Democracy gone Astray: Wednesday, September 27, 2023

Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.

This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Wednesday, September 27, 2023

Explosive New Footage Shows Roger Stone Hatching Trump's 2020 Election Plot

MSNBC aired newly obtained footage on Wednesday evening showing Donald Trump ally and longtime GOP operative Roger Stone dictating what sounds a lot like the core of the plot to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

In the video, Stone dictates a message saying that “any legislative body” can send their own electors to the Electoral College “on the basis of overwhelming evidence of fraud.”

UPDATE: Aug. 17, 5 p.m. ET — The Fulton County Sheriff’s Office announced Thursday it is investigating the threats against members of the grand jury that indicted former President Donald Trump. The office said in a statement that it takes the matter “very seriously” and is coordinating with local, state and federal agencies to track the posts.

PREVIOUSLY:

A woman in Texas was arrested Wednesday after she allegedly threatened to kill the federal judge overseeing an election interference case against former President Donald Trump. The news came just hours after media outlets reported that the purported names and addresses of grand jurors in the Georgia vote tampering indictment had been shared on far-right message boards.

It reads like a headline pulled from a dystopian near future: Artificial intelligence is being used to ban books by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou from schools. To comply with recently enacted state legislation that censors school libraries, Iowa’s Mason City Community School District used ChatGPT to scan a selection of books and flag them for “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act.” Nineteen books — including Morrison’s “Beloved,” Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and Khaled Hosseini’s “The Kite Runner” — will be pulled from school library collections prior to the start of the school year.

Ukrainian forces launched a new effort to land troops on the left bank of the Dnipro river in the 77th week of the war, where flooding after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam in June had made counteroffensive action impossible.

Ukrainian forces also continued to make incremental territorial gains 10 weeks after launching their counteroffensive.

Reports suggested that Ukraine had at least partially taken the town of Urozhaine on the Zaporizhia-Donetsk border, and advanced on Robotyne in the western Zaporizhia region.

A civilian cargo vessel has left Ukraine’s southern port of Odesa, Kyiv has said, despite warnings from Russia that its navy could target ships using the Black Sea export hubs.

The announcement raises the spectre of a standoff with Russian warships, after Moscow pulled out of a key deal last month brokered by the UN and Turkey, which guaranteed safe passage for grain shipments from three Ukrainian ports.

NEW YORK (AP) — A former fundraiser for U.S. Rep. George Santos was indicted Wednesday on federal charges that he impersonated a high-ranking congressional aide while soliciting contributions for the New York Republican’s campaign.

Sam Miele, 27, was charged with four counts of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft in an alleged scheme to defraud donors and obtain money for Santos under false pretenses. Prosecutors said Miele used a fake name and email address to impersonate a “high-ranking aide to a member of the House with leadership responsibilities.”

WASHINGTON ― Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) this week described impeaching President Joe Biden as less an opportunity to remove Biden from office than a performance for the American people.

Gaetz said that even if the House impeaches Biden, there’s little chance the Democratic-controlled Senate would convict and remove the president from office.

A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that the Food and Drug Administration failed to address safety concerns when it made the abortion pill mifepristone easier to obtain back in 2016 — a win for abortion opponents.

The drug, however, will remain available under current FDA regulations while the suit is pending, due to a Supreme Court ruling earlier this year.

Mark Meadows, who was Donald Trump’s chief of staff during the 2020 election and the ensuing efforts to overturn its results, is trying to transfer his Georgia state prosecution to federal court with the goal of having the charges against him dismissed.

In court papers filed Tuesday, lawyers for Meadows argued that the case against him should be moved out of Georgia state court so that Meadows can argue in federal court that he is immune from the prosecution under the U.S. Constitution. The charges against him, his lawyers said, amount to “state interference in a federal official’s duties” in violation of the Constitution’s supremacy clause. Meadows intends to file a separate request for “prompt dismissal” of the charges, his lawyers added.

Eva Hartog, POLITICO Europe’s reporter in Moscow, has been expelled from Russia after 10 years reporting in the country.

Russia’s foreign ministry told Hartog last Monday that her visa would not be extended and gave her six days to leave the country. Hartog was told the decision had been made by the “relevant authorities,” but was given no additional information about how the ruling was made.

GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene hasn’t ruled out the possibility of running for Senate in Georgia.

“I haven’t made up my mind whether I will do that or not. I have a lot of things to think about,” she said in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published Wednesday.

The conservative firebrand, who was recently booted from the House Freedom Caucus after calling then-fellow Freedom Caucus member Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) a pejorative in a verbal fight on the House floor, has toyed with the idea for months — notably after former President Donald Trump encouraged her to do so earlier this year.

BERLIN — So much for Olaf Scholz’s Zeitenwende.

The German government on Wednesday stepped back at the last minute from making a legal commitment to meeting NATO’s target of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense on an annual basis, according to Reuters and German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.

A government official told the news agency that a clause pledging to meet the target was deleted at short notice from Finance Minister Christian Lindner’s draft of a new budget financing law, just before the Cabinet passed it to the parliament.

Robert Oppenheimer, the American physicist who led the team that developed the world’s first nuclear weapons, quoted from ancient Hindu scriptures to illustrate his conflicting feelings about the forces his science unleashed: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” he said. In his later years, Oppenheimer longed for a future “without nation states armed for war, and above all, a world without war”.

Yet there’s another kind of loss that Oppenheimer recognised only too clearly in his readings of the Bhagavad Gita, the ancient text he turned to after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Humans now possess the power to destroy the world they live in.

Not content with trying to destroy America’s trust in the US election system with his big lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, Donald Trump is now trying to destroy America’s trust in the US judicial system with another big lie.

The second big lie is that judges, prosecutors, witnesses and juries are corruptly prosecuting Trump as a means of keeping him from being re-elected.

Vladimir Putin is reportedly planning to hold a meeting with Russian policymakers on Wednesday in order to discuss reintroducing some capital controls to help prop up the struggling rouble.

Citing a Russian finance ministry proposal, the Financial Times said large exporters could be forced to convert up to 80% of their foreign currency into roubles in order to raise demand for the currency.

Other proposals included a ban on foreign dividend payments and loan extensions, cancelling import subsidies, limiting currency swaps, and reducing the amount of foreign currency exporters can take out of Russia, the newspaper reported.

Ukraine’s SBU intelligence service has claimed responsibility for an attack on the Russian-built Kerch strait Bridge connecting Crimea to the mainland last month, saying it had been conducted by remotely controlled sea drones.

Vasyl Malyuk, the head of the agency, told CNN the drone, called “Sea Baby”, was developed internally and that two were packed with 850kg warheads when they exploded and damaged the road and rail bridge on 17 July. Two people were killed in the attack.

Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney in Georgia who is prosecuting Donald Trump and 18 other allies over efforts to overturn the 2020 election, is facing a flurry of racist online abuse after the former president attacked his opponents using the word “riggers”, a thinly veiled play on the N-word.

Hours after Willis had released the indictments on Monday night, Trump went on his social media platform Truth Social calling for all charges to be dropped and predicting he would be exonerated. He did not mention Willis by name, but accused prosecutors of pursuing the wrong criminal targets.

Former Vice President Mike Pence publicly sided with 2020 Georgia poll workers on Wednesday, telling a crowd that the swing state’s election “was not stolen” as his former boss, Donald Trump, continues to claim.

“The Georgia election was not stolen and I had no right to overturn the election on Jan. 6,” Pence told a crowd at the National Conference of State Legislatures in Indianapolis.

Drew Findling, one of the attorneys defending Donald Trump against charges of racketeering to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, donated to the campaign of the district attorney who brought the fourth indictment against the former president, Rolling Stone reported Tuesday. Findling also donated to President Joe Biden’s winning campaign.

Findling gave $1,440 to Fani Willis’ successful Democratic primary bid for Fulton County DA in July 2020, the outlet wrote, citing data from the Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission. Meanwhile, he donated $8,400 for Biden’s White House bid.

Marjorie Taylor Greene has big dreams. The U.S. representative from Georgia used to openly pine for a seat on the influential House Oversight Committee — before eventually getting one. Now Greene is seemingly trying to manifest the next chapter of her political career, speculating about joining the White House with Donald Trump.

In an interview published Wednesday by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Greene said that she hasn’t decided whether she’ll eventually run for U.S. Senate or maybe become Trump’s running mate. But in her mind, the sky’s the limit for what she can achieve after winning two elections.

Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, attempted to defend her boyfriend’s dad on Tuesday after his latest criminal indictment, but, boy, did it backfire badly.

The conservative media personality appeared on Newsmax to discuss the charges against Donald Trump that were unveiled Monday in Georgia, which allege that he tried to push election officials there to overturn his narrow loss to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020.

Lara Trump returned to one of Republicans’ greatest hits while defending father-in-law Donald Trump following his indictment in Georgia on Monday night.

Desperately attempting to turn the tables on Democrats, the wife of Eric Trump cried about Hillary Clinton’s years-old email scandal during an appearance Tuesday on Newsmax.

“To see, of all people, Hillary Clinton out there having anything to say about anything when she BleachBitted and destroyed 33,000 emails after she was told not to ― cellphones with a hammer,” she said, referring to accusations about Clinton’s use of a private email server that clouded her 2016 campaign against Trump.

Former President Donald Trump was indicted for the fourth time on Monday night, and this time he can’t pin his hopes on escaping punishment with a presidential pardon.

Georgia’s Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis charged Trump with more than a dozen felonies tied to his efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat in the state, ranging from conspiring to commit forgery to filing false documents to racketeering. Willis brought charges against him and 18 co-defendants under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act, or RICO.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on Tuesday griped about Fani Willis’ prosecution of Donald Trump on racketeering charges tied to the 2020 election, saying she should be “going after rapists.” (Watch the video below.)

But to many observers on social media, that’s exactly what the Fulton County district attorney was doing.

Writer E. Jean Carroll accused Trump of raping her in a Manhattan department store in a lawsuit, and a jury found him liable for sexual abuse. A judge this month rejected Trump’s defamation counterclaim, saying Carroll’s insistence in a post-verdict TV interview that Trump raped her was “substantially true.”

“This tube is the Gospel. The ultimate revelation. This tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers!” Howard Beale, the mad prophet of the airwaves, proclaims in the 1976 Paddy Chayefsky film “Network.”

Beale’s character may be fictional, but his message isn’t wrong. Just look at the Kennedy-Nixon debates; Jimmy Carter’s malaise speech; Ronald Reagan’s rise as the first actor and TV star to become president; George H.W. Bush checking his watch; George W. Bush’s declaration of Mission Accomplished; Barack Obama’s 2004 convention speech; and, of course, there’s Donald Trump.

With the coup-attempting former president and 2024 Republican front-runner now at 91 felony counts across four separate indictments, his pack of rivals, with few exceptions, on Tuesday remained unwilling to use that vulnerability against him.

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), campaigning at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, told reporters that the latest indictment from Georgia accusing Trump of creating a “criminal enterprise” to illegally remain in office despite having lost the 2020 election reflected badly not on Trump but on the Fulton County district attorney.

An Argentinian couple living in Slovenia, a Mexican-Greek photographer who ran a yarn shop in Athens and now three Bulgarians arrested in Britain. Over the past year, police and security services across the globe have accused numerous people living apparently innocuous lives with being Russian intelligence agents or operatives.

Many others have been accused of passing information to Russia, including a security guard at the British embassy in Berlin, sentenced to 13 years in prison, and more than a dozen people arrested in Poland accused of carrying out various tasks for Russian intelligence.

Protracted wars are costly and cause economic damage. Ancient Rome discovered that, as did the US in the 1960s when the conflict in Vietnam was one factor behind pressure on the dollar that led eventually to the breakup of the Bretton Woods fixed currency system.

The decision by Russia’s central bank to raise interest rates from 8.5% to 12% to defend the plunging rouble is the latest example of this age-old truth. Eighteen months into the war with Ukraine, Russia’s current account surplus is shrinking and inflationary pressure is growing. The currency is taking the strain, and the trigger for Tuesday’s emergency move appears to have been the rouble hitting 100 to the US dollar on Monday.

A senior Nato official has apologised and clarified his comments a day after he said publicly that Ukraine could give up territory to Russia in exchange for Nato membership and an end to the war.

Stian Jenssen, the chief of staff to the Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, told a Norwegian newspaper that he should not have spoken as simplistically as he did, after his initial comments prompted an angry reaction from Kyiv.

Former Ukrainian captives say they were subjected to torture, including frequent beatings and electric shocks, while in custody at a detention facility in south-western Russia, in what would be serious violations of international humanitarian law.

In interviews with the BBC, a dozen ex-detainees released in prisoner exchanges alleged physical and psychological abuse by Russian officers and guards at the Pre-Trial Detention Facility Number Two, in the city of Taganrog.

The testimonies, gathered during a weeks-long investigation, describe a consistent pattern of extreme violence and ill-treatment at the facility, one of the locations where Ukrainian prisoners of war have been held in Russia.

Ralph Nader, the longtime consumer advocate, corporate critic and former presidential candidate, discusses “serial law violator” Donald Trump’s criminal indictments, particularly the second federal case brought by special prosecutor Jack Smith that accuses Trump of conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and of inciting the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill. Nader says there is a glaring omission in the charges, and says Trump should be additionally charged under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which could bar him from again running for political office due to having “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the United States.

“[O]n the basis of the public record, former President Donald J. Trump is constitutionally disqualified from again being President (or holding any other covered office) because of his role in the attempted overthrow of the 2020 election and the events leading to the January 6 attack.”

Those words were written by two prominent conservative legal scholars in a comprehensive 126-page paper that will be published next year in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. The article is an urgent call to action that provides a roadmap to disqualify Trump from running for or assuming the presidency again.

Last week, former President Donald Trump joked at a campaign event in Alabama that he only needed one more indictment to secure the GOP presidential nomination. After-hours on Monday evening, Trump got his wish when a Fulton County, Georgia, grand jury indicted the disgraced ex-president, along with 18 others, on state Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) charges and a slew of conspiracy charges. They are being charged using the same legal tools used to take down mafia bosses and their henchmen, groups engaged in sprawling campaigns of illegality.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) sprung to the defense of Donald Trump ahead of the former president’s Georgia racketeering indictment and was mocked for comments that critics thought defined irony.

During Monday’s broadcast of Jesse Watters’ Fox News show, Graham said Trump’s mounting legal woes were “unfair.” He claimed prosecutors were weaponizing the law and setting “a bad precedent,” and insisted the former president’s fate should be left to voters.

Just hours after former President Donald Trump was indicted in Georgia over his attempt to disrupt the 2020 election, Trump announced he’ll hold a news conference to once again push baseless claims that the election was rigged.

“A Large, Complex, Detailed but Irrefutable REPORT on the Presidential Election Fraud which took place in Georgia is almost complete & will be presented by me at a major News Conference at 11:00 A.M. Monday of next week, in Bedminster, New Jersey,” Trump posted on his social media platform Truth Social on Tuesday. “Based on the results of this CONCLUSIVE report, all charges should be dropped against me & others — There will be a complete EXONERATION!”

The not-so-shiny pony is headed for the political glue factory, or so goes the buzz from Justin Trudeau’s detractors. And there are a lot of them.

The way most pollsters and pundits and all Harper-Cons see it, you can put a fork in Trudeau; he’s done. But they can put away the cutlery for now. The chances are better than even that the current PM will defeat his fourth Conservative leader in a row — assuming he sticks around for the next electoral tilt.

Yes, the polling looks bad. But there are few things less relevant than a mid-summer poll with no election in sight.

Donald Trump slammed the judge presiding over his newest criminal case early Monday, testing her three-day-old warning that he refrain from “inflammatory” attacks against those involved in his case.

In a Truth Social post just before 1 a.m., Trump assailed U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan as “highly partisan” and “very biased and unfair,” citing as evidence a statement she made during the sentencing of a woman who participated in the mob that breached the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“She obviously wants me behind bars,” Trump wrote.

On a near-daily basis, former President Donald Trump faces either entirely new indictments or add-ons to existing ones. He’s now got a rap sheet that includes two separate sets of federal indictments and state charges in New York. He has been found liable, in a civil case, for sexual assault, and his business empire has been found guilty of a variety of malpractices.

Fulton County, Georgia, is almost certainly going to add more charges to this ballooning rap sheet this week. Add up the number of years Trump could, in theory, spend behind bars if he’s found guilty on all the charges, and it runs more than half a millennium.

It wasn’t long ago that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s political future looked shaky.

The Georgia Republican-MAGA firebrand suffered a very public ousting from the hard-right conservative Freedom Caucus, had a well-documented blow-up with Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), and publicly lost the support of a party official in her home state of Georgia. Former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon went so far as to call for a primary challenge against her over her alliance with Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

A grand jury in Georgia has indicted former President Donald Trump and 18 allies on racketeering charges for a sweeping attempt to corrupt the 2020 election by subverting Joe Biden’s victory in the state.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis leveled the charges Monday night after a two-year investigation that also tagged Trump with allegations that he conspired to derail the Electoral College process, marshaled the Justice Department to bolster his scheme, pressured Georgia officials to undo the election results and repeatedly lied about fraud allegations to ratchet up pressure.

Former President Donald Trump attacked special counsel Jack Smith on Sunday night amid reports the Justice Department obtained a search warrant for his Twitter account earlier this year.

“How dare lowlife prosecutor, Deranged Jack Smith, break into my former Twitter account without informing me and, indeed, trying to completely hide this atrocity from me,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social account. “What could he possibly find out that is not already known.”

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Sam Bankman-Fried used money he stole from customers of his FTX cryptocurrency exchange to make more than $100 million in political campaign contributions before the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, federal prosecutors said on Monday.

An amended indictment accused the 31-year-old former billionaire of directing two FTX executives to evade contribution limits by donating to Democrats and Republicans, and to conceal where the money came from.

How To Bag A Billionaire (Hint: Become A Supreme Court Justice)

Editor’s note: It appears that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas just can’t stop accepting lavish gifts from his billionaire friends. Much like Moriah Mills before him, every day there seems to be a new report explaining how the judge on the highest court in the land has received everything from VIP sports tickets to private jet rides. So writers Mitu Yima and Jumoke Balogun, creators of This Black-Ass Life decided to break down exactly what it takes to finesse a billionaire.

It’s hard out here trying to afford rent, take our little trips and buy the designer drip we deserve. We’re not getting flewed out like we used to be in this economy. So when times are hard, sometimes our best path forward is by looking backward. Specifically to OG Baller Alert.

Rudy Giuliani, a key figure in former President Donald Trump’s effort to remain in power after the 2020 election, was indicted in Georgia on Monday for his role in what prosecutors called a sweeping conspiracy to overturn the state’s results and subvert the will of the people.

Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, leveled 13 charges against Giuliani as part of the state’s yearslong investigation into election tampering. He is charged with a violation of Georgia’s RICO Act (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations), soliciting the violation of oath by a public official, false statements and conspiracies to commit forgery and file false documents, among other charges.

Former President Donald Trump responded with fury early Tuesday morning after he was indicted in Georgia over his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in the state.

Trump took to his Truth Social account to blast Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis after he was charged with more than a dozen felonies, ranging from filing false documents to racketeering. Also named were 18 others as defendants in the indictment, including attorney Rudy Giuliani, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and lawyer Sidney Powell.

Russia’s central bank has hiked interest rates by 3.5 percentage points in an emergency move aimed at halting the rouble’s recent slide, after it fell to its weakest point in almost 17 months.

The decision to raise the key rate from 8.5% to 12% was announced after an extraordinary meeting of the bank’s board of directors, called after the rouble plunged past the psychologically key level of 100 to the dollar on Monday morning.

Israeli forces have killed two Palestinians during a raid on a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank city of Jericho, medical sources told the Reuters news agency.

“Two young men were rushed to the hospital with bullets in their chests,” the Jericho Hospital’s director told Reuters on Tuesday.

The Palestinian health ministry said 16-year-old Qusay al-Walaji and Mohammed Nujoom, 25, were shot in the chest by Israeli forces “during an attack on Jericho at dawn today” – the first deadly raid in months on Jericho.

Since the 2020 presidential election, when Democrats emerged with a razor-thin majority in the Senate, Joe Manchin has been no stranger to his Republican colleagues: schmoozing with them on his houseboat, meeting to discuss concerns about President Joe Biden’s massive spending packages, and proving a consistent ally in derailing the aspirations of both Blue Dog Democrats and left-wing progressives.

Whether or not Premier Danielle Smith and her enabler and office manager Rob Anderson carefully planned their freeze on renewable electricity generation last week or just came up with it on a whim, it’s now turning into a three-alarm international dumpster fire.

On Wednesday the U.K.-based Guardian published a major story on the seven-month moratorium, which caught the markets and commentariat by surprise when Alberta Utilities Minister Nathan Neudorf announced it last week.

The Guardian’s story was not a friendly update of the sort typically filed by local media in Alberta. “Fury as Alberta cuts renewables during Canada’s worst fire season ever,” the headline shouted, pointing to an obvious irony.

Russia’s central bank has announced it will hold an extraordinary meeting on Tuesday to discuss the level of its key interest rate after the rouble fell to its weakest point in almost 17 months.

The currency has been steadily losing value since the beginning of the year and slid past the psychologically important level of 100 to the dollar on Monday morning.

It has weakened by 26% this year as a result of a collapse in export revenues and growing military spending, making it the third worst-performing global currency in 2023. The decline has led to calls from senior Kremlin officials for higher borrowing costs.