as she did.
Once again, time is an ally of those who think ahead and the enemy of those who fail to. Most teevee legal eagles still don't understand delay has known countermeasures. By getting this in front of SCOTUS so early it forces their hand as well, not just Team Trump's. And in an indirect way puts more pressure on Judge Cannon down in FL.
And it should be noted, no matter what his attorneys say; he is NOT President Trump.
RIGHT!!!
Thank you for highlighting that intentional error in the traitors post. The reader of that post has to be stupid to think anyone but the traitor wrote it.
Should be 9 to zip, unless Ginni gets a vote.
Should be 9 to zip is right, Doug. But I won't be surprised if it's 5-4.
According to Lawerence Tribe and Andrew Weissman on the Last Word tonight, (wow was that ever good), the court already has 5 votes to hear the case because they gave it 4 just to consider and they wouldn’t have done that if they weren’t going to hear it. Additionally they have never heard a case about presidential criminal immunity, which is what this is about, and they are going to want to place their mark on history, all judges do, look for it to not even be close. Too Fucking Cheeee! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👍👍😎
I dunno. Drumpf expects "his" judges to do what he wants, that's why they were selected.
Yes, you are right on. Lawrence O'Donnell's show last night was incredible!
Yes, great show! I love it when Lawrence has them on. They got some really good digs in. 😃
5-4 in whose favor?
Sorry, Judith, I should have specified 5-4 in favor of Jack Smith's petition. I mean, how could at least 5 justices not rule in favor on something so clear cut?
Dobbs...
Come on, Runfast, think positive here!!😁
Dobbs was very different and full of religious implications the hard Right Catholics on the Court claim to have religious objections on a very personal level (the extent to which they might be full of shit is beyond my purview).
in THIS case, there's a clear, never-before-challenged precedent. and it's a precedent they badly want to stand because if it doesn't stand, SCOTUS becomes largely irrelevant and Congress loses any teeth it might still have. I also can't see Roberts ruling for TFF. remember that he considers himself "The Institutionalist."
I hope so. It'll take one more besides Roberts. Gorsuch, maybe?
Sad, but possibly true.
Depends on how big a bonus the justices are seeking from Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo, who already have Amy, Brett, Neil, Clarence and Sammy on the payroll. That’s a majority to make Trump an immune uber-citizen. But if the Fungible Five are holding out and seeking a bonus in addition to their usual payoffs in order to crown Trump, Crow & Leonard Inc. will have to dip into the cash reserves in the Caymans and Deutsche Bank.
An excellent response, Jonathan, and quite possibly more accurate than anyone could imagine!!
Ginni needs to be held accountable for aiding in the insurrection.
yes, but I'm not holding my breath.
The conman criminal who's spent his entire adult life manipulating the legal system to subvert justice and crush those less wealthly than himself cries "no fair!". Boo frickin Hoo.
“That’s where we are again, folks. Our future is once again in the hands of the Supreme Court.”
Except that now there are five ultra right wing ideologues on the court who have demonstrated that in their view, stare decisis is for thee, but not for them...
Let's find out if they're ready to plunge further into the Trumpian maelstrom, with their own immediate future's credibility - meaning, all opinions issued in June 2024 and perhaps earlier - being up for grabs, an even more routine subject for stunned, outraged mockery.
You might think the horrific example currently on offer from the Texas Supreme Court - not just some onery Justice of the Peace in the wastelands beyond Amarillo, mind you, but the Head Honchos y Abogados de Tejas! - spurring the flight to a safe abortion by a desperate pregnant woman, caught in a heart-breaking biological crisis about her prospects for both the potentially stillborn child, ongoing serious threats to her own physical and psychological health, as well as the capacity for any future pregnancies, would get their full attention!
Well, we are going to learn in the next weeks how far the Federalist Society Five are willing to go.
More than their credibility is on the line, after all, with an authoritarian in charge, who needs a Supreme Court?
Upvoted for a concise summary of what authoritarians want, must state severe reservations for the implication a bloated buffoonish self-destructive nitwit like Trump won't inherently generate a counter-balancing set of movements that not only thwart that goal , but "clean out the Augean stables"!
Well, if it's taken to its ultimate result, P01135890 would eliminate the supreme court, too in a new administration. Hope they take that into CONsideration!
he wouldn't be the first president to ignore them...that'd be Jackson (who, I maintain, was a sociopath). if he did that, the legislature would be next.
I'm wondering how many of his people who actually KNEW what his stated plans were would still be supporting him. to them (at least at rallies), the one-day fascist thing sounds cool, I'm inclined to think. if they knew the actual implications, it's possible a lot of them would consider that their "bridge too far."
the above is an example of "wishful thinking."
And Jackson is the orange julius caesar's idol!
not for no reason.
this in no way implies that, prior to being elected, TFF had any idea who or what Jackson was, other than the guy on a twenty-dollar bill.
and why isn't he GONE?
I want a twenty-dollar bill with Duke Ellington. Louis Armstrong on the ten (fuck Hamilton, he's been there long enough; besides, he's got his own hit show).
I'm sure that is true, but somebody told him something so he adopted AJ as his role model!
Agree 100% with your ideas for the 20...remember when it was supposed to be changed to Harriet Tubman? P01135890 put the kiebash on that!
I remembered that as well.
but hey...if the republic survives past next year, the issue needs to be revisited.
He is a private citizen. Just like you and me. What would happen to us if we showed the same dismissive arrogance????
It would never happen as you and I could never afford the attorney fees for endless appeals,
When SC Smith's case wins, the bill for court costs (ALL of them) should be given to the orange traitor.
None of us are a Perfect Seven, like t-rump is: powerful, old, rich, white, gentile, heterosexual and male. So we don't get away with much of anything.
You can't also think of any counter-examples, really?
Where all sorts of much younger, much less wealthy, non-white, non-gentile, non-hetero, men or women "got away" with frauds, crimes, scandalous and egregious snubbing of the rule of law, including inventing crooked scams, schemes, even murder-for-hire plots, and even committing that sort of thing while in a prominent business, or academia?
It's true the scope for "getting away with it" (for awhile, even decades as in the case of Trump, excepting large financial punishments through fines for some of his frauds) is much amplified by being in the categories you list - but that hardly means other crooks and fraudsters don't do their damndest to give them competition in corruption.
And it's a fraction of the some 340 million US citizens in any case, remember that as well.
I don't recommend trying.
Thanks again Lucian Truscott for putting on your coat of shining armour called Truth and wading into the thickets of incredibly complicated information to bring us the essential kernel of fact that we can understand. Or this could be like Hercule's 11th task, struggling his way to his goal, fighting impossible odds (and monsters), plucking the golden apples of the Hesperides to bring home?
One way or another, love your cogent analyses of the hideous existential threats facing your democracy (and mine, too, probably.)
Brilliant. First, Drebeen’s name on that petition means Trump's chances of conviction went WAY up. Plus it will allow him to take SCOTUS’ temperature. All these cases are headed to SCOTUS.
This fever is for them to break. Like a patient with the capacity to save himself and others, but may decide not to.
Indeed, the Court's taking the cert for the case is incredibly fast, and it's also an indicator that they're going to rule on it as they have in the past-because they have a previous case not only with Nixon but with Trump as well-in Trump v. Vance, the court ruled that he was not immune from investigation by a Grand Jury, nor immune from charges stemming from that jury:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/07/10/supreme-court-vance-immunity/
I have in the past derided this court, (as most of us have) but this one I think is going to be a slam dunk for Smith. The court does not take their powers lightly and they're going to make a statement that nobody, even them, is above the law, and that Trump had better shut up while he can.
It might be a different time, a different court, but if rule of law means anything to this country and this legal system they will rule for Smith.
Donald Trump can't throw out 200 years worth of Constitution just because he's a crook, and neither could Richard Nixon.
I'm just wondering how long it will take after the 20th that the court makes their decision.
I'm betting probably in mid-January. Any takers?
I think you are right Mary, mid January, this is a slam dunk, with the most experienced Solicitor in the nation arguing for us. This is a chance for the Roberts court to set a mark they won’t be ashamed of, in front of everybody, they are not going to want to screw it up.
So many optimists! I still ponder how Drumpf picked these justices to serve his own ends, and will now expect them to follow through.
Because he thinks like a mafia don, that 'offer that they can't refuse' is a real thing. The Supreme Court justices know that they will be on the bench long after any case involving Donald Trump is presented, and they can afford to tell him off.
They don't owe him the time of day, because in the paraphrased words of Chevy Chase, "We're the Supreme Court and you're not."
I sure hope you're right, Mary ("slam dunk for Smith"). It's time they FINALLY made a correct decision.
I trust Smith, but the corruption of the SC is frightening. He is seriously gambling on them doing the right thing when Dobbs showed them to be bald face liars, and Thomas has made clear how easily they can be bought.
He may (and should) recuse himself.
HA!!!
He showed us his stripes when he was the sole vote to support Drumpf's lies about the 2020 election being stolen.
Wonderfully informative column; thank you. I love (make that **love**) Nixon's lawyer having the sense or instinct for self-preservation to argue that he was being ordered by Nixon to make the claim that Nixon had equivalent legal authority as Louis XIV. Trump obviously thinks that he, too, stands above all the rest of us commoners. How about feeding AI the Mark Twain novel and then have AI give us "A Queens Bridge-and-Tunnel Poseur in King Louis' Court." Politics aside, the famous painting of Louis XIV shows a monarch whose clothes fit him. Is there any record in all of human history of an authoritarian who dressed, as does Trump, like such a schlepper?
LOL!
When Louis XIV was born, France celebrated as there would no fighting over the succession to the throne, but when Louis died, France was too tired and worn out from supporting his lavish lifestyle and endless wars all over Europe to care. If anything, the commoners were glad he was gone, but then came 1789…
Well, sure, but that took about 70 years. We don't have that long! (And that revolution spawned a whole new series of atrocities and amoral opportunists, so "meet the new boss, same as the old boss.")
well, if we leave the realm of politics, the schlumpy guys start to proliferate. right off the bat I get John Ford...major authoritarian in Hollywood. and, having promised a nice-sized list, I find myself defeated.
I also have to say that, as a Bridge-and-Tunnel guy myself, that cliche feels both a little old and even a tiny bit offensive.
and, looking at the place NYC (especially Manhattan) has become, I'd say it's time to retire that cliche. I wouldn't want to live anywhere but here, and I've lived in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
I should have been clearer about the bridge-and-tunnel sneer, which I remember from the '60s and '70s being used by owners, doormen, and first patrons of "hip" establishments to describe the shnooks who invariably followed those whose very presence made place 'hip" for a while. What I now read is that much of Manhattan residential real estate has been taken over by mostly-absentee condo owners, which brings to mind Gertrude Stein's famous lament that the Oakland in which she grew up no longer existed: "There's no there, there."
I get it. actually, the folks I was really objecting to were the assholes who originally decided that the Bridge-and-Tunnel crowd was somehow lesser than native Manhattanites. I confess to having a similar sense myself, once upon a time, when I'd meet these private school kids who seemed much hipper and smarter than I was. of course, the fact of their having gone to private school might have had something to do with it.
however, it still burns my ass a little every time someone uses "Queens" as the punchline for jokes. and they do.
As much as Martin Scorsese, Don Rickles, and Tony Bennett gave a good name to the Borough in which they grew up, Bernard Madoff, Andrew Cuomo, and especially Deranged Defendant Donald Trump (DDDT) besmirch its reputation. However, easily outshining even as loathsome a creature as DDDT, there's 34-56 107th Street in Queens, the home of Louis Armstrong and his wife Lucille Wilson from 1943 until Satchmo's death in 1971. Long after DDDT's bray has faded from the world's aural memory, people will be listening to Armstrong singing with Ella Fitzgerald and ripping solos like the ones on his 1928 "West End Blues."
Trying to stay positive and hopeful as this orange-ish man puts the whole country through Hell.
LOL, you give the external world an awful lot of power with that hyperbolic metaphor.
And Ukrainians who are battered and mass murdered by the genocidal Russian invaders must be stunned by the fragility of Americans by comparison with their plight, for instance, or Israelis dealing with terrorist armies on several borders, literally a few tens of miles away.
https://www.rsukraine.org/
EXCERPT -
Brave Ukrainians are now fighting for their freedom, democracy, and the fundamental values and principles of the sovereign nation for which they stand.
Millions of families are suffering terrible misery as a result of the current state of affairs which has shocked much of the world.
REVIVED SOLDIERS Ukraine is a well-established 501(c)(3) U.S. charity that has been providing medical and humanitarian help to Ukraine for many years
We are now working around the clock to deliver medical equipment and supplies, arrange humanitarian aid, and provide medical treatment to injured Ukrainians.
***** Warning - the photos are gut-wrenching, showing the terrible cost of a real kind of Hell unleashed by the aggressive war of Putin against both civilians and of course the soldiers.
I was searching for a way to donate in a way to help Ukraine, but that wouldn't also subsidize heavy-handed Christian (or any other religious groups) exploiting Ukraine's misery to engage in frightening people with threats of "Eternal damnation in a Hell after death," found this!
"Feed the Hungry" was soliciting me via USPS mail and sounded good - until I read their bible-thumping spiel, that is.
Razom is one charity recommended by Timothy Snyder, Ukraine expert who writes a Substack called Thinking About. There are others, and I haven’t received any direct mail solicitations from any of them even after donating.
I’ve been giving there thanks to Timothy’s recommendation, I’ve heard from the president himself thanking me, sure I know it’s probably auto generated, but they know who their friends are and I want to be counted as one.
I have given to them several times.
Thanks Carol, useful for future reference.
I have read several books by Prof. Snyder, one in particular I highly recommend to everyone interested in "how we got here," Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010) - Here's the Kirkus Review --- A difficult book to read in terms of the sheer scale of the atrocities, atrocities consciously deployed as "strategy and tactics of genocide and/or simple revenge, setting feuds, etc."
BLOODLANDS
EUROPE BETWEEN HITLER AND STALIN
by Timothy Snyder ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 12, 2010
A significant work of staggering figures and scholarship.
A chillingly systematic study of the mass murder mutually perpetrated by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
From 1933 to 1945, 14 million people were murdered between the two regimes, as Stalin and Hitler consolidated power, jointly occupied Poland and waged war against each other. The region of mass slaughter was largely contained between the two, from central Poland to western Russia and including Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states—a region Snyder (History/Yale Univ.; The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Duke, 2008, etc.) terms the “bloodlands.” The author asserts that the fuzzy understanding of the death camps has skewed the truth about the mass killing, only hinting at their terrifying extent. “The horror of the twentieth century is thought to be located in the camps,” he writes. “But the concentration camps are not where most of the victims of National Socialism and Stalinism died.” Half of the killings within this period were caused by starvation, as a result of Stalin’s starvation policy of the early ’30s (a five-year plan of “industrial development at the price of popular misery”) and Hitler’s deliberate starvation of Soviet prisoners of war. Snyder traces how Stalin’s focus on collectivization and famine “had unwittingly performed much of the ideological work that helped Hitler come to power.” Stalin had already been secretly practicing mass murder on the Polish population during the Great Terror, well before the “large open pogrom” of Kristallnacht. Hitler recognized their joint “common desire to get rid of the old equilibrium” and neatly divide and destroy Poland at the Molotov-Ribbentrop line. His Hunger Plan was followed by massive depopulation in the forms of deportation, shooting, forced labor and, eventually, the death factories. Snyder devotes ample space to the partisan efforts, the incineration of Warsaw and Stalin’s eager postwar ethnic-cleansing sweep. In the concluding chapter, “Humanity,” the author urges readers to join him in a clear-eyed reexamination of this comparative history of mass murder and widespread suffering.
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/timothy-snyder/bloodlands/
it IS a great book. and it IS very hard to read.
but it's definitely essential.
today, I began Eric Alterman's book about the US and Israel. it's called "We are Not One."
Hmm, I should check Alterman's book out, especially as I finally figured out how to reconfigure
E-books from Hennepin County Library's truly massive store (thank the Cosmos, the Renaissance humanists, bibliophiles, the plain damn common sense PEOPLE who realize education / literacy is essential for every possible reason imaginable, so they pressure for a larger budget, volunteer, donate $$, the works) so it's actually copacetic to read that way...
And mainly because no matter where anyone locates themselves on the I/P farrago of false trails and frenzied fakery very occasionally lit up by sincere peace plans and progress - very good thing to listen to dedicated scholars who can provide context. I remain willing to be persuaded I am mistaken, it's valuable!
i wish i could recall (i tried looking) to credit the posting on Xitter that essentially said:
jack smith has crafted a smooth move. if the s.c. rules that trump is immune then biden can do everything and more of what trump has done.
biden can declare that he wins in 2024, he can weaponize the doj, he can remove any begative media, and more.
"…he can remove any [n]egative media, and more"—"more" presumably including … and then shoot trump on Fifth Avenue.
Yeah, but the fact of the matter is that Biden wouldn't do any of that stuff, so it's a moot point. Unfortunately, maybe, in that I'd like to see him lock up Drumpf in a dungeon so deep and dark he can never escape to again threaten the life of the country.
Yep
yeah, but he won't.
yeah,
but dont you see the point is that if the s.c. considers this possibility might occur, they will likely rule against allowing trumps immunity.
I got the point. MY point is that SCOTUS finds for TFF, there's still no way Biden would go rogue.
here it is:
https://x.com/BaddCompani/status/1734284978341752857?s=20
Both the court and the nation is in peril, this is one ruling that can break both.
No matter how this turns out we all know there is no rule of law. Wealthy and well connected people are treated with maximum deference while non wealthy and non well connected people get thrown in jail immediately or worse.
You speak with cynicism that isn't proper in this context.
The court will uphold their end of the bargain.
If they don't, they'll have Donald Trump as the only person in the US and in our country's history to evade justice by being too good to prosecute.
It's not happening that way. They would not dare, because if they do, the Senate will begin official impeachment hearings of every single justice that voted to throw out the rule of law by allowing Trump to become king.
As for wealthy people not getting put in prison: Bernie Madoff ring a bell? Martha Stewart?
There's a few here and there I guess. That doesn't change the fact that the other 99% get away.
What? You think this Senate is really going to impeach a SC Justice? Or it would gain a conviction if it did? With all due respect, that is a fantasy.