This is going to be a brief post, because I’m not feeling well today. It’s just a cold, but I’m really tired and not up to doing much.
The election is less than a month off. I got my mail-in ballot a couple of days ago, and I plan to send it in today or tomorrow. I can’t wait to vote for Kamala Harris. I would have done it already, but there are a bunch of ballot questions I have to read about first. One that I know I will vote for will end the practice of requiring students to pass standardized tests (MCAS) in order to graduate.
Kamala Harris and Howard Stern
Harris has given a bunch of interviews this week, and more are coming. Of course the mainstream media is not happy, because she chose interviewers who are likely to reach voters who don’t follow the news day to day like us politics junkies.
“DON’T CALL IT A ‘MEDIA BLITZ’ — After avoiding the media for nigh on her whole campaign, VP KAMALA HARRIS is … still largely avoiding the media,” the two authors of Playbook wrote.
The specific media the authors are talking about here is “legacy media,” also called the “mainstream media.” Think CNN, the New York Times or Fox News. Politico accuses Harris of skirting outlets like those in favor of alternative venues, such as podcasts and late-night TV.
The complaint comes after Harris’ team announced her latest media schedule. On Monday, she’s slated to appear on CBS News’ “60 Minutes,” and then on Thursday, she plans to stop in Nevada for a Univision town hall. She was interviewed on the wildly popular sex and dating podcast “Call Her Daddy” in an episode that was released on Sunday, and later this week, she’s scheduled to appear on “The View,” “The Howard Stern Show” and “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.”
The Playbook authors admit that the “60 Minutes” interview and the Univision town hall may offer some value to voters, but they take issue with the other appearances on her schedule.
“Let’s be real here: Most of these are not the types of interviews that are going to press her on issues she may not want to talk about, even as voters want more specifics from Harris,” the authors wrote. “Instead, expect most of these sit-downs to be a continuation of the ‘vibes’ campaign Harris has perfected.”
Harris and Stephen Colbert
Politico’s real gripe, though, is that Harris is doing a disservice to voters by avoiding difficult interviews with news outlets like, well, Politico. This is something that only news outlets like Politico care about. Voters don’t care. Anyone reading or watching exclusive news interviews with Harris is already an engaged voter and has probably already decided who they’re going to vote for in November.
Harris is employing a smart strategy. When your opponent in an election is Donald Trump, and tens of millions of people will vote for you based on the fact that you’re not Trump, you can afford to spend time courting, and possibly energizing, the folks who are less engaged with politics. “Call her Daddy” is the fifth-most popular podcast on Spotify. Is it really not worth an hour of Harris’ time to appear in front of that audience?
Politico says its criticism is warranted because somebody needs to ask Harris the tough questions that voters want answered. But she’s already doing that. CBS News released a preview of Harris’ “60 Minutes” interview, and it shows her talking about her proposed economic policies. What tough questions is she not answering? Politico never says.
Here’s a tough question: Who cares? To complain that a presidential candidate is not doing interviews with the same outlets that have had almost exclusive access to presidential candidates forever reeks of superciliousness. It’s also counterintuitive. Essentially saying to Harris, “Come do an interview with us so we can kick your ass” is not a persuasive argument. When I was in college studying journalism, my professors often warned that journalists tend to display a uniquely annoying type of arrogance. That’s exactly the type of self-important pretense that we’re seeing here.
Harris is doing exactly what she needs to do, and she’s not going to be intimidated by the likes of Politico, or even The New York Times. She was on 60 Minutes on Monday. Yesterday she went on The View, The Howard Stern Show, and Stephen Colbert. I haven’t heard/seen the first two, but I did watch Colbert’s show last night. Harris was great and the audience reaction was enthusiastic, to put it mildly. More interviews are coming.
I’m sure by now you’ve heard about the new book by Bob Woodward that is coming out next week. As usual, Woodward kept quiet about important information in order to increase sales. The biggest revelation is that Donald Trump sent Covid tests to Vladimir Putin during the time when Americans were desperate for tests and thousands of people were dying every day. In addition, Trump has stayed in contact with Putin since he left the White House.
As the coronavirus tore through the world in 2020, and the United States and other countries confronted a shortage of tests designed to detect the illness, President Donald Trump secretly sent coveted tests to Russian President Vladimir Putin for his personal use.
Putin, petrified of the virus, accepted the supplies but took pains to prevent political fallout — not for him, but for his American counterpart. He cautioned Trump not to reveal that he had dispatched the scarce medical equipment to Moscow, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward.
Putin, according to the book, told Trump, “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me.”
Four years later, the personal relationship between the two men appears to have persisted, Woodward reports, as Trump campaigns to return to the White House and Putin orchestrates his bloody assault on Ukraine. In early 2024, the former president ordered an aide away from his office at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, so he could conduct a private phone call with the Russian leader, according to Woodward’s account.
The book does not describe what the two men purportedly discussed, and it quotes a Trump campaign official casting doubt on the supposed contact. But the unnamed Trump aide cited in the book indicated that the GOP standard-bearer may have spoken to Putin as many as seven times since Trump left the White House in 2021.
The book does not describe what the two men purportedly discussed, and it quotes a Trump campaign official casting doubt on the supposed contact. But the unnamed Trump aide cited in the book indicated that the GOP standard-bearer may have spoken to Putin as many as seven times since Trump left the White House in 2021.
“Trump was the most reckless and impulsive president in American history and is demonstrating the very same character as a presidential candidate in 2024,” Woodward writes in the book, “War,” which is set to be released Oct. 15.
Trump denied sending the tests to Putin but, unfortunately for him, the Kremlin has confirmed the report.
The Kremlin confirmed on Wednesday that former United States President Donald Trump sent Russian President Vladimir Putin Covid-19 testing kits during the height of the pandemic, as reported by American journalist Bob Woodward in a new book.
“We also sent equipment at the beginning of the pandemic,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in a written response on Wednesday, Bloomberg reported. That the U.S. and Russia exchanged medical equipment during the pandemic was already known.
But Woodward writes in his book that when Trump was still president in 2020, he “secretly sent Putin a bunch of Abbott Point of Care Covid test machines for his personal use” during a time period when Covid tests were scarce.
I’m not sure why “journalists” aren’t asking about the top secret documents that Trump was storing at Mar-a-Lago when he spoke to Putin. Remember, not all of the documents have been returned.
According to CNN, Bob Woodward’s latest book reveals that Trump has spoken to Vladimir Putin as many as seven times since leaving the Presidency.
“In one scene, Woodward recounts a moment at Mar-a-Lago where Trump tells a senior aide to leave the room so “he could have what he said was a private phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin.”
“According to Trump’s aide, there have been multiple phone calls between Trump and Putin, maybe as many as seven in the period since Trump left the White House in 2021,” Woodward writes.
Woodward asked Trump aide Jason Miller whether Trump and Putin had spoken since he left the White House. “Um, ah, not that, ah, not that I’m aware of,” Miller told Woodward.
“I have not heard that they’re talking, so I’d push back on that,” Miller added.
Woodward writes that Biden’s Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines “carefully hedged” when asked about whether there were any post-presidency Trump-Putin calls.
“I would not purport to be aware of all contacts with Putin. I wouldn’t purport to speak to what President Trump may or may not have done,” Haines said, according to Woodward.”
According to WaPo’s version of the Woodward story the incident where Trump asked an aide to leave the room happened in early 2024.
This is unsurprising. After all, Trump has repeatedly described speaking to Putin in advance of the Ukraine invasion, including fairly explicitly during the debate with Joe Biden.
“When Putin saw that, he said, you know what? I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my – this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream. The difference is he never would have invaded Ukraine. Never.”
But the confirmation that Trump keeps speaking to Putin is important for several other reasons.
We still don’t know where all the stolen documents are
If Trump was speaking to Putin before the Ukraine investigation and at least as recently as earlier this year, he was speaking to him during the investigation into his stolen documents, during the period when Trump was hiding boxes from his attorney to make sure he could steal documents.
Trump was going back and referring to some of these documents during the period he worked with Putin.
And perhaps most importantly, there were presumably classified documents loaded onto his plane on June 3, 2022 that got flown back to Bedminster, and probably some remained hidden at Mar-a-Lago (the FBI failed to search a room off Trump’s suite).
The FBI has never found the missing classified documents.
Trump was charged with hoarding some of America’s most secret documents in his basement. And during that entire period, he was checking in regularly with the leader of a hostile foreign country, the one who keeps helping him get elected.
After Donald Trump was asked in a Monday interview about the future prospects of Gaza, the former president made a curious claim: “You know, I’ve been there, and it’s rough.”
Perhaps he merely meant he has been to Palestinian territory, since he did visit the West Bank in 2017? Or maybe he was just talking about having been to the broader region?
Nope.
Trump’s campaign said Monday night that he meant what he said about having been to Gaza in particular – and the campaign insisted the claim is true.
“President Trump has been to Gaza previously and has always worked to ensure peace in the Middle East,” campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told CNN.
Leavitt, though, did not provide a single detail about Trump’s supposed trip to Gaza. And she did not respond when we repeatedly asked for even the most basic information, like the year of the supposed visit.
So we were highly skeptical – because Trump has a long history of making things up, because of the lack of public evidence, because the Times of Israel has reported that Trump had never even visited Israel before his presidency, and because the Trump campaign had offered a substantively different comment to The New York Times earlier Monday.
That earlier comment, which a campaign official provided only on condition of anonymity, did not say Trump had actually been to Gaza. Instead, the anonymous campaign official tried some spin, correctly saying that Trump has been to Israel but wrongly saying, “Gaza is in Israel.”
We asked three former Trump officials who worked on Middle East policy whether they know of any proof for the former president’s claim, and the campaign’s claim to CNN, that Trump has been to Gaza itself. The only one who has responded, Trump-appointed former Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Schenker, said in an email: “As far as I know, he’s never traveled there. He did not go in 2017 when he visited Israel. I think this story is probably already over.”
Pretty much everything that comes out of Trump’s mouth is a lie.
I’m going to end with a serious piece by Tom Nichols at the Atlantic: The Moment of Truth. The subhead is “The reelection of Donald Trump would mark the end of George Washington’s vision for the presidency—and the United States.”
Last November, during a symposium at Mount Vernon on democracy, John Kelly, the retired Marine Corps general who served as Donald Trump’s second chief of staff, spoke about George Washington’s historic accomplishments—his leadership and victory in the Revolutionary War, his vision of what an American president should be. And then Kelly offered a simple, three-word summary of Washington’s most important contribution to the nation he liberated.
“He went home,” Kelly said.
The message was unambiguous. After leaving the White House, Kelly had described Trump as a “person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about.” At Mount Vernon, he was making a clear point: People who are mad for power are a mortal threat to democracy. They may hold different titles—even President—but at heart they are tyrants, and all tyrants share the same trait: They never voluntarily cede power
The American revolutionaries feared a powerful executive; they had, after all, just survived a war with a king. Yet when the Founders gathered in 1787 to draft the Constitution, they approved a powerful presidential office, because of their faith in one man: Washington.
Washington’s life is a story of heroic actions, but also of temptations avoided, of things he would not do. As a military officer, Washington refused to take part in a plot to overthrow Congress. As a victorious general, he refused to remain in command after the war had ended. As president, he refused to hold on to an office that he did not believe belonged to him. His insistence on the rule of law and his willingness to return power to its rightful owners—the people of the United States—are among his most enduring gifts to the nation and to democratic civilization.
Forty-four men have succeeded Washington so far. Some became titans; others finished their terms without distinction; a few ended their service to the nation in ignominy. But each of them knew that the day would come when it would be their duty and honor to return the presidency to the people.
All but one, that is.
Donald Trump and his authoritarian political movement represent an existential threat to every ideal that Washington cherished and encouraged in his new nation. They are the incarnation of Washington’s misgivings about populism, partisanship, and the “spirit of revenge” that Washington lamented as the animating force of party politics. Washington feared that, amid constant political warfare, some citizens would come to “seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual,” and that eventually a demagogue would exploit that sentiment.
Today, America stands at such a moment. A vengeful and emotionally unstable former president—a convicted felon, an insurrectionist, an admirer of foreign dictators, a racist and a misogynist—desires to return to office as an autocrat. Trump has left no doubt about his intentions; he practically shouts them every chance he gets. His deepest motives are to salve his ego, punish his enemies, and place himself above the law. Should he regain the Oval Office, he may well bring with him the experience and the means to complete the authoritarian project that he began in his first term.
I recently learned that cats were used by both sides during the battle for women’s suffrage. They were used on posters and postcards to supposedly dehumanize women fighting for the right to vote, but were also used in support of women’s suffrage.
The women’s suffrage movement was an exceptionally controversial topic in both the United States and England. Postcard manufacturers hired artists to create visually appealing postcards about women’s suffrage. A popular subject was the suffrage cat, which was used for both pro- and anti-suffrage messaging. In Victorian culture, the cat was often associated with the female sphere; the indoor cat represented the passive, ideal homemaker, and the outdoor cat was brazen, feral and fallen. Defining how the cat was intended to be viewed as a symbol in women’s suffrage postcards can be a challenge, as seen in some of the selections below.
At that link, you can see descriptive text about some of the images I’ve posted here.
In the 1800s and early 1900s, many women and men supported women’s suffrage (the right to vote). There were, however, people that opposed the idea. One of the prevailing beliefs was that voting power would diminish a woman’s role as caretaker of the family. Some women and men felt so strongly about this that they founded anti-suffragist organizations. Cartoonists also created advertisements and postcards supporting anti-suffragists. These ads often featured animals to make a point.
In popular mainstream culture at the time, women were associated with animals perceived as passive, like cats. Social norms dictated that middle class, white women should stay in the home. Men, however, were expected to occupy public spaces and partake in physical exercise. As a result, men were often associated with physically active animals like dogs. Anti-suffrage artists used these animals symbolically in their cartoons.
Cats were more often used in British anti-suffragist ads. Anti-suffrage organizations in Britain used cats to try to make the point that women were simple and delicate. The cartoons implied that women’s suffrage was just as absurd as cat suffrage because women (and cats) were incapable of voting.
Cats were also used symbolically in some American anti-suffrage ads. A number of American cartoons showed men at home with a cat, taking care of the children. The cat symbolized a loss of the man’s masculinity. Some people believed that if women participated in politics, men would be left at home to raise the children.
Suffragists took back the meaning of the cat in 1916. That April, suffragists Nell Richardson and Alice Burke started a cross-country road trip in a two-seater car they called “The Golden Flier.” Members of the press at the send-off ceremony in New York City reported that the car looked like “a little yellow ant scuttling off through the crowds of limousines and autotrucks which lined the streets” (New York Tribune, April 07, 1916).
Over the next several months, the women stopped in New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, Ohio, Texas, California, Washington and other states across the country to talk about the importance of women’s suffrage. During their trip, the women adopted a cat that became their unofficial mascot. They named him Saxon, after the manufacturer of the Golden Flier.
Over the next several months, the women spent long hours standing on street corners and in public parks making speeches about suffrage. Alice Burke commented that they were in the sun so often that they let their “noses blister and burn” and their “hair sizzle.” Burke and Richardson were not the only ones enduring the hot weather. Burke wrote in her diary:
The little black kitten is suffering as much as we are from the heat, but he keeps under a cover, and all we can see around the corner of it is a pink nose and a youthful whisker.” (New York Tribune, May 29, 1916)
Now for some news. The mainstream media and some Democrats are still trying to get President Biden to end his campaign for a second term; but last night he gave a speech to an enthusiastic audience in Detroit that should begin to quiet the naysayers. I hope you were able to watch it, because it was impressive. Biden spoke extemporaneously for 35 minutes–no teleprompter and no notes. And the audience loved it. They chanted “Don’t you quit” and “We’ve got your back.” These people are the base of the Democratic Party, and they still love Joe Biden. Biden is also up 2 points on Trump in the latest polls, despite the massive efforts to bring him down.
Here’s the speech:
It’s difficult to find honest reporting on the speech, because most in the press are still hoping to end Biden’s campaign. I really think some of these “journalists” really want Trump back in the White House because they think it will further their careers. Here’s just one example from Politico: Inside Biden’s sputtering campaign to restore Dems’ confidence.
Three of Joe Biden’s senior aides entered a Senate Democratic lunch on Thursday armed with internal and external polls showing the presidential race still within the margin of error, hoping to keep this last bastion of support from abandoning his embattled campaign.
During a difficult and at times tearful meeting with Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti and Jen O’Malley Dillon, senators aired concerns about the president’s ability to serve for another four years, his path to defeat former President Donald Trump and the effect Biden’s poor polling might have on Democrats running down the ballot, according to five people familiar with the meeting who were granted anonymity to describe private discussions.
But by the end of the lunch, Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania had enough.
“You have legacies, too,” Fetterman said, according to the people, asking what those legacies would become “if you fuck over a great president over a bad debate.”
Then, the first-term senator called the question: Who was with him — committed to sticking with Biden as the party’s nominee?
No more than four people signaled that they were, according to four of the people familiar with the meeting. While not every Senate Democrat was in attendance and some had trickled out of the lunch already, Fetterman, Sens. Chris Coons of Delaware and Tammy Duckworth of Illinois thought Biden should continue.
The paltry show of support for Biden behind closed doors revealed that for all the indecision about whether and how to confront Biden, elected Democrats’ confidence in the president had plunged to a ruinous low. While Senate Democrats have largely kept quiet publicly, Biden may have to plow ahead despite an overwhelming lack of confidence from his former Senate colleagues. The majority of the Democratic caucus left Thursday’s meeting just as, if not more, concerned about the path the party is on with Biden atop the ticket.
Of course, the naysayers are always anonymous. Fuck them! Use you name or STFU.
DETROIT — President Joe Biden tore into the “right-wing Project 2025” and made it a central theme of his speech at a rally Friday in battleground Michigan as he seeks to put a lid on Democratic calls that he withdraw from the presidential race.
“Folks, Project 2025 is the biggest attack on our system of government and on our personal freedom that’s ever been proposed in the history of this country,” Biden told the crowd, adding that the initiative “is run and paid for by Trump people” and is “a blueprint for a second Trump.”
Biden, rousing the crowd with a more energetic performance than usual, said it would unleash a “nightmare” on the country if his Republican rival is elected and implements it. “Another four years of Donald Trump is deadly serious. Project 2025 is deadly serious,” Biden said, describing it as a threat to American values
When he took the stage, Biden was greeted to chants of “Don’t you quit!” and “We got your back!” The president told them there’s “a lot of speculation lately” about whether he’ll stay in the race.
“I am running, and we’re going to win!” he said….
Biden is zeroing in on Project 2025 as a mechanism to unify the Democratic Party as it splinters over his future in the race, following a shocking debate performance that some in the party see as politically fatal to his re-election prospects. Numerous voters at the rally stood by him and voiced displeasure with the Democrats calling on him to step aside. And it was clear the right-wing document has caught on across within the Democratic Party as a rallying cry for those eager to keep Trump out of the White House.
A Biden aide said the president’s campaign plans to continue focusing on Project 2025 at next week’s GOP convention.
Kapur asked voters about Project 2025:
Before Biden’s remarks at the Detroit rally, the first seven Michigan voters NBC News spoke to were all aware of Project 2025 — and had strong opinions on it.
“It’s horrific. It would totally dismantle our democracy, fill the whole government with loyalists to Trump,” said Deanna Zapico, of Royal Oak. “It would be like Hitler in 1933. There wouldn’t be an election in a long time. That’s my fear.”
“I’m sharing it with everybody,” Zapico said.
Deborah Fuertes, of Brighton, summed it up in one word: “Scary.”
“This is an existential threat,” she said.Trump’s “name’s all over that thing,” said Angela Heard, a sales manager based in Grosse Pointe Woods. “If we don’t get our s— together we’re gonna be like ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’”
A sweeping proposal for how Donald Trump should handle a second term in office has sparked concern for its implications on the role of federal government and its calls to eliminate a number of basic human rights.
The 2025 Presidential Transition Project, more commonly known as Project 2025, released a 900-page manifesto last year titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.” The policy guidebook — compiled by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation in partnership with more than 100 other conservative organizations — lays out a far-right, Christian nationalist vision for America that would corrode the separation of church and state, replace nonpartisan government employees with Trump loyalists and bolster the president’s authority over independent agencies.
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, a rumored candidate for Trump’s chief of staff in a second term, promoted his group’s extreme positions during a July interview, saying, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Down with the tomcats
Shortly after Roberts’ controversial interview, Trump attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, saying on Truth Social that he knows “nothing” about it and has “no idea who is behind it,” before adding that he disagrees with some of its propositions.
While Project 2025 is not formally a part of Trump’s campaign platform, it has been led and supported by several influential people in his orbit. The project’s top leaders all worked in Trump’s White House and a number of the manifesto’s contributors also served in the Trump administration, including but not limited to former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson and imprisoned former trade adviser Peter Navarro.
Equally damaging to Trump’s claim that he is unfamiliar with Project 2025 is that he worked closely with the Heritage Foundation when he was first elected president. He was provided a similar “Mandate for Leadership” back in 2016, and enacted nearly two-thirds of the group’s proposals within his first year in office.
The Heritage Foundation also reportedly played a behind-the-scenes role on Trump’s presidential transition team and had a significant hand in staffing the administration.
Alvord also addressed Project 2025’s goal of eliminating the wall between church and state.
Project 2025 establishes a framework for guiding the federal government through a biblical lens. Across nearly 1,000 pages, the mandate pushes an unpopular interpretation of the Christian agenda that would target reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ people and people of color by effectively erasing mention of all related terms, protections and troublesome historical accounts.
Though the mandate accuses the “woke” left of infringing on people’s religious freedoms, its policies are rooted in a singular, extremist view of how society should function based on its authors’ own Christian nationalist values. It repeatedly calls for the punishment, even imprisonment, of people who do not conform to the think tank’s platform.
The proposed policies in Project 2025’s mandate stem from four stated goals. In its words: restoring the family as the centerpiece of American life, dismantling the administrative state, defending the nation’s sovereignty and securing God-given individual rights.
Through a holistic approach to restructuring the government, it would seek to give Trump heightened authority to enact his backers’ platform in every city and state — often encouraging the president to creatively subvert congressional approval.
Read the rest at People Magazine. It’s very detailed.
Speaking of Christian nationalism, ProPublica has an investigative article on a shadowy organization of rich people working to influence the 2024 election. Andy Kroll and Nick Surgey: Inside Ziklag, the Secret Organization of Wealthy Christians Trying to Sway the Election and Change the Country. The subhead reads: “The little-known charity is backed by famous conservative donors, including the families behind Hobby Lobby and Uline. It’s spending millions to make a big political push for this election — but it may be violating the law.”
A network of ultrawealthy Christian donors is spending nearly $12 million to mobilize Republican-leaning voters and purge more than a million people from the rolls in key swing states, aiming to tilt the 2024 election in favor of former President Donald Trump.
These previously unreported plans are the work of a group named Ziklag, a little-known charity whose donors have included some of the wealthiest conservative Christian families in the nation, including the billionaire Uihlein family, who made a fortune in office supplies, the Greens, who run Hobby Lobby, and the Wallers, who own the Jockey apparel corporation. Recipients of Ziklag’s largesse include Alliance Defending Freedom, which is the Christian legal group that led the overturning of Roe v. Wade, plus the national pro-Trump group Turning Point USA and a constellation of right-of-center advocacy groups.
1908
ProPublica and Documented obtained thousands of Ziklag’s members-only email newsletters, internal videos, strategy documents and fundraising pitches, none of which has been previously made public. They reveal the group’s 2024 plans and its long-term goal to underpin every major sphere of influence in American society with Christianity. In the Bible, the city of Ziklag was where David and his soldiers found refuge during their war with King Saul.
“We are in a spiritual battle and locked in a terrible conflict with the powers of darkness,” says a strategy document that lays out Ziklag’s 30-year vision to “redirect the trajectory of American culture toward Christ by bringing back Biblical structure, order and truth to our Nation.”
Ziklag’s 2024 agenda reads like the work of a political organization. It plans to pour money into mobilizing voters in Arizona who are “sympathetic to Republicans” in order to secure “10,640 additional unique votes” — almost the exact margin of President Joe Biden’s win there in 2020. The group also intends to use controversial AI software to enable mass challenges to the eligibility of hundreds of thousands of voters in competitive states.
In a recording of a 2023 internal strategy discussion, a Ziklag official stressed that the objective was the same in other swing states. “The goal is to win,” the official said. “If 75,000 people wins the White House, then how do we get 150,000 people so we make sure we win?”
According to the Ziklag files, the group has divided its 2024 activities into three different operations targeting voters in battleground states: Checkmate, focused on funding so-called election integrity groups; Steeplechase, concentrated on using churches and pastors to get out the vote; and Watchtower, aimed at galvanizing voters around the issues of “parental rights” and opposition to transgender rights and policies supporting health care for trans people.
In a member briefing video, one of Ziklag’s spiritual advisers outlined a plan to “deliver swing states” by using an anti-transgender message to motivate conservative voters who are exhausted with Trump.
But Ziklag is not a political organization: It is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charity, the same legal designation as the United Way or Boys and Girls Club. Such organizations do not have to publicly disclose their funders, and donations are tax deductible. In exchange, they are “absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office,” according to the IRS.
Critics shredded Meta’s decision to ease restrictions placed on former President Donald Trump’s Instagram and Facebook accounts.
Axios reported Friday the social media titan planned to soon roll back limits it placed on Trump’s accounts as it aimed to allow for more parity leading up to the Nov. 5 election. The tech giant said a minor violation could lead to his accounts being suspended up to two years or restricted.
The move comes more than a year after he was reinstated to the platforms but with limits such as suspensions and advertising restrictions for violating company rules.
Stunned social media critics blasted the decision.
“So the despotic threats worked?” asked @JenBaty, pointing to Trump’s threat on Truth Social that the “ZUCKERBUCKS (sic),” a reference to Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg, “will be sent to prison for long periods of time.”
Trump has previously said Zuckerberg “cheated” in the 2020 election.
“Why isn’t he being prosecuted?” he wrote last year. “The Democrats only know how to cheat. America isn’t going to take it much longer!”
A few stories on the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee next week:
So it can be hard for some to swallow that Milwaukee is playing host to former President Donald Trump and the Republican National Convention this coming week while rival Chicago, the larger city just 90 miles to the south, welcomes President Joe Biden and Democrats in August.
It didn’t help smooth things over with wary Democrats after Trump used the word “horrible” when talking about Milwaukee just a month before the convention that begins Monday.
Adding to the angst, Milwaukee was supposed to host the Democratic National Convention in 2020, but it didn’t happen due to COVID. Owners of local restaurants, bars and venues say the number of reservations that were promised during the RNC aren’t materializing. And protesters complained the city was trying to keep them too far away from the convention site to have an impact.
“I wish I was out of town for it,” Jake Schneider, 29, said as he passed by the city’s statue of Fonzie, the character played by Henry Winkler in the 1970s sitcom “Happy Days” that was set in Milwaukee. “I’m not super happy that it’s the Republican Party coming to town.” [….]
Ryan Clancy, a self-described democratic socialist who is a state representative and serves on the Milwaukee County Board, puts it more bluntly: “It is shameful that we rolled out the red carpet for the RNC.”
Former President Donald Trump will be officially renominated next week to be the Republican Party’s standard-bearer for the third presidential election in a row as he seeks to return to the Oval Office.
GOP delegates from around the country will gather in Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention, with much of the country following along through the primetime speeches each night.
These speeches have historically allowed presidential candidates to unify discord from aggressive primary campaigns, and the conventions offer a high-profile platform to sway undecided voters.
While an official list of speakers hasn’t yet been announced, here are some of the people who’ve reportedly been tapped to demonstrate their support for Trump on stage next week.
The list includes Donald Trump, Jr., Ron DeSantis, Sean O’Brien (Teamsters president), David Sacks (Elon Musk’s pal), Kari Lake, Elise Stefanik, and more. She’s not listed, but I heard that Margery Taylor Green will also speak.
Donald Trump will be rubbing elbows in Milwaukee with a crowd that may include dozens of witnesses and alleged co-conspirators in his criminal cases — people he has sworn not to communicate with about details of the charges against him.
Avoiding them may not be possible for the former president during the four-day convention, creating an unusual dynamic, and a potential legal liability for Trump, against the backdrop of a national nominating convention.
1911
“If I were a Trump attorney, my biggest fear might be that Trump finds himself in close quarters with a defendant and starts running his mouth off,” said Anthony Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University.
Several false electors for Trump in 2020 who were charged with crimes in Arizona, Nevada and Georgia are expected to be at the Republican National Convention. In addition, many of Trump’s former White House aides who testified to grand juries in Washington and Florida are likely to be on hand. Though the roster of speakers hasn’t been publicly shared, there’s a high likelihood that others embroiled in Trump’s alleged crimes — a long list of GOP officials and activists — will also be there.
The situation is, like many things associated with Trump, unprecedented, and it’s hard to gauge the likelihood that an interaction in a crowded convention hall could become legally perilous for the former president. But it’s not zero, according to legal experts.
“I imagine the tight scripted nature of the convention will help isolate Trump from that danger,” Kreis said. “But you also never know.”
General attacks on the prosecutions he’s facing in Washington, Florida and Georgia — familiar themes in Trump rallies and speeches — or superficial encounters with people involved in his cases are unlikely to raise prosecutors’ eyebrows. But legal experts say there are lines Trump could cross if he mentions codefendants or witnesses by name or has more substantive interactions with them. And even general remarks, whether scripted or extemporaneous, could present risks if they could be interpreted as pressure on witnesses against cooperation or an attempt to influence their future testimony.
Those are my recommended reads for today. I hope you find something that interests you.
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Yesterday, the two most important newspapers in the U.S. published articles in which they “both-sided” the indictment of Donald Trump in the January 6 case. Reporters Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman at the New York Times and Devlin Barrett and Josh Dawsey at The Washington Post published articles that–at least in their headlines and the early paragraphs characterized Jack Smith’s case against Trump as a First Amendment case even though Smith explained very clearly in his statement announcing the indictments that it is a conspiracy case–based on lies that led to actions.
This is exactly what Republicans want Americans to believe–that Trump is being prosecuted for lying about the results of the 2020 election or even for his belief that the election was stolen from him. I’m not even going to quote from the two articles, but here are the links if you want to read them.
As soon as I saw the headline, I knew this NYT story was going to be bad: “Trump Election Charges Set Up Clash of Lies Versus Free Speech.” No. No, it does not.
Both-sides coverage in politics is toxic; in legal coverage it’s so bad it becomes almost funny. But of course in typical legal matters we rarely get both-sides coverage. Instead, it skews heavily in favor of the narrative of law enforcement and prosecutors. But when a politician (let alone Trump) is the defendant, suddenly there’s a detached remove from the underlying facts. Conspiracy to overthrow the government or just political puffery in the spirit of stump speaking? Who can say, really? We’ll leave to you, dear reader, to decide.
Take the core graph of the story:
The indictment and his initial response set up a showdown between those two opposing assertions of principle: that what prosecutors in this case called “pervasive and destabilizing lies” from the highest office in the land can be integral to criminal plans, and that political speech enjoys broad protections, especially when conveying what Mr. Trump’s allies say are sincerely held beliefs.
Trust me, folks. This is not going to be a showdown over the limits of the First Amendment. How do I know? Well, one way is by reading the bottom half of the same NYT story, where legal experts shred the Trump defenses.
Kurtz recommends reading this thread on Twitter, which I read yesterday.
I don’t know this guy and I’ve been told he’s an attorney, but for what it’s worth this is almost the textbook example I use when I’m teaching folks who *don’t* understand how the First Amendment actually works. (1/6) pic.twitter.com/Do5rBY8rsu
(2) I call my buddy @AnthonyMKreis and say: “Let’s go buy crowbars and use them to deprive people of their right to vote.” He says: “I agree! Let’s conspire to do this thing together!”
I walk to the store and buy a crowbar. Bad news: Crime! Life is bad. 😢 (3/6)
Kurtz notes (at TPM) that the Wall Street Journal did the same thing:
Another example of covering a criminal prosecution like it’s politics, courtesy of the WSJ: “Trump Is Being Prosecuted, but Justice Department Is on Trial, Too”
Oh boy, this sentence: “On the issue of whether it can persuade the public of the righteousness of its prosecution, the Justice Department has taken on a huge and politically polarizing target in an atmosphere already ripe with mistrust over its motivations.”
Not literally untrue. But notice the way this turns it all into a messaging contest, like a political campaign
Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment distills the whole of the January 6 investigation into 45 pages. The story it tells is already familiar. There is the sheer number of lies told by Trump and his allies, such as that over 10,000 dead people voted in Georgia, that there was a suspicious late-night “vote dump” in Michigan, and that Pennsylvania issued 1.8 million absentee ballots but processed 2.5 million.
Smith makes clear that the issue here isn’t Trump’s lies as such, particularly right after the election. In fact, the indictment states that Trump “had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won.” Nor is the issue the dozens of unsuccessful court cases Trump brought. Instead, the issue is that Trump worked with his co-conspirators to disenfranchise voters by interfering with the collection, counting, and certifying of votes.
Put another way, Trump isn’t being indicted for what he said. He’s being indicted for what he did.
The indictment tells the story of the fake elector scheme, where swing states, at the behest of Trump and his conspirators, put forth GOP electors in states won by Biden. It also details the pressure put on Mike Pence to throw out the election while Trump whipped his supporters into a frenzyuntil they attacked the Capitol.
The indictment reveals that even after the January 6 rioters were finally cleared from the Capitol, Trump and his co-conspirators were pounding the phones and sending emails late into the evening trying to reach elected officials who would agree to block certification. Around 7 pm on the 6th, one of Trump’s co-conspirators called five US senators and a House rep, all within 20 minutes, and left a voicemail for one senator asking them to “try to just slow it down” and saying that “the only strategy we can follow is to object to numerous states.”
Even as the joint session of Congress finally met at 11:35 pm on the 6th to certify the election, one of Trump’s co-conspirators emailed Mike Pence’s counsel, urging Pence to violate the law and adjourn for 10 days to “allow the legislatures to finish their investigations as well as to allow a full forensic audit of the massive amount of illegal activity that has occurred here.”
In the last day, Maggie and Mike and Devlin and Dawsey came out with twin pieces that purport to assess the legal strength of the indictmentagainst Trump, but instead simply say, “well, Trump believes his bullshit and so do we and so the charged conduct may be First Amendment protected.”
Neither of these articles even mention that 18 USC 371, conspiracy to defraud the US, is about lying to the US, even though one of the lawyers cited by WaPo attempted to explain that to them.
Here’s why all those claims that Trump knew he was lying are in the indictment: because his false claims were the means Trump used to carry out the conspiracy to defraud.
The Defendant widely disseminated his false claims of election fraud for months, despite the fact that he knew, and in many cases had been informed directly, that they were not true. The Defendant’s knowingly false statements were integral to his criminal plans to defeat the federal government function, obstruct the certification, and interfere with others’ right to vote and have their votes counted. He made these knowingly false claims throughout the post-election time period, including those below that he made immediately before the attack on the Capitol on January 6:
This indictment will be measured not by what Maggie and Mike and Devlin and Dawsey claim about legal statutes they haven’t bothered to explain.
It will be measured by whether the government presents evidence to prove the elements of offense for each charge beyond a reasonable doubt.
Two and a half years after a mob attacked the Capitol in his name, Donald Trump is making the trip down Pennsylvania Avenue he promised he’d make — but never did — on Jan. 6, 2021.
But this time, it’s to be arraigned in federal court.
Trump’s expected arrival on Thursday afternoon in Washington — to face charges that he sought to derail the transfer of power to Joe Biden — will bring him to the federal courthouse that sits just across the street from the Capitol his supporters defaced on Jan. 6. He’s expected to plead “not guilty” to four criminal charges leveled by special counsel Jack Smith.
Smith has accused Trump of orchestrating a breathtakingly broad campaign to unravel American democracy and cling to power despite decisively losing the 2020 election. In service of that goal, Smith says, Trump deputized six co-conspirators — including attorneys Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro — to carry out a campaign of disinformation, cloaked in legal action, to convince state legislatures, Congress and then-Vice President Mike Pence to block Biden’s election.
Smith alleges that Trump used his unique platform as president to stoke false claims about election fraud and rile up supporters, harnessing their energy to pressure Republican elected officials to attempt to undo Biden’s victories in a handful of states. When that failed, Trump helped assemble slates of false presidential electors who would be used to stoke a conflict in the certification of Biden’s victory. Then, Trump and Eastman leaned on Pence — who would soon preside over Congress’ counting of electoral votes — to assert unprecedented authority to reject Biden’s electors or postpone the count altogether. The failure of that effort culminated in a burst of rage, with thousands of Trump’s faithful storming past police barricades and into the Capitol, while Trump — according to Smith — exploited the violence to continue salvaging his schemes.
As his supporters rioted, Trump wanted to join them, according to evidence amassed by the Jan. 6 select committee. Several witnesses described a heated altercation with Secret Service agents after they refused to take him to the Capitol because of security concerns. Instead, the Secret Service insisted he return to the White House, where he watched the attack unfold on television….
His arraignment on Thursday is scheduled for 4 p.m. Trump, represented by attorneys Todd Blanche and John Lauro, is expected to face Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya, who received the initial indictment from prosecutors on Tuesday. It will be Trump’s third arraignment on criminal charges since April but his first in Washington, D.C. There’s little of substance likely to occur beyond Trump’s initial plea in the case, but officials at the federal courthouse and the Capitol are bracing for crowds and potential security threats.
Cheney is one of the good guys, even though he writes for Politico.
That’s all I have for you today. I’m still dealing with the aftermath of my mother’s death, and it has been difficult and exhausting. Seeing Trump charged for trying to end our democracy might make me feel a little better.
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We’ve known for years that the Feds are tapping phones, reading e-mails, checking on which site we go to on the internet, all without warrants. This afternoon the news broke that the DOJ subpoenaed two months
of phone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.
The records obtained by the Justice Department listed incoming and outgoing calls, and the duration of each call, for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP.
In all, the government seized those records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown but more than 100 journalists work in the offices whose phone records were targeted on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.
Naturally AP reporters and executives are outraged and President and CEO Gary Pruitt has sent a letter of protest to Attorney General Holder.
The government would not say why it sought the records. U.S. officials have previously said in public testimony that the U.S. attorney in Washington is conducting a criminal investigation into who may have leaked information contained in a May 7, 2012, AP story about a foiled terror plot. The story disclosed details of a CIA operation in Yemen that stopped an al-Qaida plot in the spring of 2012 to detonate a bomb on an airplane bound for the United States.
The story in question was about the successful foiling of the so-called underwear bombing plot. There’s much more at the AP link. So the feds are enraged because of a leak about a successful counterterror operation. Imagine if it had been unsuccessful? Maybe those reporters would be headed to re-education camps by now.
But that’s not the whole story, according to Think Progress. The reason the feds were so nervous about that AP story was that the CIA stopped the underwear bomber rather than the FBI.
Why that drew the attention of the Justice Department, however, is that the CIA was the one who foiled the plot, which the AP report made clear:
The FBI is examining the latest bomb to see whether it could have passed through airport security and brought down an airplane, officials said. They said the device did not contain metal, meaning it probably could have passed through an airport metal detector. But it was not clear whether new body scanners used in many airports would have detected it. You can check out the price of precious metals here.
The would-be suicide bomber, based in Yemen, had not yet picked a target or bought a plane ticket when the CIA stepped in and seized the bomb, officials said. It’s not immediately clear what happened to the alleged bomber.
AP learned of the plot a week before publishing, but “agreed to White House and CIA requests not to publish it immediately” due to national security concerns. But, by reporting the CIA’s involvement in foiling the plot, they put AQAP on notice that the CIA had a window into their activities. The AP’s reporting also led to other stories involving an operative in place within AQAP, and details of the operations he was involved in. That operative, it was feared, would be exposed and targeted by AQAP as retribution for siding with the United States.
John Brennan, who is now the head of the CIA, said at his confirmation hearing that the release of information to AP was an “unauthorized and dangerous disclosure of classified information.”
The AP knew they were being investigated–the shock came when they realized the breathtaking extent of the federal intrusion.
The DOJ issued a statement claiming that “because we value the freedom of the press, we are always careful and deliberative in seeking to strike the right balance between the free flow of information and the public interest”
Okay, if you say so….
So now what? Will mainstream reporters who have been accepting of government surveillance as long as it was directed at us “little people” now begin a real pushback? We shall see.
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I’ll warn you up front: I’m going to subject you to another rant about the Trayvon Martin case. If you’re not interested, you can stop reading now and just head for the comments. I promise not to take offense. BTW, it was either this or a rant about Cory Booker and Harold Ford.
I’m still following the Trayvon Martin story very closely, and I’ve been really shocked at the way the mainstream media has covered it. There has been a surprising willingness of reporters and “experts” to accept George Zimmerman’s multiple and conflicting versions of what happened on the night of February 26, 2012, when he shot and killed an unarmed minor child, for example, see here. I can’t help but wonder if some kind of institutionalized racism isn’t involved. Here are a few of the obvious inconsistencies in Zimmerman’s accounts just off the top of my head.
We’ve been told that Martin walked in circles around Zimmerman’s truck, and that Zimmerman was terrified. Yet Zimmerman was on the phone with a police dispatcher at the time and never mentioned this threatening activity.
We also know that Martin was on the phone with a friend at that time. Does it make sense that he would repeatedly circle Zimmerman’s truck while at the same time telling his friend he was frightened because a “crazy and creepy” man was watching and following him? And why would Zimmerman then get out of his truck and begin following Martin (while still on the phone with the dispatcher) if he was so frightened of the boy? We know that he did get out of his car and follow Martin, because Zimmerman told the police dispatcher so, and you can hear him huffing and puffing on the call as he either ran or walked quickly after Martin.
We’ve also been told that after Zimmerman got out of his car, he lost sight of Martin and turned back toward his truck. Then suddenly Martin attacked from behind, knocking Zimmerman to the sidewalk. Then supposedly Martin climbed on top of Zimmerman and banged his head on the pavement again and again and again. Where’s the evidence for that?
We now know that Zimmerman had a superficial cut on the back of his head and a couple of other cuts on his face as well as a bloody nose. We’ve been told that he had two black eyes and a closed fracture of his nose, but no photos of these injuries have been released. There was no sign of black eyes in the videos of Zimmerman at the police station after the shooting.
Certainly getting your head banged on cement should lead to serious damage–including brain damage or internal bleeding–not just a one-inch long cut! Here is an article about a man in Florida who fell and hit his head on the pavement and died from his injuries. Perhaps you could hit your head on pavement and survive, but pounded violently and repeatedly into the pavement? Surely that would turn the back of your head to hamburger.
Furthermore, if the fight took place on the sidewalk, how did Martin’s body end up in the middle of a grassy area? Police also reported that the back of Zimmerman’s jacket was wet and covered with grass stains. Witnesses describe a fight that moved over a distance and was witness successively by neighbors along the way.
According to the Orlando Sentinel, even police did not believe the story about the hand over the mouth, because Zimmerman wouldn’t have been able to scream out words if his mouth were covered.
Police also had problems with some of the melodramatic quotes Zimmerman attributed to Martin, such as the claim (through Zimmerman’s father) that Martin reached for Zimmerman’s gun and announced “you’re going to die tonight.” You have to wonder how many arms Martin had to be punching Zimmerman, holding his hand over Zimmerman’s mouth, pounding his head on the pavement, and also reaching for the gun. Of course we now know that none of Martin’s DNA was found on any part of the gun, yet Zimmerman told police the two struggled over it.
In Zimmerman’s account, Martin was sitting on top of him, punching him and suddenly Martin saw the gun and reached for it and the two struggled over it. How would Martin have seen the gun if it was in the holster on Zimmerman’s waist. Wouldn’t he have been sitting at or above the waist in order to punch Zimmerman’s face? And how would Zimmerman have pulled his gun out in this position? Another problem with this story is that the autopsy showed that the trajectory bullet went front to back in a straight line. How would Zimmerman have been able to do this with Martin sitting on top of him like this?
How would the man on the bottom manage a straight, front-to-back shot from that angle? Wouldn’t it make more sense if they had been standing at the time of the gunshot?
Zimmerman also told police that after he shot Martin, the boy said the words “Okay you got it” or “you got me.” But from the autopsy results we now know that Martin was shot straight through the left ventricle of the heart with a hollow-point bullet. His lungs collapsed immediately as the bullet split into pieces. How would he have been able to speak? I think he probably died instantly.
So there are all kinds of problems with Zimmerman’s account(s) of the shooting and the events leading up to it. Yet, most mainstream media sources that I’ve read are reporting that Zimmerman’s account(S) are corroborated by the evidence. The assumption is that Martin attacked Zimmerman and therefore somehow deserved to die. I just don’t get it.
Since the release of part of the prosecution evidence, media outlets have focused on the finding that Trayvon Martin had trace levels of THC in his blood and urine at the time of his death, but have paid almost no attention to the much more powerful and dangerous medications that George Zimmerman was taking–Adderall (two forms of amphetamine) and Restoril (a sedative-hypnotic in the benzodiazepine family). Both of these are addictive drugs that are commonly abused, yet media reports have tended to minimize their mood-altering effects.
It seems to me that if Zimmerman’s attorney opts for a hearing on a stand-your-ground claim that all these inconsistencies will be brought up. That will be problematic for Zimmerman, because he will have to take the stand in order to state his case and back it up. He will have to describe the events of the night and explain any discrepancies with his previous statements. He made five different statements to police and participated in a taped recreation of events at the scene.
At Zimmerman’s bond hearing, prosecutor Bernie de la Ronda suggested that there were inconsistencies in Zimmerman’s statements (de la Ronda was referred to as “unidentified male” in the CNN transcript).
UNIDENTIFIED MALE [Prosecutor de la Ronda]: But before you committed this crime on February 26th, you were arrested — I’m sorry, not arrested. You were questioned that day, right, February 26th?
ZIMMERMAN: That evening into the 27th.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And then the following morning. Is that correct?
ZIMMERMAN: Yes, sir.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And the following evening, too. ZIMMERMAN: Yes, sir.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Ok. Would it be fair to say you were questioned about four or five times?
ZIMMERMAN: I remember giving three statements, yes sir.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And isn’t it true that in some of those statement when you were confronted about your inconsistencies, you started “I don’t remember”?
O’MARA [Zimmerman’s attorney]: Outside the scope of direct examination. I will object your honor.
JUDGE LESTER: We’ll give you a little bit of leeway. Not a whole lot but a little bit here, ok.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Isn’t it true that when you were questioned about the contradictions in your statements that the police didn’t believe it, that you would say “I don’t remember”?
JUDGE LESTER: I’m going to grant his motion at this time.
O’MARA: Thank you, your honor.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Would you agree you changed your story as it went along?
ZIMMERMAN: Absolutely not.
Prosecutor de la Ronda also alluded to some e-mails and text messages that were found on Zimmerman’s cell phone after his arrest.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Ok. Now, sir, you had a phone at some point and you agreed to turn over that phone to the police so they could make a copy of what was in there, right?
ZIMMERMAN: Yes, sir.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And in that phone did you receive or send text messages sir.
ZIMMERMAN: Yes, sir.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Did you ever make any reference to a reverend?
O’MARA: Objection, your honor. Outside the scope.
JUDGE LESTER: Sustained.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Did you ever make any reference to Mr. Martin, the father of the victim?
JUDGE LESTER: Sustained. You’re getting a little bit far away.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I apologize your honor. My question is he was asked in terms of apology to the family and I’d like to be able to address that if I could. JUDGE LESTER: I think you can classify that whether or not he asked the apology. I don’t want to get into other areas.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, sir.
JUDGE LESTER: Thank you.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: My question is, Mr. Zimmerman, do you recall sending a message to someone, an e-mail, about referring to the victim’s father?
ZIMMERMAN: No, sir. I don’t.
The statements that Zimmerman gave to police and the e-mails and text messages from his cell phone have not been released yet. But we have learned from one witness’s statement that Zimmerman has shown himself to be a bully and a bigot toward a Middle Eastern co-worker. I suspect that the comments found on Zimmerman’s cell phone were derogatory and racist references to Trayvon Martin’s family and/or their supporters. The “reverend” might be Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson.
Zimmerman will also have to deal with the testimony of Trayvon Martin’s friend (referred to in the media as “Dee Dee,” who was talking to Martin during the time leading up to the confrontation and the shooting. In the full interview that she gave to the prosecutor, “Dee Dee” describes hearing a confrontation between Martin and Zimmerman. Martin says “Why are you following me for?” and Zimmerman responds by saying “What are you doing around here?” She then hears a bumping sound and Martin’s headphones fall off. But she can still hear him say, “Get off. Get off.” The whole interview is posted at The New York Times (scroll down to sidebar).
One of the biggest questions is who was screaming on one of the 911 tapes called in by a witness. Yesterday, the WaPo had an article about two voice experts, one of whom concluded that the voice is Trayvon Martin’s and that he can be heard saying “I’m begging you,” “Help me,” and “Stop!” right before the gunshot silenced him. A second expert pooh poohs these findings, but give it a read. I found the article quite compelling.
I know I’m largely preaching to the choir here at Sky Dancing, but I wanted to try to pull some of these inconsistencies together to show that–despite the media seeming to favor Zimmerman’s side–he is going to have a lot to answer for, particularly if he and his attorney decide to go the “stand-your-ground” route. In a trial, Zimmerman will have a choice about whether to take the stand; but at a pre-trial hearing to determine whether he is immune from prosecution because he was defending himself, Zimmerman would have to testify and his credibility will be on the line.
I’d love to get your reactions to what I’ve written. I’d especially like to know your opinions about why the mainstream media in general has been giving George Zimmerman the benefit of the doubt and demonizing Trayvon Martin.
For example, why the obsessive focus on traces of THC and little attention to the heavy duty prescription drugs Zimmerman was taking? Why was Martin described for so long as very tall, towering over Zimmerman, when he actually was 5’11” and Zimmerman is only a couple of inches shorter. Why has the media portrayed Zimmerman’s injuries as horrifying when they are actually quite superficial? Why have they exaggerated a tiny cut on one of Martin’s fingers into “scraped knuckles?” And so on. Am I wrong to suspect underlying racism as at least part of the explanation for these media attitudes?
As always, please feel free to post your own links in the comments.
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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.
Four years later, the personal relationship between the two men appears to have persisted, Woodward reports, as Trump campaigns to return to the White House and Putin orchestrates his bloody assault on Ukraine. In early 2024, the former president ordered an aide away from his office at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, so he could conduct a private phone call with the Russian leader, according to Woodward’s account.
But the confirmation that Trump keeps speaking to Putin is important for several other reasons.
I recently learned that cats were used by both sides during the battle for women’s suffrage. They were used on posters and postcards to supposedly dehumanize women fighting for the right to vote, but were also used in support of women’s suffrage.
Now for some news. The mainstream media and some Democrats are still trying to get President Biden to end his campaign for a second term; but last night he gave a speech to an enthusiastic audience in Detroit that should begin to quiet the naysayers. I hope you were able to watch it, because it was impressive. Biden spoke extemporaneously for 35 minutes–no teleprompter and no notes. And the audience loved it. They chanted “Don’t you quit” and “We’ve got your back.” These people are the base of the Democratic Party, and they still love Joe Biden. Biden is also up 2 points on Trump in the latest polls, despite the massive efforts to bring him down.
Biden, rousing the crowd with a more energetic performance than usual, said it would unleash a “nightmare” on the country if his Republican rival is elected and implements it. “Another four years of Donald Trump is deadly serious. Project 2025 is deadly serious,” Biden said, describing it as a threat to American values
The move comes more than a year after he was reinstated to the platforms but with limits such as suspensions and advertising restrictions for violating company rules.
Good Afternoon!!
against Trump, but instead simply say, “well, Trump believes his bullshit and so do we and so the charged conduct may be First Amendment protected.”
This afternoon, at 4:00, Trump will be arraigned for the third time. Kyle Cheney at Politico: 
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