Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

I guess a trial date of Jan. 6th would be too on the nose? Oops. That's a Saturday. Nevermind.

Special counsel proposes a trial date for Trump Jan. 6 case

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Prosecutors in the office of special counsel Jack Smith are proposing that a federal judge in Washington, D.C., set a start date of Jan. 2, 2024, for former President Donald Trump's trial on charges related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The government lawyers estimate the case could last about four to six weeks.

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Glad I am back...and glad to see so many of the old-timers are still around.

I kinda miss Craven (Robert). He and I were not seeing eye-to-eye much a while back, but I wish he were around. He's not posting using a different name, is he?

Happy birthday, bud.

Over the last few years, Robert and I have interacted on Facebook but he's now pretty much disappeared from that site. He had expressed what seemed to me like a near complete disfavoring of social media. Of course, he's not the first of us to have that hope/faith shattered.

Izzy, what am I missing in that joke?

Frank Apisa wrote:

Izzy, what am I missing in that joke?

The Geordie dialect.
"...Or a meringue" sounds like, "Or am I wrong."

Judge Chutkan issues protective order barring Trump from publicly disclosing
sensitive information in 2020 election case

US District Judge Tanya Chutkan has issued a protective order barring former President Donald Trump from publicly disclosing “sensitive information” – including witness interviews – that’s turned over to his legal team by special counsel investigators in the 2020 election interference case.

While Chutkan declined a broader protective order sought by prosecutors who wanted to lock down all evidence turned over in discovery, she did restrict how Trump and his legal team can handle and publicly share sensitive information.

Her order defines sensitive information as grand jury secrets, including subpoenaed information and witness testimony; transcripts and recordings of witness interviews done by investigators outside of the grand jury; evidence obtained through court-approved searches, and sealed orders related to the investigation. The evidence Trump cannot share publicly also includes material from other government agencies, such as the Secret Service.

Prosecutors say the sensitive information represents a large amount of the evidence they’ve collected.

The order also specifies that while Trump can review the evidence unaccompanied by a lawyer and take notes about it, he cannot put in those notes any especially personal identifying information and cannot make photos, copies or recordings of the evidence.

During a hearing Friday in federal court in Washington, DC., prosecutors had pushed for even stricter rules, while Trump’s lawyers expressed concerns that the former president would inadvertently violate a protective order when making political statements on the 2024 campaign trail.

Chutkan repeatedly raised concerns about witness intimidation if certain restrictions were not imposed on what Trump could disclose from the evidence prosecutors hand over.

Arguing in favor of more limitations for when Trump viewed the sensitive discovery himself, prosecutor Thomas Windom said that the “defense counsel has a certain level of trust in the defendant that the government does not.”

In another exchange, Windom told the judge that the investigators routinely recorded witness interviews done outside of the grand jury and that there “hundreds of recordings of witness interviews.”

He warned that, without the restriction, there was nothing stopping Trump from publishing small snippets of the interviews and potentially tainting the jury pool.

When Trump attorney John Lauro took a turn to argue, he did not get far with the judge.

“You are conflating what your client needs to do to defend himself and what he wants to do politically,” she told him. “And what your client does to defend himself has to happen in this courtroom, not on the internet.”

Lauro put forward a hypothetical of Trump making a statement while debating his former Vice President Mike Pence – who is also running for the White House now and is a key witness in the criminal case – that overlapped with what’s in discovery.

The judge told Lauro the example wasn’t helping his arguments.

“He is a criminal defendant. He is going to have constraints the same as any defendant. This case is going to proceed in a normal order,” Chutkan said, referring to Trump.

glitterbag wrote:

Happy birthday Frank, here’s a cake (sorry, my emoticon was blocked)

Thanks.

Is "sorry, my emoticon was blocked" some kind of old-age Internet porn?"

As I try to cover the news tonight, I am struck by how completely the Republican Party, which began in the 1850s as a noble endeavor to keep the United States government intact and to rebuild it to work for ordinary people, has devolved into a group of chaos agents feeding voters a fantasy world.

The big news today was the hearing in Washington, D.C., where Department of Justice prosecutors argued for a protective order to stop former president Trump from intimidating witnesses and tainting the jury pool in the case against him for trying to stop the counting of electoral votes that would decide the 2020 presidential election.

Trump appears to have given up on winning the cases against him on the legal merits and is instead trying to win by whipping up a political base to reelect him, or even to fight for him. He has filled his Truth Social account with unhinged rants attacking the justice system and the president, and on Sunday his lawyer, John Lauro, echoed Trump as he made a tour of the Sunday talk shows, misleadingly suggesting that Trump had been indicted for free speech. In fact, the indictment says up front that even Trump’s lies are protected by the First Amendment, but what isn’t protected is a conspiracy that stops an official proceeding and deprives the rest of us of our right to vote and to have our votes counted.

A grand jury indicted Trump on August 1; when he was arraigned on August 3, the magistrate judge warned him that it is a crime to “influence a juror or try to threaten or bribe a witness or retaliate against anyone" connected to the case. Trump said he understood.

The next day, he posted on Truth Social: “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”

Justice Department lawyers promptly sought a protective order to limit what information Trump and his lawyers can release. Trump has a longstanding pattern of releasing misleading information to bolster his position among his base, and lawyers are concerned that he will continue to intimidate witnesses and try to taint the jury pool in hopes of getting the trial venue moved.

Days later, Trump told an audience in New Hampshire that he would not stop talking about the case, and called Special Counsel Jack Smith a “thug” and “deranged.” He has continued to post such messages on social media.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan reinforced that Trump’s focus on politics had no relevance in her court of law. Justice reporter for NBC News Ryan Reilly noted: “The word of the Trump hearing today: yield. Came up six times, as in: ‘the fact that he's running a political campaign currently has to yield to the orderly administration of justice.’”

Chutkan agreed to the protective order but agreed with Trump’s team that it would not include any material already in the public domain. She also prohibited Trump from reviewing materials with “any device capable of photocopying, recording, or otherwise replicating the Sensitive Materials, including a smart cellular device.”

Finally, she warned Trump’s lawyers: “I caution you and your client to take special care in your public statements in this case…. I will take whatever measures are necessary to protect the integrity of these proceedings.” If Trump repeats “inflammatory” statements, she said, she will have to speed up his trial to protect witnesses and keep the jury pool untainted.

Just what that might mean was illustrated today when a judge revoked the bail of former FTX cryptocurrency chief executive officer Sam Bankman-Fried for witness tampering and sent him to jail. Prosecutors say Bankman-Fried was leaking the private diary entries of his former girlfriend to the New York Times to discredit her testimony against him.

In Ohio, where voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly rejected the attempt of the Republicans in the legislature to stop a November vote on an amendment to the state constitution protecting abortion rights, Republicans tried to stop the inclusion of that amendment by challenging its form. Today the Ohio Supreme Court unanimously rejected that lawsuit. The proposed amendment will be on the ballot in November.

After demanding that David Weiss, the U.S. attorney in charge of investigating and charging Hunter Biden, be named a special counsel and then charging that Weiss had asked for and been denied that status—both he and Attorney General Merrick Garland denied that allegation—Republicans are now angry that Garland today gave Weiss that status.

Weiss requested that status for the first time earlier this week, and Garland granted it, although both Weiss and Garland had previously said Weiss had all the authority that status carries. Now House Republicans say appointing Weiss a special counsel is an attempt to obstruct Congress from investigating the Bidens. For all that Republicans are in front of the cameras every day insisting President Biden is corrupt, there is no evidence that President Biden has been party to any wrongdoing.

One of the things such behavior accomplishes is to distract from the party’s own troubles, including the inability of House Republicans to agree to measures to fund the government after September. Far-right extremists are still angry at the spending levels to which House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) agreed in a deal to raise the debt ceiling last June, and are threatening to refuse to agree to any funding measures until they get cuts that the Senate will never accept.

The House left for its August break after passing only one of the twelve bills it needs to pass, and when it gets back, it will have only twelve work days before the September 30 deadline. This chaos takes a toll: when the Fitch rating system downgraded the U.S. long-term rating last week, the first reason it cited was “a steady deterioration in standards of governance.” It explained: “The repeated debt-limit political standoffs and last-minute resolutions have eroded confidence in fiscal management.”

Another thing this chaos does is convince individuals that the entire government is corrupt. On Wednesday, as Biden was to visit Utah, FBI agents shot and killed an armed man there who made threats against him, Vice President Kamala Harris, and other officials who have been associated with Trump’s legal troubles: Attorney General Garland, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, and New York attorney general Letitia James. Craig Deleeuw Robertson described himself as a “MAGA Trumper.”

It seems we are reaping the fruits of the political system planted in 1968, when the staff of Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon reworked American politics to package their leader for the election. “Voters are basically lazy,” one of Nixon’s media advisors wrote. “Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand…. When we argue with him, we…seek to engage his intellect…. The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable.”

The confusion also takes up so much oxygen it’s hard for the Democrats, who are actually trying to govern in the usual ways, to get any attention. Today was the one-year anniversary of the PACT Act, officially known as the Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act of 2022. The law improves access to healthcare and funding for veterans who were exposed to burn pits, the military’s waste disposal method for everything from tires to chemicals and jet fuel from the 1990s into the new century.

According to Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), the PACT Act has already enabled more than 4 million veterans to be screened for toxic exposure, more than 744,000 PACT Act claims have been filed, and hundreds of thousands of veterans have been approved for expanded benefits.

Biden spoke in Utah about the government’s protections for veterans and why they’re important. In addition to the PACT Act, he talked about his recent executive order moving the authority for addressing claims of sexual assault, domestic violence, child abuse, and murder outside the chain of command to a specialized independent military unit—a move long championed by survivors and members of Congress.

Today the White House released a detailed explanation of “Bidenomics” along with resources explaining why the administration has focused on certain areas for public investment and how the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act have supported that investment. That collection explains why the administration is overturning forty years of political economy to return to the system on which the U.S. relied from 1933 to 1981, and yet it got far less traction than the fight over the protective order designed to keep Trump from attacking witnesses.

For all the outrage manufacturing hypocritical Magaidiots out there with their ‘Hawaii needs help and Brandon is on vacation’ bullshit:

A. let’s pretend for a minute that you actually give a **** about anyone else’s pain and suffering…Ok, that’s over.

B. President Biden issued a federal disaster declaration on THURSDAY and has sent whatever federal assistance is needed and then some to help the people of Hawaii with the recovery. And he’s monitoring the entire situation as we speak.

C. If you really, really wanna ******* go there, may I remind you that your despotic dotard played red state/blue state politics, ‘if they didn’t vote for me I’m not gonna help them’ when it came to the country’s disaster response, he threw paper towels at hurricane survivors in Puerto Rico, posed for a thumbs up photo op with a newly orphaned baby after a mass shooting in Texas, blamed the state of CA for its wildfires, and of course while thousands of Americans were dying daily from a virus he said was a “hoax” even though he damn well knew it wasn’t, he was golfing. Like a lot. Refrigerator trucks were filling up with the bodies of our fellow citizens, and he was on the back nine.
So don’t. Just ******* don’t even try to gaslight us. Joe Biden takes the occasional weekend nap on the beach, but still puts Americans in need FIRST.
Trump, when he wasn’t golfing, tried to deny blue states disaster aid cuz he was big mad at them and golfed through an entire f’ng global pandemic.
So just ******* don’t.

I love it! To think how much I despised that guy. I guess it's all relative.

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — At the Redstone Arsenal in Alabama, a major hub of the U.S. military’s space and missile programs, a key officer is supposed to be leaving his post for a critical new job leading the agency responsible for America’s missile defense.

But now Maj. Gen. Heath Collins’s promotion is on hold — creating disruptions up and down the chain of command.

His absence means that a rear admiral normally stationed at Redstone overseeing missile testing is instead temporarily filling in as acting director of the Missile Defense Agency. Meanwhile, the brigadier general tapped to replace Collins is also stuck, forced to extend his assignment at Space Systems Command in Los Angeles rather than starting work in Huntsville.

Collins’s elevation is one of 301 military promotions for jobs around the world currently blocked by the state’s U.S. senator, Tommy Tuberville (R), who since February has been using his power to single-handedly place “holds” on all Pentagon appointments that require Senate confirmation. Tuberville’s goal, he says, is to force the military to end its policy of paying for service personnel and family stationed in states with abortion bans to travel to states where the procedure is legal if they need care.

The ripple effect up and down the chain of command from the delayed promotion of one senior leader at one installation offers a vivid illustration of what critics say is the deepening fallout from Tuberville’s gambit to use his Senate “hold” power to wage a culture-war campaign over abortion policy.

It has undermined the military’s long-term planning, several officials and retired generals or other veterans living near the arsenal contend, derailed the training of future leaders in highly specialized fields and disrupted the lives of military families — all of which stands to worsen the Pentagon’s personnel retention struggles, his opponents claim.

If Tuberville does not budge, the number of positions blocked from Senate confirmation is set to rise to 650 by the end of the year, according to the Defense Department — a majority of the military’s 852 flag and general officer positions.

Tuberville, who declined to comment, has said the Defense Department’s policy violates a federal ban on funding for abortions and that he does not believe the holds are affecting military readiness.

“I hate to have to do this. But they’re going to listen,” Tuberville, a former college football coach, told the Catholic News Agency last month. “I’m not changing my mind.”

About the impacts at Redstone, Tuberville spokesman Steven Stafford said in an email: “No one has been a stronger advocate for Huntsville than Coach.”

Collins is one of four senior leaders either currently stationed at Redstone Arsenal or scheduled to transfer to the Alabama base whose Senate confirmations have been held up by Tuberville’s hold. The Washington Post has identified at least six more service members who have had to temporarily change or extend roles, or whose career progression has been frozen, because of those four Redstone holds.

Tuberville’s hold is “unprecedented,” Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth said in an interview, adding that it is playing out in “unexpected and unhelpful ways.”

Other senators have previously blocked military promotions but an official said none before had lasted this long.

Sabrina Singh, deputy Pentagon press secretary, said that the military needs “tested leaders who are fully empowered to make tough decisions” and that the hold “undermines our military readiness.”

The Senate must approve the appointments of the most senior military leaders. Generally, votes are held on large numbers of promotions in batches, which under Senate rules requires that each group receive the unanimous consent of the chamber, allowing any one senator to hold up the process. The Senate majority leader could get around Tuberville’s hold by bringing the nominations to the floor one-by-one but doing so could require devoting two to three days for each vote and prevent the Senate from conducting other business. Such a process would take months, Democrats say.

Despite the local impacts, Tuberville faces little political pressure to withdraw the holds at home in Alabama, where Republicans are widely supportive of his antiabortion stance. Earlier this month, the state Republican Party’s Executive Committee voted 99 to 1 to adopt a resolution supporting his position.

“Tuberville is not just standing for a pro-life principle. He’s also defending taxpayers who are having their money misused,” said John Wahl, chairman of the Alabama Republican Party.

Redstone Arsenal, named after northern Alabama’s red soil, was established in 1941 as a war chemicals plant with an ordnance facility next door. After World War II, the Army found itself in need of land for developing for a new kind of military system, rockets, and brought to Huntsville a team of German scientists led by Wernher von Braun. In Huntsville, he went on to develop the rocket that launched Apollo 11 to the moon.

Today, the 60-square-mile base is home to the Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command, much of the workforce of the Missile Defense Agency, as well as NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and several other air- and space-focused military organizations and contractors.

The base is dotted with historic rockets, including von Braun’s V2 and a Saturn 1B, one of the family of Apollo launch vehicles. It is still an active test site for rockets engines, javelins and explosives.

hightor wrote:

I love it! To think how much I despised that guy. I guess it's all relative.

Exactly my thoughts when I read it, Hightor.

Oh well...things CAN change...and in this case, much for the better.

why do we only see the brave side of republicans when they’re out of power?

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why do we only see the brave side of republicans when they’re out of power?

because they know longer have to appeal to the base...