Wednesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, March 22, 2023
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55 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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To any Guinness fans: Try Bellhaven Black
Amazing.
That is all.
@EddieInCA:
I’ll look for it.
This seems like a big effing deal (and I am not being sarcastic). When a Federal judge uses the phrase “prima facie showing that the former president had committed criminal violations,” shit is going down.
Sources: Special counsel claims Trump deliberately misled his attorneys about classified documents, judge wrote
Of course, it’s been obvious he’s been lying about his illegal retention of classified documents (and everything else, really). Now we see a judge revoking attorney-client privilege and determining the attorney’s notes and other documentation are subject to the crime-fraud exemption and therefore the attorney must turn them over because Trump lied to the attorney as well.
I’ve been quite busy and so missed that Project Veritas has ousted the execrable James O’Keefe. O’Keefe has apparently tapped the rubes into a new con, which he is calling “Uber, for journalists.” It’s crowdsourced mayhem in the form of “citizen reporters,” which he launched last week.
Some time ago I think I related the story of a “numberless” credit card I got. The bank hyped it as super-secure, as there were no numbers printed on the front. Alas, they are in the back.
Yesterday I got a replacement card from a different bank, as the old one expired tow months from now. This one’s not hyped. It also has no numbers on the front. I was surprised to see it has no numbers on the back, either. It has my name printed on the back, a phone number to get assistance, some legalese about the card, a magnetic strip, and a QR code. That’s it. If I need the card number, it’s on the bank app.
I’m not sure how I feel about it.
@Jen:
That’s ironic, because one of the things O’Keefe was accused of was blowing Project Veritas money on “Black Uber,” the premium Uber ride.
@Sleeping Dog:
They appear to sell it in The Beer Store in Salem, NH.
Benito wants to get kinky at court.
From the piece: “..he was deeply anxious that any special arrangements – like making his first court appearance by video link or skulking into the courthouse – would make him look weak or like a loser.”
Called it.
@Kathy:
The latest I read is that he wants to be handcuffed and marched into the courthouse, so as to inflame his fans, all the while grinning.
@CSK:
Salem (groan), next time I head to my brother’s, I’ll stop. I need to make a stop at the local exotic brew outlet, I can see if they have it there.
No indictment today. The grand jury’s been told not to convene.
@CSK:
“Indictment tomorrow. There’s always an indictment tomorrow. What? Someone has to keep some damn perspective around here! Sooner or later, BOOM!”
Attributed to Susan Ivanova.
Why are we arming middle schools?
https://www.foxnews.com/us/three-teens-shot-north-carolina-middle-school-2-bodies-found-hours-first-victim-rushed-er
Steve
@steve:
That is very strange wording in the headline.
I have known one true narcissist in my life.
He lived with it fairly well. Went into communications. Worked for a high-profile non-profit focused on disaster relief. During the Katrina aftermath he was on CNN 8 times a day for weeks. Good at it.
And he was really, really good at his day job.
He was scarily charismatic. Got fouled up and disabled by alcoholism. That screwed up his career.
A fairly good person all things considered. He was OP on charisma, like weirdly so. Beyond booze his biggest problem was he was a total player in regards to dating.
It is strange hanging out with a true narcissist. He was off-the-charts charismatic. If he engaged with you it was beasties forever vibes.
And subtle, too, looking back.
Dave was not just your friend, buddy, pal – he was your best fucking friend who could call you up at 3 AM to go on an adventure.
If you watched natural disaster news in the mid 2000s Dave was the spokesperson for major non-profit x and was all over the news.
Apparently, Trump wants and desires the full perp walk with handcuffs. He wants to look like a martyr, a political prisoner.
Folks in charge are all “No sir. That is not necessary. We just need you to show up at this address in the next 48 hours. Someone will walk you through the process when you arrive.”
Trump wants a full perp walk for future PR.
And I love it that people are passively thwarting him.
When thinking about Benito’s legal troubles, I keep going back to a scene in The Shawshank Redemption. It’s the one afer Andy arrives at the prison, and Red and the others make bets about which of the new men will be the first to cry.
@de stijl:
Trump said he wouldn’t mind being shot while being busted because that would make him “a martyr.”
@CSK:
I wonder if he knows martyrs are all dead.
@steve: I’m pretty sure* this was just an isolated incident; still, it reminds us of a time-honored axiom–the answer to a bad middle school with a gun is a good middle school with a gun.
*Given that the story comes from NC, I’m not as sure as I’d like to be, though. Maybe the troll who lives in NC can flesh this out some for us if he’s still posting from time to time.
I hope I’m not “the troll” but I do live in NC. When we say “by” in the South it’s sometimes short for “near” or “nearby.” Just a Southern thing, must have had a Southern copy editor and it didn’t sound weird to them.
@CSK: Yes, strange, but it wasn’t a leap for me to shift “by” to “near.” (When I was still teaching, I would have asked the writer for more information on how the middle school got a gun, though.)
@CSK: He should be more careful about what he says. It’s easily possible that some whackjob MAGAt could hear that, pop a cap on him, and expect it to be explained as an Antifa attack.
@just nutha:
I would also ask the relevance of mentioning the middle school in the headline–especially since it seems to have taken place at night, and not even on the middle school grounds.
@Kathy:
I’ve read that narcissists consider themselves martyrs, because they suffer more than anyone else. That’s certainly true of Trump. No one, after all, has ever been treated as badly as he has.
@just nutha:
Maybe someone will shoot him in the middle of Fifth Avenue.
@Bruce Henry: No. The guy I’m thinking of is the guy who was always portraying himself as a MOU type business whiz who always cited that Russian business/econ news trolling site. He’d recently moved to Asheville and was going to sell his dozen other houses because he’d finally found the perfect place to live.
@Mu Yixiao: I took that as directional information for the Lookie Lous who would want to go hunting for the crime scene.
@CSK: Where there's life, there's hope.
@just nutha:
I don’t know. Doesn’t Superman’s mighty chest deflect bullets?
@EddieInCA:
Belhaven Wee Heavy is also excellent.
If only because it enables you to ask a guest “fancy a glass of Wee?”
🙂
@JohnSF:
I might pooh-pooh that idea.
@CSK:
That’s 100% true in Bizarro World.
@Kathy:
It’s a constant refrain with him: “Nobody has ever been treated as badly as I have.”
While everyone is paying attention to the Trump case in NY, there have been some really interesting things going on in the Mar-a-lago documents case.
Any of our resident legal experts care to opine on what’s going on there?
Via Tristan Snell on Twitter
And today’s ruling via The Hill
@Jen:
The business about “an imminent/ongoing threat to national security” gives me chills.
UK political news: a key part of the UK/EU agreement re. the revised Northern Ireland Protocol passed first reading in the Commons despite DUP voting against, and a ERG Conservative rebellion, which Boris Johnson and Liz Truss supported.
End result was 515 votes to 29, give support of the opposition parties. *smirks*
ERG could only get 22 Tory rebels; 48 Conservative abstained or were absent (prob. 35 to 40 abstaining on principle) so government had a (small) majority with Conservative votes alone.
Question now is, will the ERG quit its silly antics, or continue a intra-party guerilla campaign?
If the second, at what point will Sunak consider forcing a vote and removing the whip from the rebels?
(That is, effectively throwing them out of the party)
And on the same day, Johnson was questioned by the Privileges Committee.
It did not go well for him.
If the Committee finds him guilty of willfully misleading Parliament, they could recommend suspension.
If MP’s then vote to suspend for more than 10 days, Johnson is liable to a recall petition being raised in his constituency.
If that then gets 10% of eligible voters in Uxbridge to agree, a by-election is called, and the odds are Johnson is done and over.
@CSK:
Eh, way too mild and anodyne. He should go full Berlusconi: “I am without doubt the person who’s been the most persecuted in the entire history of the world and the history of man.”
@JohnSF: God loves to tease.
@Kylopod:
Trump is always being treated unfairly, according to him.
@Jen: It could be an imminent/ongoing threat to national security. Or it could be judges fed up with stalling and flimsy appeals who are having none of it, and figured the DOJ would not have a problem with an all-nighter if it kept their schedule intact.
My guess is that Corcoran was/is scheduled to appear before the GJ today. The “emergency” appeal was filed just after 5pm yesterday. Probably calculated to interfere with the schedule.
@Jay L Gischer: I’m definitely not a lawyer, but I’ve been following this story today on EmptyWheel, where there’s some good discussion of it in the comments to the post titled “Lordy, There Are [transcribed] Tapes”. You know, just like Nixon.
@Bruce Henry: Not a Southern thing, unless I was taught a Southerism. “Put the recycling out back, in the can by the trash” is perfectly normal to me.
Using “by as in nearby” anywhere near a passive tense verb is inviting confusion.
“Man shot by zombies in officer involved shooting” would seem to imply that the zombies shot the man, rather than the police shot the man who was in the vicinity of zombies.
“By” shouldn’t be used by passive verbs.
@CSK: He wouldn’t lose a single supporter!
@Jen: My take is that District Judge Howell found as a fact that Trump lied to his lawyer (Evan Corcoran) about the existence of classified docs at Mar a Lago. Corcoran communicated this lie to DOJ, thereby committing a crime. On this basis the attorney/client privilege was pierced and Corcoran cannot rely on the privilege to refuse to testify to the grand jury. The DC Court of Appeals affirmed Judge Howell’s ruling (at light speed).
The Manhattan AG’s case against Trump is piffle to the classified documents case.
@de stijl: As much as I don’t want him to get special treatment, if it screws with his ability to make a spectacle out of it, I’m in favor.
I would enjoy a spectacle, but so would he, and my spite is more powerful than sense of joy.
Do we need a fancy mugshot, or can they just have his lawyers print out a placard and make him hold it up on a zoom call? Or just photoshop it onto an official portrait.
Was he fingerprinted already as part of his Presidential Presidenting? Just use those.
Ok, it might be fun to get a mugshot with the height markers, with him not wearing lifts. I could enjoy that little bit of humiliation.
@DAllenABQ: I really don’t like breaking the attorney-client privilege as a general thing, and am wondering if there will be efforts to ensure no protected information will be revealed.
This is Trump’s lawyer — who knows what prejudicial sketchy shit he knows that prosecutors are completely unaware of, or which he asked about the legality of but then never did.
Maybe depose the lawyer with a clean team, that then reviews and forwards the relevant portions to the prosecutors?
@CSK: hands too!
@Gustopher: It is distinctly plausible that the decision to break the privilege in this case does not implicate the actual content of any classified document, and it is further plausible that Corcoran never actually looked at any classified document. If I were in his place I would go out of my way to avoid looking at any classified document.
It is incredibly rare for a judge to break attorney/client privilege. I practiced criminal law for 30+ years and the breaking of the privilege came up exactly once. Ironically, I was the lawyer trying to preserve the privilege.
@JohnSF:
I have to ask, ever drink Bailey’s out of a shoe?
@JohnSF: The consensus from quite a few U.K. commentators seems to be that Boris has basically screwed his possible chances for a comeback.
@just nutha:
Asheville is really nice. And in visually stunning area.
@CSK:..Superman
Those bullets would bounce off his chest but when the bad guy would run out of ammunition he would throw the gun at Superman and Superman would always duck.
@DAllenABQ: I think I’m more concerned with the lawyer being asked something that causes him to reveal that he explained to Trump that it would be illegal to regularly dig up his ex-wife’s corpse for conjugal relations or something like that.
Something we don’t know about, where the knowledge that he asked about it (not illegal!) leads to a new avenue of investigation (ew, we have to check for signs the grave has been disturbed) that either taints that entire path of investigation (oh, crap, they had tips that hadn’t been looked into yet) or adds impermissible prejudicial information that taints the current legal process (no one likes a necrophiliac).
Basic rule of law, protecting the defendant’s rights things.
(In this case everyone might be relieved that his dead exwife was at least not a child)
@Beth:
Nah. Can’t abide Baileys. 🙂
Drinking out of a shoe would probably improve it.
Wouldn’t do the shoe much good, though.