monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

revelette3 wrote:

Most of the past mass shootings involved someone converting their legal gun into an illegal gun able to shoot like a machine gun or something of that sort.

Hardly most. I defy you to come up with a second example besides that Nevada restaurant shooting that you linked.

Dr. Charles Lieber, 60, who is the chair of Harvard's Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department, is accused of lying about working with several Chinese organizations, where he collected hundreds of thousands of dollars from Chinese entities, US Attorney Andrew Lelling said at a news conference.

According to court documents, Lieber's research group at Harvard had received over $15 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense, which requires disclosing foreign financial conflicts of interests.
The complaint alleges that Lieber had lied about his affiliation with the Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) in China and a contract he had with a Chinese talent recruitment plan to attract high-level scientists to the country.

In a separate indictment unsealed Tuesday, Yanqing Ye, a 29-year-old Chinese national, was charged with visa fraud, making false statements, conspiracy and being an unregistered agent, the US attorney's office said.
Yanqing had falsely identified herself as a "student" on her visa application and lied about her military service while she was employed as a scientific researcher at Boston University, according to the indictment. She admitted to federal officers during an April 2019 interview that she held the rank of lieutenant with the People's Liberation Army, court documents show.
Yanqing is accused of accessing US military websites and sending US documents and information to China, according to documents.
Last week, a cancer researcher, Zaosong Zheng, was indicted for trying to smuggle 21 vials of biological material out of the US to China and lying about it to federal investigators, Lelling said.
Zaosong, 30, whose entry was sponsored by Harvard University, had hidden the vials in a sock before boarding the plane, according to Lelling.
"This is not an accident or a coincidence. This is a small sample of China's ongoing campaign to siphon off American technology and know-how for Chinese gain," Lelling said.

the Republican Party has become the party of workers and the Middle class

The US is the oldest democracy in the world. Well not quite! You will have to take that cliche with a pinch or two of salt for to swallow it you will have to disregard the genocide of Native Americans, the transatlantic slave trade, relentless warmongering around the globe, and the fact that most black Americans (voting rights act of 1965) and women (1920) could not vote until quite recently.

Be that as it may, the US institutions of liberal democracy, especially the legislative and the judiciary, are theoretically there to protect it against whims and wanton tyrannies that might threaten its executive branch.

The spectacle of Donald Trump's impeachment, however, makes one wonder.

What today we recall as "the Moscow Trials" were a series of show trials in the former Soviet Union in the late 1930s staged against Trotskyists and other "enemies" Joseph Stalin had deemed dangerous to his reign. The defenders were charged with trying to subvert the Soviet Union and bring back capitalism.

On the surface nothing in Trump's impeachment trial at the US Senate resembles those dark years of the former Soviet Union. What we are witnessing in the US is democracy in action, isn't it?

The US president has been impeached by the House of Representatives, charged with abusing the power of his office to force a foreign country to investigate a political rival and obstruction of Congress. The impeachment was then sent to the US Senate for a trial and possible removal of the president from office. That is what the US constitution has wisely stipulated.

The senators were now to hear the case, evaluate the arguments, call in witnesses, and cast their votes. Democracy and the rule of law and thus justice would be served. After all Chief Justice John Roberts is presiding over the impeachment trial.

That would be the case if the two main factions of US politics, the Democrats and the Republicans, were actually interested in the rule of law and reason and serving justice rather than safeguarding their immediate and banal political interests.

A fair trial, an impartial jury and the calling of relevant witnesses Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is not interested in. He had already declared openly that "I'm not an impartial juror." His sidekick, Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham had also said openly: "I'm not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here" - promising he would do everything in his power to make the impeachment proceedings of the incurably corrupt Donald Trump "die quickly".

Stalin was probably not as remotely pleased with his henchmen back in the 1930s as Trump must be with his Republican comrades today. He will be acquitted and sent on his way to use this very show trial to his advantage in securing a second term.

Neither the Moscow Trials nor Trump's impeachment trial were after truth and justice. They were make-believe spectacles staged to suggest justice was being served when, in fact, it was being actively subverted.

The show will be used by Republicans to keep their grip on the White House and the Senate, to continue appointing conservative judges to the Supreme Court, to hold the reins of power in the three branches of government and to make the US the envy of xenophobic dictatorships around the globe.

But neither Russia, nor the US has any exclusive claim on such show trials.

Perhaps the prime example of all such show trials was in France during the Dreyfus Affair when, in one of the most notorious examples of European anti-Semitism, a Jewish artillery captain in the French army, Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935), was falsely convicted of passing military secrets to the Germans. He was then publicly humiliated and subjected to the most hateful anti-Semitic venom.

In Iran, both under the Pahlavi regime and now under the Islamic republic, show trials have been the staple of political persecution, with the most famous case being that of Mohammad Mosaddeq after the CIA coup of 1953. In China during the so-called "Great Leap Forward" (1958-1962) Mao Zedong also had his real and imagined political enemies rounded up and given show trials, with some sentenced to death.

More recently in Egypt, the trial of Hosni Mubarak and later Mohammad Morsi were integral to the counterrevolutionary mobilisation to prop up Abdel Fattah el-Sisi's military junta. In Saudi Arabia, even more recently the so-called trial of the murderers of Jamal Khashoggi was meant to put an end to speculation about the top leadership's culpability in the murder of a dissident.

All of these show trials, from Stalin's and Mao's to Trump's, are reminiscent of the so-called Theatre of the Absurd, a genre of theatrical plays that emerged in Europe in the 1950s.

In the Theatre of the Absurd, playwrights deliberately use disjointed and meaningless dialogues and stage wayward apparition of plots to make a mockery of meaning and reason, very much on the model that Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the former White House Press Secretary, or better even Kellyanne Conway, senior counsellor to President Trump, use to defend their boss.

Indeed the absurd is on full show in Trump's trial: everyone knows that he abused his office to pressure a foreign country and yet in broad daylight, Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard professor of law on the president's defence team, stands up and says the US constitution does not say what the US constitution says, while McConnell puts together a whole political machinery to exonerate Trump and help pave the way for his re-election.

Trump's presidency and his impeachment are a theatre of the absurd on a global stage, except with real and calamitous consequences. There is no exiting this theatre.

We are all trapped in it and forced to watch a mockery of justice in which the organs of "the oldest democracy in the world" begin to devour themselves and the very idea of democracy is reduced to nullity.

Bloomberg is, by far, the most egregious case - he is using his vast wealth (...) to singlehandedly buy his way into the inner circle of Democrat contenders for the nomination., and doing so with the evident cooperation and accommodation of the DNC.

everyone knows that he abused his office to pressure a foreign country and yet in broad daylight

Opinion piece on Trump's impeachment.

The president also pardoned Edward DeBartolo, a former owner of the San Francisco 49ers who pleaded guilty to a felony in 1998 for not reporting an extortion scheme.

WASHINGTON — President Trump has commuted the 14-year prison sentence of former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois, the Democrat who was convicted of trying to essentially sell President Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat for personal gain, according to a person briefed on the decision.

Mr. Trump commuted the former governor’s sentence on Tuesday and is planning on announcing it soon, taking the action after saying for years that he was considering intervening in Mr. Blagojevich’s case.

By commuting the sentence, the president would free Mr. Blagojevich from prison without wiping out the conviction. Republicans have advised the president against it, arguing that Mr. Blagojevich’s crime epitomizes the corruption that Mr. Trump had said he wanted to tackle as president.

Trump once again proves that he's part of the corrupt, putrid swamp which he claimed pre2016 election to drain.

Upset Poll: More Americans Identify as Republicans Than As Democrats

According to Gallup, 30% of Americans now identify as Republicans. But only 27% identify as Democrats. But the larges group is the 42% of registered voters who say they are independents. This is not new as independents have made up the largest category of American voters for decades.

However, this is a shift, nonetheless. In past decades, the Democrat Party has enjoyed the comfort of having more voters identify with them than with the GOP.

What this really means is that the Democrat Party has so strayed from its roots that many of its former members have drifted away from thinking of themselves as Democrats. On the other hand, the number of those who envision themselves as Republicans is holding strong.

Blaggo has served 10 years.

At least when it comes to Trump and his pardon of Bernie Kerik, the reason is clear. Done as a favor to his henchman, Rudy Giuliani.

This is not new as independents have made up the largest category of American voters for decades.

AGs have meddled in politicized cases, only Bill Barr was told to resign

Other AGs have intervened as well.
Holder and the New Black Panther Party
AG Lynch and the Tarmac
Reno and the Disappearing Illegal Fundraising

Then how is it that independent candidates end up with one or two percent of the vote?

Because those independents vote either Republican or Democrat on election day.

My take on that, is that the corporate media has everyone convinced that a vote for an independent, is a wasted vote.

they much prefer an evenly divided population.