monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

None of you even attempted to answer my one question, though.

I do not talk to to brainwashed jam,
I do not like the brain dead man.
I will not talk to him at the Klan
I will not talk to the grunt muttering can.
He is so very bad you see,
Society’s necrotic leprosy.
I do not like his Nazi plan,
He really is a brain dead man.

MARTINEZ: Now, President Trump tweeted last month, all agree the U.S. president has the complete power to pardon. So how did the Founding Fathers intended for the presidential pardon to be applied?

RUDALEVIGE: Well, they saw it in several ways. They obviously set up a system with pretty robust checks and balances. And the pardon power was intended to be part of that. Where the justice system had produced a miscarriage of justice, it was possible for the president to step in and provide a check against the judicial branch. Or framers like Alexander Hamilton saw the pardon power as a policy instrument. You know, if you had a rebellion or some kind of insurgency, the offer of clemency might restore tranquility to the Commonwealth, as he put it. So there were both reasons of individual mercy and broader public policy that have motivated the use of the pardon power over time.

President Trump doesn’t use his pardon power often, but when he does, he abuses it for all it’s worth.

In less than four years in office, Mr. Trump has made a mockery of mercy, doling out clemency to some of the most deplorable people in the country, an alarming number of whom happen to be his friends, while ignoring tens of thousands of more deserving applicants.

On Wednesday, Mr. Trump once again granted pardons to some of his closest allies: Paul Manafort, his former campaign chairman; Roger Stone, his longtime confidant; and Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. These grants, along with 26 others, followed 20 Mr. Trump issued a day earlier, many to a rogues’ gallery of wrongdoers who shouldn’t have been on anyone’s mercy list. These included four Blackwater security guards convicted in connection with the killing of Iraqi civilians, three corrupt Republican former members of Congress and two figures who pleaded guilty as part of the special counsel’s Russia investigation.

Sure, Mr. Trump has tossed a bone to a few people sentenced under outrageously harsh three-strikes laws, like Weldon Angelos, who got 55 years in prison for selling marijuana while carrying a handgun. But those are the exceptions. In general, if you are not a xenophobic sheriff, a right-wing troll, a homicidal military officer, an old friend or a turkey, your odds of being pardoned by this president hover around zero.

What makes Mr. Trump’s clemency record even worse is how paltry it is. As the old joke goes, the food is terrible, and the portions are too small. To date, Mr. Trump has issued a not-so-grand total of 94 pardons and sentence commutations — fewer than any president but George H.W. Bush in more than 100 years. He may add a few more to that list, of course, if only by pre-emptively pardoning his lawyers and family members.

Mr. Trump’s stingy, self-serving approach to clemency is due in part to his transactional view of the law as something to punish his enemies and to protect himself, his friends and his allies. But it’s a power that is easy to abuse because it is nearly unlimited. While Mr. Trump may be the most flagrant abuser, he’s far from the first. From Bill Clinton’s pardon of the fugitive financier Marc Rich to Gerald Ford’s pardon of his predecessor Richard Nixon, there are plenty of examples of presidents of both parties exploiting mercy for dubious reasons.

The solution isn’t for presidents to pardon fewer people; it’s to pardon more, with more consideration and more consistency.

As President-elect Joe Biden prepares to take over, he has the opportunity to reimagine this deeply important but long-abused power and make it work more as the founders intended: as a counterweight to unjust prosecutions and excessive punishments. “Without an easy access to exceptions in favor of unfortunate guilt, justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist No. 74.

If ever there was a moment to reform the system, it is now. The decades-old American prison crisis has dumped millions of people behind bars, many suffering under hugely disproportionate sentences. Last summer, the nation was engulfed by mass protests over criminal-justice abuses, and prisons continue to endure many of the nation’s worst coronavirus outbreaks. Recent federal laws, including one signed by Mr. Trump, have alleviated some of the most egregious sentences, but they haven’t done nearly enough. There are currently nearly 14,000 clemency petitions waiting for action. And unlike so many other parts of the federal government, clemency is one area in which presidents can do a lot of good on their own, and fast.

First and most important: Take back control of the pardon process. The power to grant mercy may be the president’s alone, but the office of the pardon attorney operates out of the Justice Department. Under most administrations, before any request for clemency can land on the president’s desk, it has to survive review by a gantlet of people whose job it is to win convictions, not undo them. In some cases, the same prosecutors who sent a person to prison are asked to weigh in on granting that person mercy. It’s “akin to having Yankees fans pick the Red Sox’s starting pitcher,” wrote Mark Osler, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law who advocates for comprehensive clemency reform.

Prosecutors’ built-in biases are exacerbated by the fear of public blowback if any grant of clemency goes wrong — say, if a person commits a crime after being granted relief.

Nostradamus had nothing on George Mason. The French seer earned a reputation for prophecy that was grounded, for the most part, in vague and ambiguous predictions of future events whose malleability allowed supporters to claim he was prescient. As with the Delphic oracle who came before him, Nostradamus’s reputation for foresight was unearned.

George Mason, however, deserves his reputation for the precision of his predictions. Many have proved uncanny, and, at least in one case, his anticipation of the future is almost eerie. Remarkably, Mason predicted Donald Trump’s pardon of Paul Manafort and Roger Stone more than 230 years ago.

Back in 1787, when the Constitutional Convention was drafting the part of the Constitution that would soon become the presidential pardon power, Mason unequivocally opposed the provision. The president, he said, “ought not to have the power of pardoning, because he may frequently pardon crimes which were advised by himself. It may happen, at some future day, that he will establish a monarchy, and destroy the republic. If he has the power of granting pardons before indictment, or conviction, may he not stop inquiry and prevent detection?”

Just so. Obviously, Mason never met Trump. But clearly he had someone like Trump in mind. Trump’s pardon of Manafort and Stone, especially when added to his pardons of Michael Flynn, is of exactly the sort Mason feared—in which an apparent connection exists between the president’s personal acts and those of the people whose crimes he has excused. Manafort, Stone, and Flynn, in different ways, were connected to Trump and allegations of criminality. Their pardons may, in part, be rewards for their refusal to help in holding Trump to account—at least that is how it appears to many observers.

The Manafort and Stone pardons are part of a postelection pardon spree. Recent news reports suggest that Trump is also considering broad preemptive pardons for Rudy Giuliani, and three of his adult children—Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric. And, most notably, public speculation swirls around the possibility that Trump might pardon himself before he leaves office, or, alternatively, resign a day early so that Vice President Mike Pence can assume the presidency and issue him a pardon.

The pardons (even if issued as part of a deal with the vice president) reflect a confluence of interests between the president personally and those he might pardon. Trump’s possible pardons may be tied to his fear that New York will initiate prosecutions of him after he leaves office. By issuing federal pardons now, he hopes that he can render any future federal or state prosecutions more difficult. The pardons are, in that way, an effort to avoid accountability, or, as Mason put it, to “stop inquiry and prevent detection.”

But even extremely troubling pardons are not necessarily unlawful. As adopted by the Founders, the presidential pardon power is subject to only two clear limits—it cannot be used to excuse cases of impeachment and it covers only “offences against the United States,” which is to say only federal crimes (so potential criminal liability for all pardon recipients in, say, a New York state prosecution remains). Some scholars additionally argue that a self-pardon is implicitly also prohibited—the text says that the president may “grant” pardons, and “granting” oneself a benefit of some sort is a strained linguistic construction.

But that’s about it. Everything else about these pardons, including the incentive they give the president’s allies to withhold evidence of criminality, is, unfortunately, within the anticipated scope of the pardon power. Indeed, the Constitutional Convention, having heard and rejected Mason’s prediction, can reasonably be said to have accepted the possibility of pardon abuse as the collateral cost of having a pardon power in the first place.

And why exactly would the delegates have done that? Why did they disregard Mason’s prediction? In the end, his concerns were rejected by his fellow convention delegates because, in their judgment, there were adequate remedies for that type of presidential misbehavior. As James Madison put it: “There is one security in this case [of misused pardons] to which the gentlemen [i.e., Mason and his supporters] not have adverted: If the President be connected, in any suspicious manner, with any person, and there be grounds to believe he will shelter him [with a pardon], the House of Representatives can impeach him; they can remove him if found guilty.”

And there you have it. George Mason was prescient. James Madison—tragically, it turns out—was naive. The most insidious damage to American norms from Trump’s pardon extravaganza stems not from the extravaganza itself, though that is bad enough. Rather the damage to our democracy comes, most clearly, from the supine, almost sycophantic nature of Congress’s response to the Trump presidency since the start, both with regard to his abuse of the pardon power and his excesses more generally. Madison saw Congress as a powerful guard dog capable of preventing executive misconduct. Instead, in terms of pardon abuse, as with so many other instances of Trump’s overreach, it has proved little more than a lapdog.

Shock And Dismay After Trump Pardons Blackwater Guards Who Killed 14 Iraqi Civilians

Among the pardons made by President Trump this week, the pardon of four former guards for Blackwater has been regarded by some as particularly galling.

Nicholas Slatten, Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard were convicted six years ago in the killing of 14 Iraqi civilians and the wounding of 17 others. Witnesses described how the American men ambushed the civilians unprovoked, firing on Baghdad's Nisour Square with heavy gunfire and grenade launchers.

The massacre took place in 2007, when the four were working as guards for Blackwater, a private military contractor, on an assignment in Baghdad. They claimed they were fired on, but prosecutors said the Blackwater guards opened fire first. Slatten, whom prosecutors said started the shooting, was sentenced to life in prison.

Hassan Salman is among the Iraqis who were shot during the ambush. He told NPR on Wednesday that he was shocked by Trump's pardons — he himself had made trips to the U.S. to give testimony in the proceedings against the four.

"Today we were surprised that the American president issued a decision to pardon these criminals, murderers and thugs," Salman said, speaking from Baghdad. "I'm really shocked. ... The American judiciary is fair and equitable. I had never imagined that Trump or any other politician would affect American justice."

The U.N. Human Rights Office says it's "deeply concerned" by the pardons.

"These four individuals were given sentences ranging from 12 years to life imprisonment, including on charges of first-degree murder," spokesperson Marta Hurtado said in a statement. "Pardoning them contributes to impunity and has the effect of emboldening others to commit such crimes in the future."

By investigating these crimes and completing legal proceedings, the US complied with its obligations under international law," she added. "Victims of gross human rights violations and serious violations of international humanitarian law also have the right to a remedy. This includes the right to see perpetrators serve punishments proportionate to the seriousness of their conduct."

Human Rights Watch says the pardons "show contempt for the rule of law."

"The victims' families finally saw some measure of justice when these men were convicted in 2014 and sentenced to prison. Now justice has been undone by the stroke of a pen," Sarah Holewinski, the organization's Washington director, said in a statement.

But supporters of the military contractors, who argued the investigation was tainted and the punishments too severe, cheered the news.

"Paul Slough and his colleagues didn't deserve to spend one minute in prison," Brian Heberlig, a lawyer for Slough, told The Associated Press. "I am overwhelmed with emotion at this fantastic news."

"These are four innocent guys, and it is completely justified," Bill Coffield, a lawyer for Evan Liberty, told the AP.

Paul Dickinson is a lawyer who represented six Iraqi families in a civil lawsuit against Blackwater and its founder, Erik Prince (who is the brother of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos). Among his clients were the parents of a 9-year-old boy who was killed as he sat in the back of his father's car.

Dickinson says that the victims' families are likely to feel let down and abandoned by the U.S. government.

"This was Baghdad's Bloody Sunday," Dickinson told NPR's Mary Louise Kelly on Wednesday. "This was the slaughter of innocent civilians who were merely going about their day when a Blackwater convoy rolled through a traffic circle after having violated orders to stand down and not exit the Green Zone — and began firing indiscriminately into cars that were carrying people going to work."

The bullets rained through the roofs of cars, taxis and buses, he says. And afterward, Iraqi citizens wanted to ensure that those who had done this were held responsible.

Dickinson says the great expense that the FBI put into the prosecution of the case has now come to nothing. "I think what that does is it sends the wrong message to the people of Iraq, who we told we were going to come in and protect, and to the rest of the world, that the pillars of justice upon which the United States is based on has a crack in it," he says.

The pardons could damage the United States' reputation abroad, as they undo the significance of the convictions, which had demonstrated that U.S. military contractors could be held accountable if they conducted criminal actions.

That notion has now been shown to be false, Dickinson says.

"We showed the world that we were going to hold people accountable," he says. "We've backed off that. The risk is now that the U.S., who has a presence worldwide, has exposure for how they might be treated — or what people of other countries might think could happen or would happen if war crimes are committed by U.S. citizens abroad."

https://www.npr.org/2020/12/23/949679837/shock-and-dismay-after-trump-pardons-blackwater-guards-who-killed-14-iraqi-civil

Why the Russian hack is so significant, and why it's close to a worst-case scenario

Then the Manhattan DA's office is waiting.

And as I said before, if "outlawing the Democratic Party" just means a glorified name change, with none of the leadership getting in trouble, then I support your idea.

I'm guessing you are planning to change political parties after this law is passed in the future, correct?

Democrat political strategist Damien Thaddeus Jones, who served as regional political director for Beto O’Rourke’s U.S. Senate campaign, has come forward to blow the whistle on a massive voter fraud ring in Harris County, Texas. The voter fraud ring is overseen by Dallas Jones, who served as Texas Political Director for the Joe Biden presidential campaign. In this stunning audio obtained exclusively by NATIONAL FILE, Damien goes into detail about Dallas Jones’ fraudulent activity and work for Biden. On the tape, “Sheila” refers to Sheila Jackson-Lee. This article below delves into the massive evidence of voter fraud — including photographic evidence and sworn affidavits — that emerged in Harris County in 2020, and how its direct link to the Biden campaign provides even more justification for President Donald Trump’s ability to claim victory in the presidential election.

the Realization of the Founders’ Fears

NSA Whistleblower Kirk Wiebe Exposes Digital Election Rigging Using CIA’s Hammer and Scorecard

Snopes and the “Factchecker” Posse Fail in Their Debunking Effort

Back to Snopes. The title for its November 9 attack on the Hammer-Scorecard thesis is, “Is There a ‘Hammer and Scorecard’ Operation to Manipulate Vote Counts?” Snopes then answers its own question with a subtitle that reads: “The director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) called the rumors ‘nonsense.’”
In the days after news outlets called the 2020 U.S. presidential election and projected that Joe Biden would be the 46th president of the United States, the internet was flooded with various unfounded claims about voter fraud. One popular rumor concerned something called “Hammer and Scorecard.” While this rumor was wide ranging, it basically held that a “deep state” supercomputer named “Hammer” and a computer program called “Scorecard” were being used to alter vote counts.

But what was the original reason for the presidential pardon to exist?

It wasn’t meant to free presidential cronies, or was it?

revelette3 wrote:

Why the Russian hack is so significant, and why it's close to a worst-case scenario

This hack is no problem.

Mr. Putin is going to be helping the American people resist and undermine the Biden Administration.