NEW YORK — Attorneys for Donald Trump sought during hours of cross examination of Stormy Daniels on Tuesday and Thursday to portray her as a fabricator and extortionist, a woman with no regard for the truth who preyed on a rich man for a quick buck.
Continue reading “Trump’s Play For Jury Nullification Becomes Clear During Cross-Exam Of Stormy Daniels”Trump Accountability Scuttled By Judges’ Manipulation, Prosecutors’ Self-Inflicted Wounds
Only an extraordinary cocktail of strategic delay, judicial scale-thumbing and good old fashioned bungling could leave just one of four Donald Trump felony indictment cases likely to conclude (and quite possibly even to start) before Election Day.
That future, long looming, became even more concrete this week.
Continue reading “Trump Accountability Scuttled By Judges’ Manipulation, Prosecutors’ Self-Inflicted Wounds”Facts On the Dining Hall? Sabra Hummus was the Main Get For UCR Protestors
Earlier this month, University of California at Riverside, a campus in the UC system, reached a negotiated settlement with the encampment organizers on the campus which will allow the peaceful deconstruction of the university encampment. Initial reports suggested that UCR had in the agreement opened the door to possible disinvestment. But it’s more complicated than that. The individual UC schools don’t control their endowments. They are controlled by an investment office for the whole system. They agreed to create a task force to “explore the removal of UCR’s endowment” from that central office and if that can happen to invest “in a manner that will be financially and ethically sound,” with a particular emphasis on arms manufacturers.
Continue reading “Facts On the Dining Hall? Sabra Hummus was the Main Get For UCR Protestors”Listen To This: Cricket’s Revenge
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss Kristi Noem’s epic self-immolation, presidential polling and the latest in Trump’s many trials.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
San Francisco Sees Unusually Large Number Of Sea Lions At Pier 39
Tourists and locals know San Francisco’s Pier 39 as THE place to catch a glimpse of sea lions sunbathing on the docks. Earlier this month visitors got quite the show as unexpectedly large groups of sea lions hauled themselves onto the floating platforms. According to local officials, the sight and sound of the over 1,000 member group was the biggest showing of sea lions in the last 15 years. So what is drawing such large groups of the blubbering animals? It’s the large numbers of anchovies and herring present in the San Francisco bay ahead of the sea lion mating season.
Visitors gather to see the the surge in sea lions in San Francisco
Sea lions lounge on the docks at Pier 39
The surge in number of sea lions in the area is due to large schools of anchovies and herring
Over 1,000 sea lions hang out on the docks
California sea lions playing on the dock
Sea lions rest on the docks after eating their fill of fish from the bay
California sea lions draw visitors to San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf
Sea lions nap on San Francisco docks
Docks packed with California sea lions
Full and sleepy seals find space on the crowded docks
The most sea lions to visit Pier 39 in 15 years
San Francisco’s sea lion center draws tourists ahead of mating season
The surge in sea lions is due to large schools of anchovies and herring in the bay
Stormy Daniels Concludes Her Two Days Of Testimony
After one day of testimony that was by turns seamy and grim, Stormy Daniels returned to the stand Thursday to be cross-examined by Trump’s lawyers.
Follow along with us below.
How Republicans Went From The Tea Party, To ‘Stop The Steal,’ To The Next Big Election Conspiracy
The Republicans are getting the “Stop The Steal” band back together ahead of this year’s presidential race.
Continue reading “How Republicans Went From The Tea Party, To ‘Stop The Steal,’ To The Next Big Election Conspiracy”Trump Attacks the Jews as Biden Puts His Foot Down
“If any Jewish person voted for Joe Biden, they should be ashamed of themselves.” That’s ex-President Trump this morning as he headed into the courtroom in New York City. This is worth everyone taking a close look at. When Trump feels cornered and scared one of his go-tos is to lash out at American Jews. The overwhelming percentage of American Jews voted for President Biden in 2020. And there’s no pollster or political prognosticator who doesn’t think the same will happen this year. So this isn’t some hypothetical — if that happened they should be ashamed. It did happen and will again. While the precise percentage of American Jews voting for each party can shift a bit cycle to cycle, Jews are, along with African-Americans, the most consistent Democratic voting block in the country and have been so for the last century. And for this they should be ashamed of themselves, according to the Republican nominee.
Continue reading “Trump Attacks the Jews as Biden Puts His Foot Down”Don’t Blame Jack Smith For The Erosion Of The Rule Of Law
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
It’s Not Supposed To Work This Way
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon being so obviously in the tank for Donald Trump in indefinitely postponing his Mar-a-Lago trial set off a new round of recriminations over various tactical decisions Special Counsel Jack Smith made in bringing the classified documents case.
Smith should have picked a different venue than South Florida! He should have had Cannon recused already! If Garland hadn’t been so slow, this wouldn’t be an issue now!
None of those are availing here, and they miss the larger point that for the rule of law to mean anything it must be sturdier and more enduring than a few tactical decisions by a single prosecutor in a single case.
We can take that notion one step further: A lot of commentary and analysis over the last year has insisted that you can’t rely on the criminal justice system to rid us of Trump – the election is the real tool to remove the Trump threat.
It would be pedantic to say there’s no truth to that, but at the same time it turns the rule of the law on its head for it be susceptible to the results of any one election. No one prosecutor, no one case, no one election should be able to determine the fate of the rule of law.
The rule of law isn’t supposed to be dependent on who wins or loses the presidency. It’s not supposed to turn in the wind like a vane. It is supposed to be lasting, immutable, and consistent. Presidents and prosecutors may come and go, but the principles underlying the rule of law must be resilient to those ephemeral real world changes.
What principles are those? That no one is above the law – and no one is below it either. That justice is meted out fairly without regard to party or ideology. That the rules of the game apply to everyone and aren’t selectively enforced. That the legal system isn’t a weapon to be deployed against one’s political adversaries. That the weakest benefit from the system as much as the most powerful, and that the most powerful are called to account same as the weakest.
Before you scoff at my idealism or naivete, of course these are aspirations. We fall short of them all the time. They’re ideals to be pursued, not a destination we’ve arrived at. The consensus around those principles does ebb and flow, but the principles themselves haven’t been under sustained attack at the level in this way perhaps ever in our history (again, excepting out the consensus’ historic blindness to minorities and disfavored groups). It’s a measure of how far we’ve sunken that we’re squabbling over which tactic, hack, or clever trick we should deploy to shore up the erosion of the rule of law.
We’re in a very bad place when it’s widely agreed that the rule of law hangs in the balance in the 2024 election, as it did in 2020. The democratic experiment cannot long endure if one of the two major political parties is itself anti-democratic. Democracy itself can’t regularly be on the ballot. The democratic consensus must be deeper and broader than that for the rule of law to survive.
The Ongoing Threat Of Another Coup
WaPo: Top Republicans, led by Trump, refuse to commit to accept 2024 election results
Quote Of The Day
Donald Trump is the first American presidential candidate to explicitly threaten the democratic system on which a free press depends. He could win. Considering the stakes for the country, that ought to be the campaign issue that dwarfs all others.
Veteran reporter John Harwood
Liveblogging The Cross-Examination Of Stormy Daniels
TPM’s John Kovensky is back at the courthouse this morning, where he’ll be liveblogging Day 2 of the testimony of Stormy Daniels. Her continued cross examination by Trump’s lawyer is expected to be hard-hitting. You can follow along in real time here.
The Complexities Of Sexual Violence
Amanda Marcotte: Stormy Daniels testimony reveals the triumph of #MeToo
Yup
Philip Bump: Trump’s classified documents trial blown apart by Cannon
Georgia RICO Case Ain’t Happening Before Election Either
An appeals court in Georgia has agreed to take up Donald Trump’s appeal of the trial judge’s decision not to disqualify District Attorney Fani Willis from the case over her affair with one of her prosecutors, adding new delays to a case that was already looking likely to spill over into 2025.
MTG Fails To Oust Speaker Johnson
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) easily survived a GOP mutiny led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Only 10 Republicans joined her in voting to oust Johnson, while Democrats overwhelmingly voted to save him.
FreedomWorks Is Shutting Down
While the Tea Party era was a forerunner of Trump, it’s not the same as MAGA-ism, and the latest proof of that is the shuttering of FreedomWorks announced yesterday.
Helmed in its heyday by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX), FreedomWorks could not survive in the Trump era, a remnant of an earlier still-poisonous brand of Republican activism but not in the same league as MAGA.
Important
NYT: How Republicans Echo Antisemitic Tropes Despite Declaring Support for Israel
Ya Don’t Say?
Politico: “The U.S. oil industry is drawing up ready-to-sign executive orders for Donald Trump aimed at pushing natural gas exports, cutting drilling costs and increasing offshore oil leases in case he wins a second term, according to energy executives with direct knowledge of the work.”
When MAGA Bites Its Own
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Cutting the Spigot
What was first communicated by reports of a slowdown in weapons transfers and then confirmed in leaks has now been brought into the open: Joe Biden is saying he will cut off the supply of heavy munitions (big bombs from the sky) if Israel goes ahead with a major ground incursion into Rafah, the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip, which is both the last refuge of Hamas’ intact battalions and hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians who have fled other parts of the strip over the last six months. This is in addition to the city’s normal civilian population.
I have seen some commentators who have absolutely no love for Netanyahu saying this undercuts whatever leverage Israel has in the hostage negotiations by depriving them of the threat to go into Rafah in force. There’s likely something to that. But it is basically a certainty that this move was absolutely the final straw for the U.S. It had been insisting and insisting and insisting not to do this without a plan to evacuate the city, and the Israeli government is saying too bad. We’re doing it. Biden had the choice to make his words meaningless or put down his foot. When you’re supplying the weapons, your foot comes down very hard.
Continue reading “Cutting the Spigot”