Many legal experts have openly expressed their criticism of US District Court Judge Aileen Cannon, who's presiding over Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago classified documents case.
The Florida judge's bias towards the former president, experts say, was proven when she postponed trial indefinitely earlier this month.
According to a Thursday, May 16 report published by Salon, "special counsel Jack Smith does have one option, which he already hinted at deploying in an April legal filing, back when Cannon wanted to instruct prospective jurors that maybe Trump had a legal right to take any classified documents he pleased: a 'writ of mandamus.'"
In other words, Salon reports the special counsel "could ask Cannon’s de facto bosses at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, who have already thrown out her decisions before, to remove her from the case altogether."
"At that time I was knee-deep into the cult of Donald Trump, yes."
That was Michael Cohen's answer from a Manhattan witness stand on Tuesday when asked by Donald Trump's attorney if he was "obsessed" with his boss in the decade that he worked for the criminal defendant. The lawyer, Todd Blanche, was trying to discredit Cohen by painting him as something like a jilted lover, a man who once worshipped Trump but, ever since going to prison for crimes committed at Trump's behest, now holds an epic grudge.
Much of what Cohen does with his time these days is indeed cringeworthy. Since being released from prison, Cohen has tried to rebrand himself as a #Resistance hero, unleashing a torresnt of anti-Trump content and trying to get on cable news as much as possible. But while his current behavior is not exactly classy, as his testimony in the campaign finance fraud trial shows, it pales in comparison to the heights of self-humiliation he performed daily while still in Trump's thrall.
If a state wants to take away your gun, they must first go to court and prove there’s a clear and legally defensible justification for that “extreme” action. You can appeal their move all the way to the US Supreme Court.
On the other hand, if a Republican governor, secretary of state, or local official wants to take away your voter registration or refuse to count your ballot, they don’t even have to tell you they’ve done it.
Thomas Paine, in his 1795 Dissertation on First Principles of Government, proclaimed:
“The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case.”
When the Republican House Majority lacked the votes to defeat Marjorie Taylor Greene’s motion to remove Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House, 163 House Democrats voted to keep him in office.
What was their thanks? Only a week later, Johnson showed up at Trump’s hush money trial to proclaim Trump’s innocence, to falsely attack the Judge’s daughter, and to denounce the American justice system as corrupt.
Recently M. Steven Fish wrote an op-ed in the New York Times entitled “Trump Knows Dominance Wins. Someone Tell Democrats.” As Mr. Fish wrote, “The American National Elections Studies has polled voters on presidential candidates’ traits since the 1980s, and the candidates who rated higher on ‘strong leadership’ has never lost. The one who more people agree ‘really cares about people like you’ loses half the time.” Fish also writes, “Today’s Republicans are all about dominance. They embrace us-versus-them framing, double down on controversial statements and take risks. Today’s Democrats often recoil from “othering” opponents and back down after ruffling feathers. They have grown obsessively risk-averse, poll-driven, allergic to engaging on hot-button issues…”
Local news has its finger on the pulse of our communities. When city council acts (or acts up), when disaster strikes, when corruption or scandal needs to be scrutinized, local news steps up. From our kids’ sporting events to small town heroes, road construction detours to storm preparedness, they cover stories of interest and importance to our daily lives – stories that large media overlooks.
Amidst the climate crisis, these stories could save our lives.
Heat waves. Super-storms. Forest fires. Floods. Reporting on climate events, disasters, and preparedness is essential, obviously. But local news has a bigger role to play in helping us apply climate solutions that make sense to the unique places that we live.
In the beautiful valley where I live, nestled on the border of Canada in Northern Maine, agriculture, forestry, and snowmobiling are the three big industries. Last week, I stood in the cool shade of a potato barn talking to the farmer who also works as a trucking broker, getting local pallets of vegetables and other goods onto shared trucks headed to market.
— from Foreign Policy In Focus
In the face of an increasingly terrible conflict, political leaders, academic scholars, engaged officials, and media experts tend to explain how the conflict arose and is escalating badly. This has the effect of making the conflict appear inevitable and insurmountable short of totally defeating the adversary. Such thinking is evident in many of the current disorders in the United States and in many other countries. Such tendencies unfortunately fuel the intensity and gravity of the Israeli-Hamas war. Less attention tends to be given to constructive alternatives.
Fortunately, there are alternative approaches, deeds. and consequences. Attention might be given to what various actors might have done or failed to do to avert or transform tragic conflicts. These alternatives can point to ways of averting escalation and transforming the conflict constructively. In this way, some officials, non-governmental intermediaries, critics, and conflict resolution workers can eventually succeed in transforming tragic conflicts.
While in the U.S. Army and Army Reserves for 29 years, I thought I had seen some pretty stupid things the military was told by politicians to do. It always begins with politicians deciding the easiest, most sensible solution to a problem would have too much political baggage and cost them votes in the next election. So, they look for a politically expedient solution, one that is invariably very expensive and convoluted.
Attempting a Military Solution for a Political or Diplomat Problem—AGAIN!!!
In this vein, all too often, politicians turn to the U.S. military for a solution to a non-military problem. Then some A-type personality in the military presents a hair-brained idea to the politicians, probably never thinking that the idea would be accepted. Then it is accepted to get the politicians out of a jam, and the next thing you know is that the Rube Goldberg, crazy idea is being funded.
PHILADELPHIA – His people have a right to self-defense, and plainly he is desperate to maintain his political power. He faces extraordinary pressure to alter his military strategy.
To avoid confusion, we are referring to President Biden, who surely withheld delivery of 3,500 bombs to Israel in part because critics of the Jewish state may abandon him next Nov. 5, denying Democrats another four-year term in the White House. However, a revealing New York Times piece on Sunday suggests that Biden’s prevailing reason was aggravation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. We are not focusing here on Netanyahu’s political aims or the pressure he Is under, and Israel’s right to self-defense.
— from Robert Reich's Substack
Friends,
There is something important about Trump’s criminal trial in New York that’s not being openly talked about. I don’t mean we’re not getting the facts about what’s happening in Manhattan Superior Court. But something very big is being left out.
The trial has introduced us to a world of moral and ethical loathsomeness in which people use and abuse one another routinely. It’s Trump world.
Consider Stormy Daniels. Porn stars are entitled to do as they wish to make money. But when they extort their clients or boyfriends who are running for public office — demanding large payments in order to stay quiet about their affair — they’re violating public morality. They’re contributing to a society in which every interaction has a potential price.
Last week we heard Daniels’s story, even more detailed and lascivious than expected. But a troubling aspect of her behavior is that when Trump ran for office, she saw a chance to extort money from him. She then “shopped” her account of their sexual liaison, before finally accepting $130,000 to be silenced in the 2016 election’s final critical days.
The much-anticipated testimony by former Donald Trump lawyer Michael Cohen finally arrived this week and from the sound of many of the talking heads on television, it's been a huge disappointment. They were apparently expecting the former president's one-time personal "fixer" to melt down on the stand in a fit of rage or lunge at his former boss. Instead, the carefully prepared Cohen was subdued and succinct, admitting his lies and misdeeds in service of Donald Trump with a sorrowful mien.
The prosecution's case has been meticulously laid out through testimony from the people with whom Trump conspired to create fake news items about his political rivals in 2016 and their scheme to buy up negative stories about him to testimony from his loyal, former assistants creating a timeline delineating what the former president knew and when he knew it.
And then there was Stormy Daniels, the adult film actress who received the hush money payoff, taking the stand to dramatically verify that the story they were trying to suppress was true. All of this has been backed up by a paper trail that even includes handwritten notes by Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg on incriminating documents outlining the crime Trump is charged with committing.
Conservative lawyer George Conway does not typically mince words when it comes to how he feels about Donald Trump.
During a Wednesday interview with MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace — speaking directly in the camera to the former president — Conway predicted that the MAGA hopeful will not testify in his ongoing New York hush money trial because he's a terrified "wuss."
"If I were his lawyer," the legal analyst told Wallace, "in a million years, I would never tell him to testify. I would tell him not to testify. And it reminds me of that passage towards the end of one of [veteran Washington Post journalist] Bob Woodward's books on the [Trump] administration, where Woodward quotes John Dowd — Trump's original personal lawyer — as saying, 'The reason why he couldn't testify is because he's an effing liar.' You can't let him testify. He would be torn to shreds in about three minutes."
Conway continued, "But that said — he never listens to his laywers. If he doesn't testify, it's not going to be because he all of a sudden decided to follow legal advice. He's causing his lawyers to do stupid things in court, like the cross-examination of Stormy, and the miscues the other day with the cross-examination with Michael Cohen. He doesn't listen to his lawyers."
The House Judiciary Committee and the House Oversight and Accountability Committee are holding hearings Thursday to consider holding Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress. The Department of Justice has refused to provide recordings of special counsel Robert Hur’s interviews with President Joe Biden and his ghostwriter in the classified documents probe, having already provided the transcripts of those interviews.
The outcome of these meetings isn’t in question; committee chairs Jim Jordan and James Comer will push the contempt vote to the House floor. They remain intent on finding anything that they can use to impeach Biden and/or members of his administration, and they won’t let the fact that their efforts so far have been ridiculous stop them.
It took them two tries to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, only for the Senate to swat it away. The star witness in their Biden impeachment case turned out to be a Russian mole. And they’ve already been down the road of trying to use Hur’s report to prove Biden unfit for office—a game that Hur refused to play in Jordan’s disastrous hearing. But no embarrassing defeat is going to stop them.
Is there a way to reverse the decision by five Republicans on the Supreme Court that it’s OK for billionaires and big corporations to bribe politicians?
Americans are watching with increasing shock and dismay:
— President Biden tried to knock up to $20,000 off the debt of every person in the country with a student loan. Republicans decided this might somehow, someday mean fewer profits for banks — who financially support the GOP — so they sued at the Supreme Court. The Republican appointees on the Court, over the objections of the three Democratic appointees, killed the president’s effort without providing any cogent constitutional rationalization.
— Scientists have developed lab-grown meat that is healthier, easier on the planet, and, when manufactured at scale, cheaper than beef, pork, or chicken. The animal ag industry freaked out and threw a bunch of cash at Republican members of Congress, who are now trying to outlaw the product before the companies developing it can get to scale. Even the buggywhip makers back in the day didn’t think the way to protect their industry was to buy off politicians (of course that was before five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery).
— from Foreign Policy In Focus
Everyone complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. This quip by the American essayist Charles Dudley Warner applies to fossil fuels as well. Everyone talks about ending fossil fuel production, but almost no one is doing anything about it.
Take the example of the Biden administration. It has launched the most ambitious effort by the United States to leave fossil fuels behind and enter the new era of renewable energy. And yet, in 2023, the United States produced more crude oil than ever before: 12.9 million barrels per day compared to the previous record from 2019 of 12.3 million barrels a day.
Or take the example of Brazil, where the progressive politician Lula da Silva won back the presidency in 2022. His predecessor was a big fan of drilling for fossil fuels. Lula has made it clear that he will take a very different approach. For instance, he wants Brazil to join the club of oil-producing countries in order to lead it into a clean-energy future. And yet, in 2023, Brazil’s production of oil increased by 13 percent and gas by over 8 percent, both new records.
Homegrown militias, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists have been using music, gaming and social media platforms as hubs for recruitment for many years. Government reports, and reporting by the media on the use of social media by homegrown domestic terrorists has grown exponentially over the past several years. In late February, The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report titled “COUNTERING VIOLENT EXTREMISM: FBI and DHS Need Strategies and Goals for Sharing Threat Information with Social Media and Gaming Companies”
A December 2023 report by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) titled “Five Things About the Role of the Internet and Social Media in Domestic Radicalization,” spelled out “how the internet and social media may both promote and prevent radicalization outcomes.”
Before examining the NIJ’s finding, lets take a step back and look at reporting on the increased use of the Internet by extremist right wing groups since the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
— from the Institute for New Economic Thinking
Shameful fact: the plight of U.S. retirees is a global exception. In their pursuit of lower taxes, America’s wealthiest individuals support policies that make it extremely difficult for seniors to manage the increasing costs of healthcare, housing, and basic necessities. Not so in other rich countries like Germany, France, and Canada, where robust public pensions and healthcare systems offer retirees stability and dignity. After a lifetime of hard work, older citizens in the U.S. find their reward is merely scraping by, as savings diminish under the weight of soaring medical costs in the most expensive healthcare system in the developed world.
The solution from America’s elites? Suck it up and work longer.
Every religion prioritizes care for the needy. Christianity’s Benedictine Rule, for example, puts care of the sick atop the moral order — “above and before every other duty.”
Really? Even above the holy Wall Street mandate that medical and insurance conglomerates must squeeze every last penny of profits out of America’s corporate-care system? Well, there’s morality — and then there’s business.
Consider how today’s monopolized and financialized hospital networks treat nurses — the high-touch frontline people who do the most to put “care” in “health care.”
Often paid a pittance, thousands of nurses across America are now organizing and unionizing against the inequities of this system. The nurses’ core grievance, however, is not their pay, but the gross understaffing imposed on them and their patients by profiteering hospital chains.
I’ve spent most of my life as an advocate for a more peaceful world. In recent years, I’ve been focused on promoting diplomacy over war and exposing the role of giant weapons companies like Lockheed Martin and its allies in Congress and at the Pentagon as they push for a “military-first” foreign policy. I’ve worked at an alphabet soup of think tanks: the Council on Economic Priorities (CEP), the World Policy Institute (WPI), the New America Foundation, the Center for International Policy (CIP), and my current institutional home, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft (QI).
Most of what I’ve done in my career is firmly rooted in my college experience. I got a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at Columbia University, class of 1978, and my time there prepared me for my current work — just not in the way one might expect. I took some relevant courses like Seymour Melman’s class on America’s permanent war economy and Marcia Wright’s on the history of the colonization of South Africa. But my most important training came outside the classroom, as a student activist.
What happens if he loses?
The mainstream press has finally turned its focus to what a second Donald Trump administration will look like should he win the White House in 2024. Salon has been covering this since Trump first flew off to Mar-a-Lago in 2021 and it was obvious that unless something happened to his health, Trump would be the 2024 nominee and the rest of the GOP would be developing a multi-faceted program to grant themselves unlimited power. None of this was anything but predictable once we saw what they were capable of during the post-election period of 2020 and the events of January 6, 2021.
The mainstream media has caught up and over the past few months has produced in-depth features and front page articles on the new MAGAfied Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, Schedule F, Agenda 47 and the details within all of those and other plans which reveal an authoritarian, anti-democratic crackdown on Americans' rights and a full rollback of safety regulations and vital programs. The proposals for foreign policy and national security are even more horrifying. Trump is as narcissistic as ever and his motives remain purely personal but he's got a full crew of authoritarian lackeys ready to take the wheel who are prepared to serve him well as they transform the United States into a full-blown autocracy for their own purposes.
Donald Trump came to the aid of embattled Republican South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, whose story about shooting to death her 14-month old German wirehaired pointer named Cricket has been denounced by Americans on the left and right for weeks.
Gov. Noem not only chose to put the story in her memoir, but has repeatedly defended her decision to drag the dog into a gravel pit and shoot her, killing her with one bullet without even warning her child, who asked when they returned home from school, “Where’s Cricket?”
Trump, speaking Tuesday on “The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show,” the successor to the late Rush Limbaugh’s talk radio program, did not appear to have a full grasp of the story or the massive outrage and upset Gov. Noem caused.
“I’m sure you’ve seen some of the Kristi Noem story. She might be the only person getting worse press than you on the left right now with the dog shooting story,” Clay Travis told Trump. “Is she still in the mix as a VP? Have you thought maybe she’d make more sense in a cabinet? How do you analyze stories like that as you go about making a choice?”
House Speaker Mike Johnson made an appearance at Donald Trump’s hush money trial Tuesday in an unofficial declaration that the GOP is opposed to the rule of law—a photo op likely designed to shore up his own support among hard-liners.
“President Trump is a friend, and I wanted to be here to support him,” Johnson said. “I’m here speaking with you outside because the court won’t allow us to speak inside the building. That’s just one of the many things that are wrong here.”
I hope you'll watch the video below a time or two before reading on.
Doesn't it seem as though what Jon Stewart is saying in that rant is about is everything this "election" should be about, and isn't? It sure did to me. So much of what has kept this country from being great is surely due to deeply embedded institutionalized corruption. That corruption has been enhancing itself year over year, decade over decade as money and privilege found better and better ways to serve money and privilege. It is so successful in resisting reform that the elections we're encouraged to believe can alleviate corruption are, in fact, the very life's blood of corruption itself, designed to perpetuate power and preserve the status quo.
I’ve been watching global trends for a few decades, and have never before seen so many warning lights flash at once. That’s just one reason I’ve concluded that, as of 2024, humanity is at a make-or-break crossroads in its economic, social, and environmental history.
Let’s take a quick look at those warning lights, and see if we can grasp why so many risks are converging at once.
Things Are Deteriorating Fast
Nearly everyone knows that the climate is heating up. But a flurry of alarming recent studies about rapidly warming oceans, climate feedbacks, and tipping points suggest that the rate of warming is suddenly accelerating. Last year was the warmest on record “by far” according to NASA, with the global average temperature leaping above the next-warmest year, 2016, by an unprecedented 0.27 degree F (0.15 degree C). And it’s been revealed that the international community of climate experts, rather than fear-mongering, has actually downplayed the severity of the crisis.
The GOP’s favorite phrase when it comes to presidential politics appears to be, “Nobody knew at the time.”
Once a president is sworn into office, regardless of how much evidence there is of crimes and irregularities committed to get him there, both the press and the electorate just seem to want to ignore that evidence and move along. After all, there’s never been a successfully contested presidential election in American history.
Which is why the GOP will again count on getting away with their crimes against electoral democracy this fall. The big question for America will be, “What did we miss that we should have known at the time?”
We have, you’ll recall, seen this movie before:
We owe an ironic debt of gratitude to Israel’s UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan for advancing the cause of the State of Palestine at the United Nations. By delivering a speech to the UN General Assembly that was so unhinged, absurd, vulgar, insulting, undignified, and undiplomatic, Erdan helped to secure a lopsided vote of 143 to 9 in favor of Palestine’s UN membership (the rest abstained or did not vote). But more than that, Erdan helped to clarify Israel’s tactical approach—and why it is doomed to fail.
Let us briefly consider the content of Erdan’s speech. Erdan claimed, in short, that Palestine equals Hamas and Hamas equals Hitler’s Nazi Reich. Erdan told the UN delegates that their nations support a state of Palestine because “so many of you are Jew-hating.” He then shredded the UN Charter at the podium, claiming that the delegates were doing the same by voting for Palestine’s UN membership. All the while, on the very same day as his speech and UN vote, Israel was amassing its forces for yet more slaughter of innocent civilians in Rafah.
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