Today I’m highlighting the work of Scottish artist Agnes Miller Parker. She is best known for her wood engravings of animals, often used as book illustrations. She was also a woman’s right activist. “The Uncivilized Cat” was an illustration for the book “Love’s Creation,” by Marie Stopes, published in 1928, the year women won the right to vote in the UK. The the image is filled with symbols of women’s liberation. Read about them at this link.
We are still waiting for the expected indictment of Donald Trump in the January 6 case. Special Counsel Jack Smith is till conducting grand jury interviews in the investigation, so maybe it won’t happen right away–or maybe it will come next week. Meanwhile, there is some Trump legal news.
The federal judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s prosecution on charges of illegally retaining dozens of classified documents set a trial date on Friday for May 2024, taking a middle position between the government’s request to go to trial in December and Mr. Trump’s desire to push the proceeding until after the 2024 election.
In her order, Judge Aileen M. Cannon said the trial was to be held in her home courthouse in Fort Pierce, Fla., a coastal city two and a half hours north of Miami that will draw its jury pool from several counties that Mr. Trump won handily in his two previous presidential campaigns.
Judge Cannon also laid out a calendar of hearings, throughout the remainder of this year and into next year, including those concerning the handling of the classified material at the heart of the case.
The scheduling order came after a contentious hearing on Tuesday at the federal courthouse in Fort Pierce where prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith, and lawyers for Mr. Trump sparred over when to hold the trial.
The timing of the proceeding is more important in this case than in most criminal matters because Mr. Trump is now the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination and his legal obligations to be in court will intersect with his campaign schedule.
The date Judge Cannon chose to start the trial — May 20, 2024 — falls after the bulk of the primary contests. But it is less than two months before the start of the Republican National Convention in July and the formal start of the general election season.
Mr. Trump’s advisers have been blunt that winning the presidency is how he hopes to beat the legal charges he is facing, and he has adopted a strategy of delaying the trial, which is expected to take several weeks, for as long as possible.
When the trial date for Donald Trump’s Manhattan hush money case was set for March — during the GOP presidential primary schedule — the former president and leading 2024 Republican candidate shook his head.
The Republican Party as a whole might have that reaction to Trump’s latest trial date.
U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon on Friday set Trump’s Florida classified documents case to begin on May 20, 2024. Cannon wound up more or less splitting the difference between the government’s request to begin in December and Trump’s lawyers’ preference to begin after the 2024 election.
The date could still be pushed back, especially given that Cannon has labeled the case “complex.” But it means we’re currently looking at this for a schedule of Trump’s upcoming trials:
Oct. 2: New York civil fraud trial
Jan. 15: Second E. Jean Carroll civil defamation trial
March 25: Manhattan hush-money trial
May 20: Federal classified documents trial in Florida
That’s a lot of legal issues to face in the heart of a campaign, keeping Trump or at least his lawyers in court for a huge chunk of time he’s supposed to be on the trail. But Trump’s most serious bit of legal jeopardy — at least for now, with potential Jan. 6-related indictments looming federally and in Georgia — won’t fully play out until the end of the primary season.
Nomination contests are often effectively wrapped up by March or April at the latest, with the final contests held in June but generally not consequential to the outcome. Republican National Committee rules effectively require every state to hold its contest by May 31, meaning a two-week classified documents trial would place the meat of the proceedings beyond the window for any GOP voters making their decisions.
Donald Trump received some no good, extremely bad legal news on Friday, when The Guardianreported that Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney criminally investigating his attempt to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia has “developed evidence to charge a sprawling racketeering indictment next month,” according to people familiar with the matter. Obviously, being charged with racketeering would be exactly as bad as it sounds—and yet somehow, that wasn’t even the worst news the ex-president received today.
Instead, it was likely the decision by Aileen Cannon—a federal judge Trump himself appointed—to set a trial date of May 20, 2024, for Trump to face off with the federal government in the classified-documents case, that had staffers and aides hiding in hallways and coat closets to avoid Trump’s ire (and whatever ketchup bottles he could get his hands on). While the spring date is several months later than prosecutors had requested, it is very much well before the postelection one Team Trump had been angling for in the hopes of putting it off until the ex-president could have won a second term and made all of his legal problems—on the federal level, that is—go away.
Of course, just because Cannon issued a ruling that Trump will undoubtedly be very unhappy about today does not mean she won’t, as many fear, blow up the case in his favor when the trial finally kicks off. (As The Washington Post notes, “In her role, Cannon can have a significant impact on the case, including by ruling on what evidence can be included and deciding on any potential motions challenging the charges.”) On the other hand, the government’s indictment against Trump is said to be extremely strong: After the charges were unveiled last month, former attorney general Bill Barropined: “I was shocked by the degree of sensitivity of these documents and how many there were, frankly. If even half of it is true, he’s toast.” As one Fox News legal analyst noted, “All the government has to do is stick the landing on one count, and he could have a terminal sentence. We’re talking about crimes that have a 10- or 20-year period as a maximum.” (Trump, along with his alleged co-conspirator, has pleaded not guilty.)
The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the state of Georgia has developed evidence to charge a sprawling racketeering indictment next month, according to two people briefed on the matter.
The racketeering statute in Georgia requires prosecutors to show the existence of an “enterprise” – and a pattern of racketeering activity that is predicated on at least two “qualifying” crimes.
In the Trump investigation, the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has evidence to pursue a racketeering indictment predicated on statutes related to influencing witnesses and computer trespass, the people said.
Willis had previously said she was weighing racketeering charges in her criminal investigation, but the new details about the direction and scope of the case come as prosecutors are expected to seek indictments starting in the first two weeks of August.
The racketeering statute in Georgia is more expansive than its federal counterpart, notably because any attempts to solicit or coerce the qualifying crimes can be included as predicate acts of racketeering activity, even when those crimes cannot be indicted separately.
The specific evidence was not clear, though the charge regarding influencing witnesses could include Trump’s conversations with Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which he asked Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes, the people said – and thereby implicate Trump.
For the computer trespass charge, where prosecutors would have to show that defendants used a computer or network without authority to interfere with a program or data, that would include the breach of voting machines in Coffee county, the two people said.
The breach of voting machines involved a group of Trump operatives – paid by the then Trump lawyer Sidney Powell – accessing the voting machines at the county’s election office and copying sensitive voting system data.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) has been contacted by the federal special counsel investigating former President Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, Kemp’s office confirmed Friday.
Former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) was also contacted for the investigation, according to CNN reports.
Special Counsel Jack Smith is investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the election and his actions related to the Jan. 6 insurrection. He served Trump a target letter on Sunday, informing the former president that he is the target of the probe.
By Agnes Miller Parker
The move shows overlap between Smith’s federal investigation and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s investigation into the same conduct in Georgia.
Smith’s probe in Arizona is questioning lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign against the state which alleged that the election was fraudulent. Smith subpoenaed the Arizona Secretary of State’s office earlier this month and subpoenaed state lawmakers in February.
Trump called Ducey multiple times to pressure him to overturn Arizona’s election results. President Biden won Arizona, the first time the state voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1996.
Mark Meadows joked about the baseless claim that large numbers of votes were fraudulently cast in the names of dead people in the days before the then-White House chief of staff participated in a phone call in which then-President Trump alleged there were close to 5,000dead voters in Georgia and urged Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn the 2020 election there.
In a text message that has been scrutinized by federal prosecutors, Meadows wrote to a White House lawyer that his son, Atlanta-area attorney Blake Meadows, had been probing possible fraud and had found only a handful of possible votes cast in dead voters’ names, far short of what Trump was alleging. The lawyer teasingly responded that perhaps Meadows’s son could locate the thousands of votes Trump would need to win the election. The text was described by multiple people familiar with the exchange.
The jocular text message, which has not been previously reported, is one of many exchanges from the time in which Trump aides and other Republican officials expressed deep skepticism or even openly mocked the election claims being made publicly by Trump, according to people familiar with the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the criminal investigation.
Special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading a Justice Department investigation of Trump’s activities in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, has focused on exploring whether Trump and his closest advisers understood that claims of fraud in the election were baseless, even as they pressed state officials and others to overturn Biden’s victory and convinced Trump’s millions of supporters that the election had been stolen, people familiar with the probe have said.
The text message is a small part of a broader portrait of Meadows that Smith appears to be assembling as he weighs the actions of not just Trump but a number of his closest advisers, including Meadows.
After an overhaul to Florida’s African American history standards, Gov. Ron DeSantis, the state’s firebrand governor campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination, is facing a barrage of criticism this week from politicians, educators and historians, who called the state’s guidelines a sanitized version of history.
Siamese cats, Agnes Miller Parker
For instance, the standards say that middle schoolers should be instructed that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit” — a portrayal that drew wide rebuke.
In a sign of the divisive battle around education that could infect the 2024 presidential race, Vice President Kamala Harris directed her staffers to immediately plan a trip to Florida to respond, according to one White House official.
“How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?” Ms. Harris, the first African American and first Asian American to serve as vice president, said in a speech in Jacksonville on Friday afternoon.
Ahead of her speech, Mr. DeSantis released a statement accusing the Biden administration of mischaracterizing the new standards and being “obsessed with Florida.”
Florida’s new standards land in the middle of a national tug of war on how race and gender should be taught in schools. There have been local skirmishes over banning books, what can be said about race in classrooms and debates over renaming schools that have honored Confederate generals.
Vice President Harris, taking aim at Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “war on woke” on Friday in his home state, blasted Florida politicians for making changes to the public school curriculum that she said amounted to little more than a “purposeful and intentional policy to mislead our children,” especially when it comes to slavery.
Harris never mentioned DeSantis (R) by name, referring only to “extremists” and people who “want to be talked about as American leaders.” But her fiery speech in Jacksonville focused squarely on the policies of the Florida governor and presidential candidate, as well as on the state’s Board of Education and its Republican-controlled legislature.
Florida’s new standards on Black history lay out numerous benchmarks, but one has especially caught critics’ attention — a statement that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” Since the guidelines were approved on Wednesday, many civil rights leaders have denounced the notion that slavery benefited its victims in some ways.
“Come on — adults know what slavery really involved,” Harris said. “It involved rape. It involved torture. It involved taking a baby from their mother. It involved some of the worst examples of depriving people of humanity in our world.”
By Agnes Miller Parker
She added, “How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities, that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?”
Since DeSantis announced his bid for the presidency in May, polls have cast him as former president Donald Trump’s top competition for the Republican nomination, at least for now. As DeSantis makes his pitch in early-voting primary states, he has blasted what he calls “woke indoctrination” in schools and said recent legislative changes in Florida could be a model for the rest of the nation.
Harris’s trip to the governor’s home state to rip into his policies could be a pivotal moment both for the Biden campaign, which has generally resisted going after the GOP presidential hopefuls, and for the vice president, who has sometimes seemed to cast about for a resonant issue.
Read more at The WaPo.
Bidenomics News
It’s difficult to understand why President Biden isn’t more popular. He has really delivered on his promises. What more do voters want? Are people really stupid enough to fall for GOP propaganda about the economy?
Morgan Stanley is crediting President Joe Biden’s economic policies with driving an unexpected surge in the U.S. economy that is so significant that the bank was forced to make a “sizable upward revision” to its estimates for U.S. gross domestic product.
Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is “driving a boom in large-scale infrastructure,” wrote Ellen Zentner, chief U.S. economist for Morgan Stanley, in a research note released Thursday. In addition to infrastructure, “manufacturing construction has shown broad strength,” she wrote.
As a result of these unexpected swells, Morgan Stanley now projects 1.9% GDP growth for the first half of this year. That’s nearly four times higher than the bank’s previous forecast of 0.5%.
“The economy in the first half of the year is growing much stronger than we had anticipated, putting a more comfortable cushion under our long-held soft landing view,” Zentner wrote.
The analysts also doubled their original estimate for GDP growth in the fourth quarter, to 1.3% from 0.6%. Looking into next year, they raised their forecast for real GDP in 2024 by a tenth of a percent, to 1.4%.
“The narrative behind the numbers tells the story of industrial strength in the U.S,” Zentner wrote.
Morgan Stanley’s revision came at a pivotal time for the Biden White House. The president has spent the summer crisscrossing the country, touting his economic achievements. “Together we are transforming the country, not just through jobs, not just through manufacturing, but also by rebuilding our infrastructure,” Biden said Thursday during a visit to a Philadelphia shipyard.
Read more at CNBC.
Have a fabulous Caturday and a great weekend, everyone!!
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The grand jury investigating the January 6 case is meeting today. Donald Trump had the option to explain himself to them; but since he won’t be doing that, he could be indicted today. The grand jury usually meets on Fridays also.
Lots of anticipation at the federal courthouse in DC today — Trump, of course, is not expected to show up but high likelihood of grand jury activity today as Jan. 6 probe nears charging stage.
Donald Trump could be indicted by a grand jury investigating his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and the January 6 Capitol riot as early as today.
Mr Trump announced on Tuesday that he had been sent a letter by special prosecutor Jack Smith informing him that he is the “target” of a grand jury investigation.
The target letter cites three statutes under which he could be charged including conspiracy to commit offence or to defraud the United States, deprivation of rights under colour of law and tampering with a witness, victim or informant, multiple outlets reported.
William Russell, a former White House aide who now works for the Trump presidential campaign and spent much of January 6 with the then-president, is scheduled to testify before the grand jury when it meets today.
A White House race that figures to be one of the most fraught in history is again in suspended animation as the political world awaits more potential criminal charges the Republican front-runner is expecting from special counsel Jack Smith.
Trump has lost none of his ability to shatter political conventions. Just months ago, the notion that a former president and potential future commander in chief could be indicted was staggering and unprecedented. Now it’s becoming an almost regular occurrence.
Trump has already been charged in Manhattan in a case triggered by a hush money payment to an adult film star, and separately, is facing federal charges related to his alleged mishandling of classified documents he hoarded in Florida. He announced this week that he’d been named as a target of Smith’s investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and events leading up to the attack on the US Capitol. Receiving such a notification is a procedural step that often leads to an indictment. And he’s waiting to find out whether he’ll be charged in a probe in Georgia over efforts to reverse President Joe Biden’s win there. The ex-president has pleaded not guilty to both indictments and denies wrongdoing in every other case against him.
Trump, his Republican rivals for the 2024 nomination, and much of America will be waiting for any developments out of a grand jury in Washington, DC, that is meeting Thursday. Two sources told CNN that Will Russell, a former special assistant to Trump in the White House who has continued to work for him, is due to testify for at least the third time. Any indictment in the probe, in the days or weeks to come, would likely emerge from this grand jury – a fact that lends its work great historical significance. Trump indicated that the target letter he received on Sunday gave him four days to take up an option to testify. Legal custom suggests that any indictment could come at any time after that.
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie – one of the rare Trump rivals who has openly criticized the ex-president – told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday that he was waiting to examine any charges from Smith before forming a judgment. But, given his experience as an ex-prosecutor, Christie suggested that the target letter from Smith was a grave omen.
“I never sent the target letter if I was not completely sure that I had put enough in front of the grand jury for them to return an indictment,” he said on “The Situation Room.”
“My sense is it’ll be a speaking indictment, as we call it in the business, which provides a lot of detail. So, you can really give folks a sense of what the evidence is that backs up the charges.”
CNN reported Wednesday that the ex-president’s legal team was scrambling to find out whether Smith had evidence about Trump’s conduct they didn’t know about. This raises the possibility that any election-related case Smith might bring against Trump may be far broader than his camp may have expected.
There’s more at the link.
UPDATE: Just now, CNN is is reporting that, according to their sources, the “Trump team [is] expecting new indictment any moment.” I’m watching with the sound off, and will update if that happens.
Both The Guardian and The New York Times have articles explaining the Civil Rights charge mentioned in the target letter Trump received from Jack Smith.
Federal prosecutors investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results have evidence to charge the former president with three crimes, including section 241 of the US legal code that makes it unlawful to conspire to violate civil rights, two people familiar with the matter said.
The potential charges detailed in a target letter sent to Trump by prosecutors from the office of special counsel Jack Smith, who also charged Trump with retaining classified documents last month, was the clearest signal of an imminent indictment.
Prosecutors appear to have evidence to charge Trump with obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the United States based on the target letter, two statutes that the House select committee examining the January 6 Capitol attack issued criminal referrals for last year.
The target letter to Trump identified a previously unconsidered third charge, the sources said. That is section 241 of title 18 of the US code, which makes it unlawful to conspire to threaten or intimidate a person in the “free exercise” of any right or privilege under the “Constitution or laws of the United States”.
The statute, enacted to protect the civil rights of Black voters targeted by white supremacy groups after the US civil war, is unusual because it is typically used by prosecutors in law enforcement misconduct and hate crime prosecutions, though its use has expanded in recent years.
The other two statutes, meanwhile, suggest a core part of the case against Trump is focused on the so-called fake electors scheme and the former president’s efforts to use the fake slates in a conspiracy to stop the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election win on 6 January 2021.
Federal prosecutors have introduced a new twist in the Jan. 6 investigation by suggesting in a target letter that they could charge former President Donald J. Trump with violating a civil rights statute that dates back to the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, according to three people familiar with the matter.
The letter to Mr. Trump from the special counsel, Jack Smith, referred to three criminal statutes as part of the grand jury investigation into Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse his 2020 election loss, according to two people with knowledge of its contents. Two of the statutes were familiar from the criminal referral by the House Jan. 6 committee and months of discussion by legal experts: conspiracy to defraud the government and obstruction of an official proceeding.
But the third criminal law cited in the letter was a surprise: Section 241 of Title 18 of the United States Code, which makes it a crime for people to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person” in the “free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”
Congress enacted that statute after the Civil War to provide a tool for federal agents to go after Southern whites, including Ku Klux Klan members, who engaged in terrorism to prevent formerly enslaved African Americans from voting. But in the modern era, it has been used more broadly, including in cases of voting fraud conspiracies….
A series of 20th-century cases upheld application of the law in cases involving alleged tampering with ballot boxes by casting false votes or falsely tabulating votes after the election was over, even if no specific voter could be considered the victim.
In a 1950 opinion by the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, for example, Judge Charles C. Simons wrote of applying Section 241 in a ballot box-stuffing case that the right to an honest count “is a right possessed by each voting elector, and to the extent that the importance of his vote is nullified, wholly or in part, he has been injured in the free exercise of a right or privilege secured to him by the laws and Constitution of the United States.”
In a 1974 Supreme Court opinion upholding the use of Section 241 to charge West Virginians who cast fake votes on a voting machine, Justice Thurgood Marshall cited Judge Simons and added that every voter “has a right under the Constitution to have his vote fairly counted, without its being distorted by fraudulently cast votes.”
The line of 20th-century cases raised the prospect that Mr. Smith and his team could be weighing using that law to cover efforts by Mr. Trump and his associates to flip the outcome of states he lost. Those efforts included the recorded phone conversation in which Mr. Trump tried to bully Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough additional votes to overcome Mr. Biden’s win in that state and promoting a plan to use so-called fake electors — self-appointed slates of pro-Trump electors from states won by Mr. Biden — to help block or delay congressional certification of Mr. Trump’s defeat.
Those charges would almost certainly be brought in Washington, D.C., where juries have convicted one Jan. 6 defendant after another.
“If I was Donald J. Trump, the last place on Earth I’d want to be tried other than Atlanta, Georgia, is Washington, D.C.,” Samuel Shamansky, attorney for convicted Jan. 6 rioter Dustin Thompson, told The Daily Beast.
Shamansky said he based his opinion partly on pre-trial jury selection and the trial itself, but mostly on speaking with the jury after it returned a guilty verdict. The jurors made it clear that they were deeply offended by the storming of the Capitol.
“The overwhelming sense was this was a personal violation, a personal affront,” Shamansky said. “Folks from outside the D.C. area with an anti-D.C. agenda took over their city and trashed the Capitol building and assaulted their officers, all in the name of a fake stolen election.”
From another defendent:
More insight into what Trump would face in Washington, D.C., comes from attorney Norman Pattis, who represented Joseph Biggs, one of five Proud Boys charged with a seditious conspiracy related to Jan. 6. Pattis told The Daily Beast that more than half of the prospective jurors he interviewed sympathized with the Black Lives Matter movement. Nearly everyone had attended a protest at some time, though not one had been to a ‘Stop the Steal’ rally.
“It is a terrifying panel,” he said. “It took us 12 days to pick a jury and we didn’t like what we had.”
All five Proud Boys were convicted, though the jurors did reject some counts and appear to have taken considerable care in weighing the evidence.
“I’m not saying you can’t get a fair trial there,” Pattis said.
But he did suggest that the nation’s capital is hardly an ideal venue for defendants who rant about “the deep state” and pledge to “drain the swamp.”
“D.C. is a company town and its business is government,” he said.
Pattis figures that Trump would seek a change of venue.
“And it will fail,” Pattis added, citing the current guidelines for such a switch.
I can’t wait for that trial!
I’m going to wrap this up, because I’m really burned out today, and besides, I can’t think of anything else but the coming Trump indictment. This man has done so much damage to this country. I want to see him finally pay the price for his crimes.
Have a nice Thursday, and please feel free to post your thoughts and links on any topic that interests you.
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The world is shifting towards a superheated climate not seen in the past 1m years, prior to human existence, because “we are damned fools” for not acting upon warnings over the climate crisis, according to James Hansen, the US scientist who alerted the world to the greenhouse effect in the 1980s.
Hansen, whose testimony to the US Senate in 1988 is cited as the first high-profile revelation of global heating, warned in a statement with two other scientists that the world was moving towards a “new climate frontier” with temperatures higher than at any point over the past million years, bringing impacts such as stronger storms, heatwaves and droughts.
The world has already warmed by about 1.2C since mass industrialization, causing a 20% chance of having the sort of extreme summer temperatures currently seen in many parts of the northern hemisphere, up from a 1% chance 50 years ago, Hansen said.
“There’s a lot more in the pipeline, unless we reduce the greenhouse gas amounts,” Hansen, who is 82, told the Guardian. “These superstorms are a taste of the storms of my grandchildren. We are headed wittingly into the new reality – we knew it was coming.”
Hansen was a Nasa climate scientist when he warned lawmakers of growing global heating and has since taken part in protests alongside activists to decry the lack of action to reduce planet-heating emissions in the decades since.
He said the record heatwaves that have roiled the US, Europe, China and elsewhere in recent weeks have heightened “a sense of disappointment that we scientists did not communicate more clearly and that we did not elect leaders capable of a more intelligent response”.
“It means we are damned fools,” Hansen said of humanity’s ponderous response to the climate crisis. “We have to taste it to believe it.”
This year looks likely to be the hottest ever recorded globally, with the summer already seeing the hottest June and, possibly, hottest week ever reliably measured. Conversely, 2023 may in time be considered an average or even mild year, as temperatures continue to climb. “Things will get worse before they get better,” Hansen said.
“This does not mean that the extreme heat at a particular place this year will recur and grow each year. Weather fluctuations move things around. But the global average temperature will go up and the climate dice will be more and more loaded, including more extreme events.”
Read the rest at The Guardian.
Now on to the Trump Crimes:
The news that Trump received a target letter from Jack Smith warning him he is about to be indicted in the January 6 case has pushed the stolen documents case in Florida into the background. Judge Cannon can dither about setting a date for the stolen documents trial all she wants; the January 6 case will be tried in Washington DC, will likely be on a fast track, and will be higher profile. Trump could be indicted for the third time as early as Friday.
Tao Fung Shan (2019), by Stephen Wong Chun Hei (Hong Kong b. 1986),
Special counsel Jack Smith has informed former President Donald Trump by letter that he is a target in his investigationSp into efforts to overturn the 2020 election, sources familiar with the matter tell ABC News.
The target letter mentions three federal statutes: conspiracy to commit offense or to defraud the United States, deprivation of rights under color of law, and tampering with a witness, victim or an informant, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
There are no additional details in the letter and it does not say how the special counsel’s office claims Trump may have violated the statutes listed, sources said.
Trump, appearing Tuesday night at a town hall in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that he received the letter on Sunday.
“It bothers me,” said the former president. “I got the letter on Sunday night. Think of it, I don’t think they’ve ever sent a letter on Sunday night. And they’re in a rush because they want to interfere, it’s election interference, never been done like this in the history of our country and it’s a disgrace what’s happening to our country.”
Target letters are typically given to subjects in a criminal investigation to put them on notice that they are facing the prospect of indictment.
The letter mentions three federal statutes: Conspiracy to commit offense or to defraud the United States; deprivation of rights under color of law; and tampering with a witness, victim, or an informant. It does not offer further details, nor does it detail how the special counsel believes Trump may have violated the statutes, the source tells Rolling Stone.
The letter does not mention statutes on sedition or insurrection, according to the source….
The source said the statutes listed likely refer to the prosecutor’s interest in charging Trump with obstructing the election certification process, including Trump efforts to pressure Mike Pence to stop the certification of President Biden’s 2020 victory.
A federal judge on Wednesday rejected Donald Trump’s request for a new trial in a civil case brought by E. Jean Carroll, where a jury found the former U.S. president liable for sexually abusing and defaming the writer and awarded her $5 million in damages.
In a 59-page decision, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan said the jury did not reach a “seriously erroneous result,” and the May 9 verdict was not a “miscarriage of justice.”
Carroll had accused Trump of raping her in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the mid-1990s, and then branding the incident a hoax in an October 2022 post on his Truth Social platform.
Trump had argued that awarding Carroll $2 million in compensatory damages for sexual assault was “excessive” because the jury found he had not raped her, while the award for defamation was based on “pure speculation.”
The judge also found that Trump did rape Carroll, despite his claims of being exhonerated of that charge, according to the “common definition.”
JUST IN: Judge Kaplan rejects Trump's bid to throw out the verdict in the Carroll sexual assault lawsuit — and he says the Carroll jury did, in fact, find Trump raped her, based on the common definition of the word. https://t.co/3i62YnLA6Mpic.twitter.com/UqPd2VTFQE
Attorney General Dana Nessel is leveling felony charges against 16 Republicans who signed a certificate falsely stating that Donald Trump won Michigan’s 2020 presidential election, launching criminal cases against top political figures inside the state GOP.
Each of the 16 electors, including former Michigan Republican Party Co-Chairwoman Meshawn Maddock and Shelby Township Clerk Stan Grot, have been charged with eight felony counts, including forgery and conspiracy to commit election law forgery, according to Nessel’s office.
Moonlight Dance, by Paul Batch,, 1979
The revelation capped six months of investigation and produced the most serious allegations yet in Michigan over the campaign to overturn Trump’s loss to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020. Biden won the state by 154,000 votes or 3 percentage points, but Trump and his supporters maintained false and unproven claims that fraud swung the result.
As part of the push to undermine Biden’s victory, Trump supporters gathered inside the then-Michigan Republican Party headquarters on Dec. 14, 2020, and signed a certificate, claiming to cast the state’s 16 electoral votes for Trump.
Eventually, the false certificate was sent to the National Archives and Congress. The document inaccurately claimed the Trump electors had met inside the Michigan Capitol. However, they hadn’t. Biden’s electors convened inside the Capitol, and the building was closed to others on Dec. 14, 2020.
“The false electors’ actions undermined the public’s faith in the integrity of our elections and, we believe, also plainly violated the laws by which we administer our elections in Michigan,” said Nessel, a Democrat, in a statement.
“My department has prosecuted numerous cases of election law violations throughout my tenure, and it would be malfeasance of the greatest magnitude if my department failed to act here in the face of overwhelming evidence of an organized effort to circumvent the lawfully cast ballots of millions of Michigan voters in a presidential election.”
Special counsel Jack Smith’s team has contacted former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, who Donald Trump pressured to overturn the 2020 election, a source familiar with the outreach confirmed first to CNN.
A spokesman for Ducey confirmed the outreach from Smith’s team, which has not been previously reported.
Phil Greenwood (UK ,Wales. b.1943), Moon Lights, etching and aquating
“Yes, he’s been contacted. He’s been responsive, and just as he’s done since the election, he will do the right thing,” Ducey spokesman Daniel Scarpinato told CNN.
Trump narrowly lost Arizona to Joe Biden by less than 11,000 votes. Trump publicly attacked Ducey, a former ally, over the state’s certification of the results. As Ducey was certifying the election results in November 2020, Trump appeared to call the governor – with a “Hail to the Chief” ringtone heard playing on Ducey’s phone. Ducey did not take that call but later said he spoke with Trump, though he did not describe the specifics of the conversation.
Ducey, behind closed doors, said that the former president was pressuring him to find fraud in the presidential election in Arizona that would help him overturn the election, a source with knowledge told CNN earlier this month after The Washington Post first reported the news. There was no recording made of that call, a source familiar with the matter said.
Then-Vice President Mike Pence also spoke with Ducey in the wake of the 2020 election.
Federal prosecutors examining former President Donald Trump’s attempt to hold onto power following the 2020 election requested surveillance and other security footage recorded at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena, according to a subpoena obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
In a grand jury subpoena dated May 31, the Georgia Secretary of State’s office was directed to hand over “any and all security video or security footage, or any other video of any kind, depicting or taken at or near” State Farm and “any associated data.”
The subpoena, which was obtained by The AJC through an open records request and had not been previously reported, shows the widening interest in Georgia from Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith, who sent a so-called “target” letter to Trump on Sunday.
It also demonstrated the growing areas of overlap between the DOJ probe and the Fulton County investigation of interference in Georgia’s 2020 elections, which is expected to result in indictments against Trump and others next month.
Previous subpoenas and grand jury appearances show that Fulton and federal prosecutors are both interested in the appointment of a slate of “alternate” Trump electors in swing states like Georgia, as well as the pressure the former president placed on Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
The federal judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case expressed skepticism on Tuesday about the government’s request to go to trial as early as December, but she also seemed disinclined to accede immediately to Mr. Trump’s desire to have the trial put off until after the 2024 election.
Appearing for the first time at a hearing in the case, the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, came to no decision about when to schedule the trial, saying she would issue a written order “promptly.”
George Wesley Bellows (USA 1882-1925), A Fresh Breeze, 1913
The question of the trial’s timing could be hugely consequential, given that the legal proceeding is intertwined with the calendar of a presidential campaign in which Mr. Trump is now the front-runner for the Republican nomination.
For nearly two hours in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., Judge Cannon, a Trump appointee, peppered prosecutors and the former president’s lawyers with questions that suggested she was in command of her courtroom and well-versed in the facts of the case.
Her decision about when to schedule the trial will be an early test for the judge, who came under widespread criticism last year after she rendered some decisions in a related case that were favorable to Mr. Trump at an early stage of the investigation.
At one point, Judge Cannon directly asked one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Christopher Kise, if he wanted to put off the trial until after the election. When Mr. Kise said he did, Judge Cannon told him that she wanted to focus on near-term issues like the amount of discovery evidence the defense had to review and the types of motions the lawyers planned to file.
As the hearing came to end, Todd Blanche, another one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, asked Judge Cannon if the defense could return to court in November and reassess the trial schedule then. Appearing to pick up on the judge’s desire to create what she called “a road map” for the case, Mr. Blanche said that if a trial date absolutely had to be chosen, he would ask for one in mid-November 2024, after the election.
Timing is particularly important in this case because if the trial is delayed until after votes are cast and Mr. Trump wins the race, he could try to pardon himself or have his attorney general dismiss the matter entirely.
I imagine the Special Counsel would appeal to the 11th Circuit if Cannon has the nerve to schedule the trial after the election, as Trump wants.
Former New York City police commissioner Bernie Kerik is in talks to be interviewed by special counsel Jack Smith’s team investigating efforts to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election, Kerik’s attorney said Tuesday. Kerik worked with Rudy Giuliani after the election to find evidence of voter fraud and later provided documents about a plan to keep Donald Trump in power to the House Jan. 6 committee. Tim Parlatore, a lawyer who quit Trump’s legal team in May and who now represents Kerik, was asked by Kaitlan Collins on CNN if he expected the former commissioner to receive a letter like the one Trump received informing him that he was a target of Smith’s investigation. Parlatore said Kerik hasn’t received a target letter and does not expect him to at any point. But when asked if Parlatore is “in talks” about Kerik having an interview with the special counsel, the attorney said: “Yeah sure, absolutely. Mr. Kerik has nothing to hide. He’s happy to sit down and explain everything to them.”
Finally, news broke of another astonishing Trump crime yesterday–theft of valuable Israeli antiquities.
Trump’s Mar-a-Lago bathrooms and ballrooms were not just filled with top secret government documents. He apparently has also been hoarding temporarily loaned Israeli antiquities there for four years.
Haaretzreports that Israel lent the Trump White House antiquities, including ancient ceramic lamps from its national treasures collection, for a Hanukkah candle-lighting event in 2019. Israel Hasson, the then-director of the Israeli Antiquities Authority, approved the loan of the antiquities so long as they were returned within weeks.
Hasson told Haaretz that “we wanted our man to go and bring it back, but then Covid broke out, and everything got stuck.” So Hasson’s agency had asked Saul Fox, a major Jewish-American donor to the Antiquities Authority, to keep the items in tow until they could be brought back to Israel. But, Haaretz reports, Israeli authorities discovered several months ago that the antiquites instead ended up at Mar-a-Lago, “where they still remain.”
Eli Eskozido, the new Antiquities Authority head, has asked the Israeli government and Trump’s former U.S. ambassador to Israel to coordinate a return of the antiquities, but to no avail. One source told Haaretz that he wouldn’t be surprised if “the items Israel seeks are also eventually found in some bathroom.”
Republicans have bent over backward to show their inextinguishable support for Israel, but it’s unclear whether they will question why Trump has been harboring Israeli antiquities. After all, they had barely any criticism for his stealing of U.S. national security documents.
The extent of Trump criming is breathtaking, but his comeuppance is coming. As we say in the Midwest, he is up shit creek.
Have a wonderful Wednesday, Sky Dancers!!
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There’s not a lot of exciting political news today, so I’m going to share a bit about the apparent solving of a high-profile cold case crime. After that, some articles about Ron DeSantis and what he’s done to Florida.
Police in Long Island announced yesterday that they have identified the man popularly known as the Long Island serial killer.
I wrote a post in April, 2011, about the series of bodies that had been found on Long Island. The women were identified as working in the sex trade. I have often argued that the massive number of murders and rapes of women in the U.S. should be a political issue. Often the women who are targeted are seen by both the criminal and the police as throwaways–poor women, women of color, and sex workers. In that post I quoted from a Salon article: Why do serial killers target sex workers?Read the rest of this entry »
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#KariLake #DollarGeneralBestSeller #Unemployed @Repeat1968, John Buss
Every day I read something new about some Maga Republican–elected officials or their enablers. My first question is, what fucking century do they think they’re living in or want to live in? The second is pretty brutal. Have they lost all sense of what it means to be part of a community of human beings?
Rep. Eli Crane, R-Ariz. referred to Black people as “colored people” Thursday in floor debate over his proposed amendment to an annual defense policy bill, prompting a stern rebuke from the former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus.
“My amendment has nothing to do with whether or not colored people or Black people or anybody can serve,” said Crane, who is in his first term. “It has nothing to do with any of that stuff.”
Lawmakers were debating a series of GOP-backed amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act, which the House aims to pass by the end of the week.
Crane said his amendment would prohibit the Defense Department from considering race, gender, religion, political affiliations or “any other ideological concepts” as the sole basis for recruitment training, education, promotion or retention decisions.
“The military was never intended to be, you know, inclusive. Its strength is not its diversity. Its strength is its standards,” said Crane, 43, a combat veteran.
“I’m going to tell you guys this right now you can: You can keep playing around these games with diversity, equity and inclusion. But there are some real threats out there. And if we keep messing around and we keep lowering our standards, it’s not going to be good,” he said.
If this Republican official had a better curriculum with real American history, he might’ve learned about the Buffalo Soldiers or the Tuskegee Airmen. For that matter, he could’ve watched a movie called “Glory,” showing the acts of bravery by the United States’ first African American Regiment, The 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Actually, all three of these units were portrayed in movies. He didn’t even have to go to a good school to know about them. I wonder how he could manage to degrade the Navaho codetalkers who were an important part of the Asian theatre in World War 2. Who the hell does he think he is? With his time as a Navy Seal, I’m sure he most certainly served with a diverse military since he was born in 1980.
What does he think of the lack of a Marine Commandant whose assignment is being held up by the dumbest man we’ve seen in a long time, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama? He’s now holding up 250 military promotions. The Republican Party hates children and the military. What’s up with that? Their energy policy, education policy, and love of Putin are simply not in line with America’s future.
Congress’s decades-long streak of bipartisan support for itsannual defense policy and spending plan collapsed Friday, after House Republicans rammed through the most conservative National Defense Authorization Act in decades — restricting military personnel’s access to reproductive care and diversity protections, and imperiling lawmakers’ broader effort to set major national security priorities.
The House’s version of the bill, totaling $886 billion, passed on a vote of 219-210, carrying a razor-thin Republican majority. Four Democrats voted in favor of the legislation. The outcome sets up a showdown with the Senate, where lawmakers are expected to vote next week on its version of the legislation which lacks the divisive components pushed by House GOP’s hard-right wing.
Democrats and moderate Republicans predict that the defense bill, in its current form, will die in the Senate, raising uncertainty for the fate of major items that leaders from both political parties had identified as national defense imperatives.
The NDAA, which sets Pentagon policy and spending limits for the year ahead, includes increased investment in precision missiles, warships and newer technologies like artificial intelligence and hypersonics — necessities, leading lawmakers and the Biden administration say, as the United States directs greater attention toward China. It also authorizes a 5.2 percent base pay increase for military personnel and expanded support for their families through housing improvements, and broader access to child care, health care and education benefits.
“To have [House Speaker, Republican Kevin] McCarthy allow extremists to load up this bill with their wish list of extremist agenda items — so that we can’t in good faith pass this because we know it would harm the lives of servicewomen and service members’ families — is just a horrible place to be in,” Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.) told reporters on a conference call Friday alongside Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.), both U.S. military veterans.
“I don’t think, in good conscience, either one of us feel … that we could vote this through because of the damage it does to those who serve,” Sherrill added.
Iowa’s state legislature voted on Tuesday night to ban most abortions after around six weeks of pregnancy, a time before most people know they are pregnant.
Republican lawmakers, which hold a majority in both the Iowa house and senate, passed the anti-abortion bill after the governor, Kim Reynolds, called a special session to seek a vote on the ban.
The legislation will take immediate effect after the governor signs it on Friday and will prohibit abortions after the first sign of cardiac activity – usually around six weeks, with some exceptions for cases of rape or incest. It will allow for abortions up until 20 weeks of pregnancy only under certain conditions of medical emergency. Abortions in the state were previously allowed up to 20 weeks.
The bill passed with exclusively Republican support in a rare, one-day legislative burst lasting more than 14 hours.
“The Iowa supreme court questioned whether this legislature would pass the same law they did in 2018, and today they have a clear answer,” Reynolds said in a statement. “The voices of Iowans and their democratically elected representatives cannot be ignored any longer, and justice for the unborn should not be delayed.”
The legislation is the latest in a raft of anti-abortion laws passed in states across the country since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade last year, ending the nationwide constitutional right to abortion. A number of states, including a swath of the southern US, have passed full bans on abortion without exceptions for cases of rape or incest.
Preparations were already under way to quickly file legal challenges in court and get the measure blocked, once Reynolds signs it into law.
The salon, Studio 8 Hair Lab in Traverse City in the northwestern part of the state, announced on social media it will no longer serve clients who identify “as anything other than a man/woman,” and made derogatory comments about transgender people.
The salon’s Instagram page, now set to private, says it is “A private CONSERVATIVE business that does not cater to woke ideologies.”
“You are not welcome at this salon. Period,” the salon wrote in a now deleted Facebook post. “Should you request to have a particular pronoun used please note we may simply refer to you as ‘hey you.'”
The salon’s owner did not respond to requests for comment from USA TODAY or the Detroit Free Press, part of the USA TODAY Network. Christine Geiger, identified as a co-owner of the salon on LinkedIn, said in a Facebook comment reviewed by USA TODAY that she has “no issues” with lesbian, gay and bisexual people.
“It’s the TQ+ that I’m not going to support,” she said, referring to transgender and queer or questioning people. The comment, posted in a local Facebook group, used language often repeated by far-right conspiracy theorists to paint LGBTQ people as “groomers” dangerous to young people.
In March, Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed an amendment to the state’s Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act, extending protections to people based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
The Office of Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, who is a lesbian, has received several complaints about Geiger’s explicit statements, a spokesperson for the department said.
“The Department and the Attorney General herself are aware of the Traverse City salon proprietor’s professed intent to discriminate against Michigan residents,” the AG’s press secretary Danny Wimmer told The Advocate.
“At the Department, we have received several complaints pertaining to the bigotry exhibited by the salon proprietor in Traverse City, and the Attorney General finds the comments to be hateful, reprehensible remarks that seek only to marginalize a community already suffering from discriminatory animus in Michigan and elsewhere,” he added.
After the Supreme Court’s ruling in June, Nessel reiterated that the 303 Creative case did not affect LGBTQ+ MIchiganders’ access to most services in the state.
“This holding has no impact on Michigan’s Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act (ELCRA) when it is applied to protect against discrimination in the provision of public accommodations that do not constitute speech,” Nessel said in a press release. “My office will continue to fight to enforce Michigan’s ELCRA consistent with the First Amendment to protect the equal rights of all Michiganders.”
A New Jersey family has filed a racial harassment complaint against a school district after the parents said their son’s teacher sent him an unsolicited package that included an afro wig and white face paint in an “act of intimidation.”
According to the July 6 complaint, Denise and Kevin Anderson say the package was sent to their seven-year-old son—only referred to as “J.A.”—by Amazon on July 9, 2021, but there was no sender information. During the 2021-22 school year, administrators of Woodland School in Warren had access to students’ addresses for remote learning, the complaint says. Denise determined that the package was ordered by her son’s second-grade teacher, Christine Rzasa, after speaking with Amazon’s customer service, the suit says.
The complaint says J.A.’s “appearance easily identifies him as a member of the mixed-race community.” His mother is Afro-Latina, and his father is white.
Following the delivery, the Andersons contacted Woodland School Principal Jeff Heaney, the Warren Township School District, and the district board. But the family claimed in their lawsuit that nothing was done regarding the alleged violation of the state’s harassment, intimidation, and bullying laws. Instead, according to the complaint, J.A. was retaliated against in a “hostile education environment.”
“As a result, [J.A.] was so fearful, humiliated and intimidated that he suffered emotional and mental damages for which he had to receive therapy, change of schools and suffer other damages,” the complaint says. “Rzasa’s conduct can be described as nothing short of outrageous.”
DeSantis plans to meet with a group of about 30 pastors and their wives in Indianola, Iowa this weekend during his visit to the state. His campaign wants to have a pastor-surrogate in each of the state’s 99 counties as well as a campaign chair in each. He plans to visit all 99 counties as part of what’s known as “the full Grassley,” named in honor of the state’s senior Republican senator, Chuck Grassley.
The DeSantis team acknowledges Trump is ahead in Iowa and the early states, even in its own internal surveys conducted by DeSantis’s chief pollster and adviser, Ryan Tyson.
In a survey of 500 likely Republican primary voters in Iowa completed this week, Trump leads DeSantis 37%-21%, with South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott in third at 11%; all other candidates running well behind in Iowa. Trump’s internal polling showed him with a bigger lead last month.
In a head-to-head matchup, Trump and DeSantis are virtually tied at 43%-42% in the DeSantis campaign poll. His campaign says this shows that the numerous other candidates in the race have little shot of winning but a big role in sapping votes from DeSantis to help Trump win.
Polls of Iowa are scarce, despite the fact that it plays a crucial role in primary season. Most polling in the race is of national Republicans, even though there isn’t a national primary, and sample sizes are usually smaller than 500 people.
The only independent public pollster to survey the race in Iowa recently, Adam Geller, found DeSantis receiving the same number as Tyson’s poll earlier this month: 21%. But Geller found Trump increasing his ballot share in a month to 44%. So Trump had a 23 percentage point lead instead of 16 points in the DeSantis poll by Tyson.
“The difference between 16 and 23 is close enough, depending on sample sizes, questions, dates, everything. I mean, that’s polling,” Geller said. “Sure, it’s early. But for DeSantis, he’s running out of time because in my polling, he’s losing to Trump among voters who like him. How do you win if the people who like you are voting for the other guy?”
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung mocked the DeSantis campaign’s internal polling by issuing a written statement that also intentionally misspelled the Florida governor’s name, which Trump insists on doing.
“So the DeSanctus campaign is pushing internal polling from unbelievable pollsters— the most favorable and most biased polling they have— showing them DOWN 16 points,” he said. “How moronic can this campaign be? At this point, anything their campaign does should be considered an in-kind contribution to us.”
Donald Trump is ever the patriot. SIGH. This is from ABC News. Of course, it’s all about him. “Trump’s unprecedented campaign pitch: Elect me to get revenge on the government. “He’s declared war on them,” one GOP pollster said.”
In his comeback bid for the White House, the former president — twice impeached but twice acquitted and now twice indicted — has vowed that if reelected, he will wield his power to personally remake parts of the federal government to a degree that historian Mark Updegrove said was unprecedented. Trump has promised to hamstring perceived enemies, including in the Department of Justice, which is currently investigating him, and target Republican bogeymen like President Joe Biden.
He swore in June to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” the Bidens and that he would “totally obliterate the deep state,” referring to a conspiratorial view of how the government operates.
“This is the final battle. … Either they win or we win,” he said in March.
Among Trump’s policy proposals is reviving an executive order from the final months of his presidency, revoked by Biden, that observers say would let him essentially turn broad swaths of federal workers into at-will employees whom he could fire and replace — rather than terminating them only for cause, such as bad performance, and after satisfying certain employment protections.
The debt relief announced Friday affects borrowers enrolled in income-driven repayment plans, whichallow forgiveness after making a certain number of monthly payments.
But the plans have drawn criticism over the years because of poor communication between the Education Department, loan servicers and borrowers. A NPR investigation in 2022 detailed failures in the program.
According to the Education Department, Friday’s action “also addresses concerns about practices by loan servicers that put borrowers into forbearance in violation of Department rules.”
In April 2022, the Education Department said it would offer a one-time adjustment to address any inaccurate payment counts.
“At the start of this Administration, millions of borrowers had earned loan forgiveness but never received it. That’s unacceptable,” Education Undersecretary James Kvaal said in a statement. “Today we are holding up the bargain we offered borrowers who have completed decades of repayment.”
In coming days, qualifying borrowers who have met the necessary threshold for forgiveness will be notified. Types of loans covered include Direct Loans or Federal Family Education Loans held by the Education Department, including Parent PLUS loans.
A lot of us will be under a severe heat dome next week. Please try to stay safe, near air conditioning, and drink lots of water! I look back on so many things that would be better if we had a President Gore and if Hillary hadn’t been drug through the mud and had, instead, become our President. The sins of the Republicans are against humanity and its most vulnerable.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
Trump, his Republican rivals for the 2024 nomination, and much of America will be waiting for any developments out of a grand jury in Washington, DC, that is meeting Thursday. Two sources told CNN that Will Russell, a former special assistant to Trump in the White House who has continued to work for him, is due to testify for at least the third time. Any indictment in the probe, in the days or weeks to come, would likely emerge from this grand jury – a fact that lends its work great historical significance. Trump indicated that the target letter he received on Sunday gave him four days to take up an option to testify. Legal custom suggests that any indictment could come at any time after that.
Prosecutors appear to have evidence to charge Trump with obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the United States based on the target letter, two statutes that the House select committee examining the January 6 Capitol attack issued criminal referrals for last year.
In 
Finally, news broke of another astonishing Trump crime yesterday–theft of valuable Israeli antiquities.
Happy Caturday!!
This is from the Washington Post.
America’s children continue to be targeted by the Far Right in a misguided effort to supposedly protect them from all kinds of things which are none of their damned business. Not all teachers appear to be on the side of all students. This story from New Jersey is horrifying. This is from 
Where do these folks get these ideas? Well, the fish rots from the head to the anus. This is from Marc Caputo. 
Donald Trump is ever the patriot. SIGH. This is from ABC News. Of course, it’s all about him. “Trump’s unprecedented campaign pitch: Elect me to get revenge on the government. “He’s declared war on them,” one GOP pollster said.”
I’ll end with some good news from Bloomberg. Well, it’s kinda good news. “
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